Sarcastically describing his time heading up the ambitious Connecting for Health program as four joy-filled years, Granger said that resistance to the sweeping changes being carried out within the NHS was coming from groups who had previously benefited from the way the service was run. Under the old system, Granger said, patients were forced to bear the risk of IT failure, whereas the new structure would shift that burden onto the IT suppliers.

Granger also insisted that spending on the program was not out of control. Contrary to what you might have read, he said, we’re not spending 20bn pounds ($38bn) and, if you’re a friend of Richard Bacon [Conservative MP for South Norfolk and a prominent critic of the IT upgrade], can you tell him we’re not spending 50bn pounds ($94bn) either. According to the CfH web site, the actual cost of the program is 12.4bn pounds ($23.4bn) over 10 years.

Well known for his outspoken views, Granger went on to attack the reliance of IT vendors on marketing to win deals. There is still a situation in the IT industry, he said, where delivery skill doesn’t even equal, let alone exceed, marketing skills. Budgets for R&D must exceed marketing budgets.

IT services companies need to be honest with clients, Granger continued, and admit that this is still an immature market. The technology it provides often doesn’t work as well as it says on the box.

Granger refused to accept that the decision by Accenture, one of the four principal suppliers, to pull out of the program at the end of September, had deepened the air of crisis around CfH. He said that the loss of the vendor had not been a major problem. We will know there is a real problem when there isn’t a queue of people waiting to take over the work, and when anyone that wants to take it on wishes to do so for a greater consideration. Following Accenture’s decision to quit, CSC took control of both the North East and East and East Midlands regional clusters, accepting a contract value roughly equal to that agreed with Accenture.

Despite his generally bullish attitude, Granger was not entirely without regrets. He said that, if he was to have his time again, he would insist that a formal reset process, to take effect a couple of years into the deals, be inserted in all contracts. This would mean fresh contracts being drawn upon that reflected the reality of work on the project, rather than being written from an uninformed perspective before any work had been done. Granger also said that he felt the duration of the deals should have been longer from the outset, to take into account the complexity of the work involved.

Tellingly, Granger also said that he should have spent two years benchmarking what was there before, so that it could be compared with results under the new system. There are a number of vested interests who don’t want to tell you how bad things were before we started this project, when IT was delivered locally rather than from a central organization.