Britain's National Audit Office - the watchdog on public spending - says it's going to investigate the National Health Service's £6.2 billion computerization project.

Well it might. The history of public-sector IT procurement is disastrous. New systems for National Insurance, air traffic control, and child support were all disasters. Thanks to Whitehall. Civil servants seem to get enormous mind-game delight in elaborating the most intricately convoluted specs - then buy expensive custom-made IT to fit them. (Then, usually, shell out even more taxpayers' funds to get the stuff actually working.)

The NHS has been talking about IT for years. The current system aims to give us all electronic patient records - right now there are just enormous (and often, lost) paper files, if you can believe anything so Dickensian. It was supposed to be up and working by June, and the NHS says it is in some parts of the country, but they won't tell us which ones in order to spare them from 'media intrusion'. The truth is that, like most government IT projects, the whole thing is over-centralized and over-complicated. We'd have been better - and cheaper - to give every doctor and nurse a web-enabled laptop and let them evolve systems from the bottom up, rather than trust civil-servants to design a perfect system from the top down.