The UK government must overhaul its approach to public sector procurement if it is serious about backing British innovation, according to Justin Megawarne, managing partner at Megaslice, who has accused Whitehall of hiding behind rigid frameworks and “arbitrary scoring systems”.
Megawarne’s comments follow the decision to award Fujitsu a place on a government framework worth up to £984 million, despite the company’s central role in developing and supporting the Post Office Horizon IT system. The system led to the wrongful prosecution of 736 subpostmasters across the UK and has since become one of the most serious miscarriages of justice in modern British history.
Fujitsu had previously written to the government committing not to bid for new public contracts until the public inquiry into the Horizon scandal had concluded. Its inclusion on the framework has reignited debate about how the government selects suppliers — and whether it is doing enough to support genuine domestic innovation.
“If an organisation has performed so badly for its customers that it has become a national scandal and warranted its own TV drama, surely it’s time the government spent its money elsewhere,” Megawarne said.
“With so much public money wasted on technology that isn’t fit for purpose, and in this case fraudulently criminalised people, the budget for real innovation continues to shrink. We are failing to support the next generation of founders who are building genuinely innovative businesses, instead recycling contracts to the same organisations that have failed us before.”
Megawarne argues that government procurement processes are fundamentally flawed, relying too heavily on mechanistic evaluation tools that struggle to identify real value.
“Current approaches to adopting new technology are overcomplicated and painfully slow,” he said. “Scoring sheets don’t capture innovation. If the government actually engaged with businesses instead of keeping them at arm’s length, we could save millions of pounds currently wasted on the wrong solutions.”
Rather than relying on civil servants to assess complex and novel technologies, Megawarne believes the government should enlist independent industry leaders with proven innovation credentials.
“Let experts judge ideas using their experience and judgement, not a spreadsheet,” he said. “Yes, some will say that sounds unfair, but it dramatically increases the chances of finding a genuinely game-changing solution. You simply need to ensure those experts have no conflicts of interest.”
He added that procurement decisions are too often driven by price rather than outcomes. “Spending less on the wrong solution isn’t saving money at all. Much of what’s been invested in so far has failed to solve the day-to-day problems government departments actually face.”
Megawarne also criticised what he sees as the government’s default preference for large, established suppliers, regardless of past performance.
“The mindset is still, ‘no one ever got fired for buying IBM’,” he said. “It’s a way of avoiding responsibility. If something goes wrong, you can always point at the big name.”
In the case of Fujitsu and the Post Office Horizon system, he said the failure was neither minor nor isolated. “This wasn’t a simple error. It destroyed lives. The company apologised only when it was forced to, and repeatedly resisted compensation. Yet here we are again, awarding more public contracts.”
According to Megawarne, the same pattern plays out repeatedly across government IT spending. “Huge consultancies win major contracts, fail spectacularly, and face no real consequences. It’s a cycle of failure with zero accountability.”
At the heart of the problem, Megawarne believes, is an institutional aversion to risk.
“True innovation exists in the UK, and much of it sits with founders who are building solutions that could genuinely transform public services,” he said. “But the government is fundamentally risk-averse.”
He warned that founders are being steered down the wrong path, optimising for procurement scorecards rather than solving real problems. “They chase perfect scores on frameworks that measure the wrong things, while innovation is sidelined in favour of cost-cutting and box-ticking.”
“If the government genuinely wants to unlock British innovation,” Megawarne added, “it needs to stop prioritising spreadsheets over people, and start backing ideas that actually work.”
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