Crapita seem to have lost the London Congestion Charge and Low Emission Zone road taxation and sneaky mass surveillance schemes contract to IBM, from 2009 onwards.
Transport for London announces new Congestion Charge service provider25 October 2007
Transport for London (TfL) today announced that IBM United Kingdom Limited is the selected bidder for the Congestion Charging and Low Emission Zone service provider contract.
The decision follows a 12-month competitive tendering procurement process.
IBM will be responsible for the operation of the Congestion Charging and Low Emission Zone schemes from November 2009, including the technology that will underpin payments and all customer contact channels.
The contract is for a duration of five years with an option to extend a further five years.
IBM's consortium partner, NCP Services, will be responsible for the schemes' enforcement.
[...]
"We expect to continue our excellent working relationship with Capita over the next two years."
We expect Crapita's demoralised staff, facing redundancies, etc. to offer an even more dire level of "service" for the next two year> Crapita now have no financial incentive to invest any extra money in the necessary training or maintenance to keep the systems running, let alone to improve them.
IBM, will, like Crapita before them, have underbid to secure the contract, knowing that they then have Ken Livingstone over a financial and political barrel and can "negotiate" extra public money in the future, exactly like Crapita did.
We await with interest the next criticism of the Daily Mail or the Evening Standard newspapers by Ken Livingstone, organisations which he usually claims are somehow tainted by their corporate predecessor organisation's supposedly nazi sympathetic past back in the 1930s.
Where is Ken Livingstone's criticism of International business Machines (IBM), whose long experience of customised data processing "solutions", included state of the art transportation back office systems for the German railways and for the recording and categorisation of the poeple sent to nazi concentration and extermination camps ?
Has anyone on the Mayor of London's media spin team bothered to read the book IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black ?
Why did Ken Livingstone not demand strong safeguards on the privacy and security of the Congestion Charge data beloning going to millions of innocent motorists, which is now, since July, being slurped automatically in bulk, in real time, from the Congestion Charge system by the Metropolitan Police and other shadowy, unaccountable "national security" organisations, ?
This is happening 24/7 i.e. also at night, at weekend and on public hoolidays, when the Congestion Charge does not apply, and without any protection from the Data Protection Act due to the Ministerial Certificate signed by Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, which cripples the enforcement powers of the Information Commissioner.
Not even Livingstone's communist friends in China and Cuba have produced such a totalitarian mass surveillance snooping system.
Will anyone in the media bother to try to pin Livingstone down to an estimate of how much money the new Congestion Charge contract will actually deliver to be"invested in public transport"? The measly £10 million produced from charges of nearly a £billion since the scheme started smacks of incompetence by TfL and the Mayor of London, and profiteering by Crapita (TfL's spin conveniently ignores the capital cost of setting up the schemes in their misleading figures).
See the previous blog posting The Bow Group report versus Mayor of London's spin doctors
