In a budget-busting leap from SAP to Oracle, West Sussex County Council is trebling its raid on capital assets such as buildings to fund its “transformational” ERP project.

The current budget for the authority’s long-running project is £27 million, more than ten times the £2.6 million originally budgeted when it started nearly seven years ago.

Last year, it was reported that the council was using money from selling off capital assets – including a former fire station – to fund the massively expanded budget. Although allowed by central government since 2016, the approach should not be used to relieve ongoing budget pressure, experts have warned.

In documents released to a council committee last week, officials said they expected use of funds from the sell-off to triple in the current financial year compared to a year earlier.

“Following a review of the 2025/26 plan, it is now currently projected that the council will use £12 million of this flexibility on qualifying transformation expenditure. However, the exact amount will not be known until the end of the financial year,” the report to the Performance and Finance Scrutiny Committee said.

In 2024/25, the council used £4 million in capital receipts to pay for its Oracle project, which it originally imagined would go live in March 2021. Officials expect the project to spend around £10 million in the 2026/27 financial year, with £4.3 million coming from capital receipts, and £5.6 million from one-off funding allocated to an IT infrastructure reserve.

An earlier estimate suggested the council might need to apply capital receipts of up to £20 million in 2025/26, with Oracle being “one major project likely to qualify.” The previous year saw £5.5 million set aside for the project from the unusual, one-off funding mechanism. Capital receipts are typically used to fund other capital projects such as schools and infrastructure rather than IT implementations and SaaS.

The council argues that selling property to fund an IT project, which would ordinarily be paid for using ongoing revenue, is justified because long-term savings are expected through “automation and enabling more tasks to be undertaken via self-service,” according to a council report from January last year.

Local council taxpayers will hope this is the case. However, the project has already confounded expectations. A report to the committee in 2024 said that in November 2019, the authority agreed a budget of £2.6 million, but later decided it needed more suppliers to help change business processes and reset the budget to £14.07 million, including £7 million in March 2021 and £7.07 million in October 2022.

In a separate report to the council last month, the project team said the current approved budget is £27 million, based on a program of up to three years from May 2024, with finance, procurement, HR, and payroll live by April 2026, including six months of post-implementation support.

However, the £27 million figure does not appear to include spending on the project before May 2024. Systems integrator DXC began working with the council on the project under a five-year, £4 million contract in May 2020. Auditors EY later said there were “weaknesses regarding budgeting, governance and risk management.”

In July 2023, the council found there was no real prospect of a deliverable plan being agreed. It terminated the agreement with DXC on 1 September 2023 despite the company winning a lucrative contract variation. Published data detailing council spending shows that throughout its period working with the council on the project, DXC was paid around £6.6 million, more than 50 percent above the original contract price.

In a statement, a spokesperson said:

“We generate capital receipts from the sale of assets and routinely sell assets that we no longer have an operational use for. West Sussex County Council has made a financial choice to use the receipts available to help fund the implementation of Oracle.

“The total estimated cost for the programme is approximately £41million. This is comprised of the initial £14.07 million spent during the earlier phases and the current approved budget of £27.048 million for the programme’s completion.”

Birmingham City Council’s SAP-to-Oracle project is set to cost £144.4 million – more than seven times earlier estimates – as it waits for a fully functioning system five years after its planned go-live date.

Keen readers will know the sorry saga of the ERP disaster at Europe’s largest local authority. For the uninitiated, highlights include going live with a system unfit to manage the council’s £3 billion in taxpayer revenue and multibillion-pound spending budget; a decision to turn off audits for fraud detection for more than 18 months; allocating £2 billion in transactions to the wrong year; and multiple delays and overspending.

Pertaining to the last item on this list of shame, Birmingham City Council has released new figures. In a written response published with its council meeting this week, officials said the total forecast cost of the program up to the 2027/28 financial year is £144.4 million, up from an initial estimate of £19 million with a £1 million contingency. In 2024, the total budget approved across financial years 2018/19 to 2025/26 was £131 million.

The project began in 2018, when the council planned to move away from its legacy R/3 SAP system to more modern software. Having picked Oracle Fusion, it initially planned to go live in December 2020 for finance and procurement, and in February 2021 for HR and payroll. According to a 2021 business case, this was re-planned with a revised launch in April 2022 for both functions.

Having hit the project milestone, things went from bad to worse. Although the council had planned to implement Oracle “out-of-the-box,” it created several customisations including a banking reconciliation system that failed to function properly. The council struggled to understand its cash position and was unable to produce auditable accounts. It has spent more than £5 million on manual workaround labour.

The Oracle implementation – along with poor management of equal pay cases – led to the council becoming effectively bankrupt in 2023.

The council has now bought a third-party solution to cover the banking reconciliation function, and is reimplementing Oracle from scratch, a project that was due to go live in April, and has now been delayed by several months.

The mushrooming cost of the project also needs to take into account the fact that schools have been removed from its scope, a move that might have led to reduced costs.

Nor does ballooning spending reflect how much the authority might be out of pocket in total. The initial project had banked expected savings in the millions from the 2022 go-live date. Anticipated savings of £69 million in 2023/24 were written off. In 2024, investigators put the total money lost at £216.5 million, which might climb by £10 million or so, given the new cost projection.

At around £225 million, the money lost equates to about £200 per person within the council’s boundaries.

The Bank of England has trebled the amount it is spending on its Oracle systems integrator amid efforts to migrate business applications to the cloud.

The UK’s central bank has planned the move since 2020, and a recent procurement note revealed it has increased financial outlay with Oracle implementation partner Version 1 to £21.5 million after initially tendering the contract for £7 million.

Version 1 was hired to “support the implementation of technical and change management aspects of the Oracle Cloud implementation and business change program,” according to the official documents.

The latest increase is due to an amendment to the Bank’s Application Management Service contract, including the “need for additional works, services or supplies” that “were not included in the initial procurement,” the notice says.

Another supplier could not meet these requirements for “economic or technical reasons such as requirements of interchangeability or interoperability with existing equipment, services or installations.” Any change in supplier might also “cause significant inconvenience or substantial duplication of costs,” it adds.

The latest increase is the second time the 330-year-old institution has upped the contract value. The procurement was first advertised for £7 million in 2022, and, after a competition, it was awarded to Version 1 for £8.7 million in September 2023.

In February last year, that figure was inflated to £13.8 million, with the bulk of the increase attributed to “amended implementation methodology, from a two-phase approach, to a multiple-phase approach with Oracle Modules going live based on the Bank’s priorities.”

At the time, a spokesperson said: “The Bank is implementing Oracle Cloud to consolidate several different systems which will help the Bank fulfil its mission. We aim to achieve value for money in all our procurement.”

The Bank of England is a public body that raises money regulating institutions, printing banknotes, banking services, management fees charged to government agencies, and investments built up over 300 years. It generates more income than it spends and contributes millions of pounds to the UK Treasury.

According to training provider Fudgelearn, the Bank of England is implementing Oracle Cloud SaaS Fusion Applications, including Finance, Procurement, Projects, Expenses, EPM, and Reporting.

The contract is “intended to deliver a step change in the capabilities and value delivered by the finance, procurement and recruitment functions in the Bank, leveraging the existing Oracle Cloud tool set to drive sustainable business change.”

Last week, the bank also awarded Oracle a £13 million contract to provide technical support for Oracle SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.

In June 2025, the BoE said it would increase the maximum spending of a framework deal for a raft of services, including support for its complex configuration of SAP, “in particular Business Warehouse” and interoperability between multi-cloud environments and on-prem and shared datacenters. The maximum value of the arrangement was set at £60 million when it was awarded in September 2024. It was then increased to £86.7 million in a non-competitive award.

Birmingham City Council’s doom laden Oracle finance and IT project – now four years behind schedule – has been delayed to at least the summer, it has been revealed.

The project, supposed to provide the council with a gold-standard finance, procurement and IT service fit for the 21st century, has been dogged with huge delays and soaring costs.

It was a critical cause of the council going bust, after costs rocketed in the wake of a catastrophic failed first attempt at ‘go live’ in 2022.

Now the council has had to confirm it faces another major delay. It says it needs more time to carry out testing and ensure the suite of services is fully functioning before it goes live.

Staff have been told the hoped for new go-live is end of July, but that it could be the autumn. Insiders have said the continued delays and obfuscation were troubling, especially given the huge focus being put on it.

The project has had a dedicated, £1,100 a day commissioner overseeing it for more than two years, Myron Hyrck, who was brought in specifically because of his prior knowledge of Oracle projects like it, while more than 90 external consultants were said to be working on the scheme – yet it was still facing significant problems. The project is currently managed by Philip Macpherson.

Originally said to cost less than £20 million and trigger millions in savings a year by being more ‘efficient’, the project has rocketed exponentially in cost and is now said to have run up bills to date of £171 million. The council had not confirmed that at the time of writing.

The council also claimed the delay would not cost more as a contingency budget – agreed last year of £40m – was already in place and had sufficient funds to meet costs.

In September, it was reported that a vital component of the project – the income management system that ensures that the thousands of payments in and out of the council every week match up with bank records – had been delayed three times. Whistleblowers said that the whole project was ‘a mess’.

As a result, the council called an extraordinary meeting to discuss the failed project. It did not at that time say the go-live of April was in jeopardy.

Sources have said that the mental health impact on staff working in the finance and digital teams had been considerable because of pressures linked to the delayed project. Repeated delays had further damaged morale, especially given the rapid turnover of staff involved in it. The continued failure to have clear deadlines was causing additional stress, they said.

In a statement the council said: “Following a review as part of the ongoing programme management it has been decided to continue on with testing of the reimplementation of the Oracle system. The council’s HR, finance and procurement programme, known as Brindley, will now have a go live date later on in 2026 and not as originally anticipated in April.”

Cllr Saima Suleman, Labour Cabinet Member for Digital, Culture, Heritage and Tourism, has previously been criticised for not having the technical expertise to properly hold the project leaders to account.

She backed the delay saying: “This decision reflects the council’s focus on ensuring that the reimplementation goes smoothly and the programme is successful – prioritising readiness and stability over fixed dates. There is no impact on the running of the current system and services will continue to function as they are now, with colleagues and suppliers still being paid.

“The Brindley programme’s budget included a contingency to accommodate for eventualities such as this. Therefore, this is not adding further cost into the existing budget.

“The council is taking a staged approach to the reimplementation, with independent assurance at agreed checkpoints. We will continue to test whether we are progressing as expected and meeting all the milestones required, as we recognise the importance of getting this programme right.”

Council opposition leader Cllr Robert Alden, Cons, Erdington, said: “Once again, the council’s botched IT rollout is having to be delayed.