This week Fujitsu pulled out of the £12.7bn National Programme for IT - the government's enormous project to introduce national patient records for NHS patients leaving BT, CSC and iSoft still involved.

How bad must things be for a company to walk away from just under £1bn of government money? And why are we writing yet another story about a government IT project heading inexorably for the rocks taking billions of pounds of taxpayers' money with it? This has happened so many times, and no doubt will again. We all know what the lessons are but for some reason government and civil servants seem unable to listen to even the simplest lessons from past failures.

Its interesting that The Reg plays up that Fujitsu pulled out, while other reports suggest that CfH (Connecting for Health, the NHS central IT body) "terminated" their contract.

Not many in the NHS are weeping over Fujitsu's departure. They started off with an attitude, something like "This is what you are getting, take it or leave it" and went downhill from there. The product they were pushing, which had been agreed between them and the DoH, without any involvement from the poor s*ds who would have to use it, was simply not fit for purpose. When Trusts pointed this out, they were threatened with financial penalties if they didn't shut up and get on with it.

I don't know who to blame for this shoddy mess, but I do know, from personal experience, that Fujitsu were difficult, unhelpful, arrogant, ill-informed about the NHS, and will not be missed.

The only downside is that now we might get lumbered with BT. Out of the frying pan...

"Secondly it's the way the civil service works internally. It's a blame culture and a question of check lists - you're safe if all the boxes are ticked, even if it doesn't make any sense. There's a pressure to conform - it is very difficult to stand up and say no."