[toyg]

What is there now was significantly rehashed under the first Cameron administration. I remember talking to a few insiders at PyconUK, around 2010-11, and they were saying they basically had carte blanche to nuke it all from orbit and rebuild how they saw fit. The government wasn't particularly popular at the time (what with the sweeping cuts to social services), but the people in question were adamant that, on digital services at least, the big guys really wanted to make a difference for good, and that it was a clean break from the past - hence why they were going to places like PyConUK to recruit motivated forward-looking people. That government effectively lasted 5 years, so they did a lot of work in that timeframe. I later heard through the grapevine that the waters got choppier after 2016, and I've not really heard anything after 2019 (beyond the occasional coded grumble on twitter), so I don't know how things are today.

> it would be upon the civil servants and associates that came up with the initiative

From what I understand, the power of this was precisely that it came from people outside the career civil service. Although this narrative came from Conservative quarters (who occasionally indulge in civil-service bashing), I find it credible. Established powers in the system tend to have established friends among deep-pocketed vendors, particularly these days that doors tend to revolve quite furiously. For all the good they did elsewhere, one undoubtedly bad legacy of the Blair-Brown years was eccessive trust on friendly vendors vs in-house.