The UK government faces trial in the High Court next month over its award of an £854mn contract for a new Meteorological Office IT system expected to be the world’s most advanced supercomputer dedicated to weather prediction and climate change.
A lawsuit has been brought by Atos, the IT services group which lost out on the contract which was awarded by the government to Microsoft in 2021.
The IT system is expected to be in the top 25 supercomputers in the world and will be used to more accurately predict storms as well as help the UK government select the most suitable locations for flood defences and predict changes to the global climate. The new supercomputer will also provide detailed information for the energy sector to help it take action against potential blackouts and power surges.
The Met Office relies on computer systems for forecasting. Detailed weather predictions for the UK now take place every hour, rather than every three hours, giving advance warnings when extreme weather is approaching.
The government is investing up to £1.2bn in the project which is designed to replace the Met Office’s existing Cray supercomputers and will increase the Met Office’s computing capacity six-fold.
Atos, which is suing the Met Office and Department of Business Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), alleges that there were breaches in the government’s obligations under the Public Contract Regulations 2015. The government is defending the lawsuit.
Atos claims its bid was wrongly excluded as “non compliant” with the technical requirements stipulated in the tender, according to particulars of claim filed at the High Court. It wants the High Court to rule that it should have been awarded the contract and is seeking unquantified damages.
Atos alleges that the government rejected its bid as “non compliant” on the basis that its proposal for a smaller development computer system used different processors in the main supercomputer, according to the court documents.
The company claims that the government made “obvious errors in the evaluation” of the bid and the tender documents “failed to contain any specification that the [computer] processors used in a smaller development system had to be the same” and be “architecturally equivalent” from an IT systems perspective as those used in the supercomputer system.
“In breach of procurement law, the Met Office has chosen a final tender which scored lower in quality, transferred more commercial risk to the Met Office and is more expensive,” Atos claims in its lawsuit.
“The effect of those breaches is extreme,” Atos alleged in its particulars of claim. “The claimant has been unlawfully deprived of the contract award, despite having the most economically advantageous tender.”
In a consolidated defence to the claim, the Met Office and the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Department deny the allegations. They said that Atos proposed a non compliant solution and denied that the process was flawed. “Atos did not submit the most economically advantageous offer” their defence document claims. “It is further denied that Atos risks suffering unquantifiable and uncompensatable damage.”
The Met Office said it was unable to comment ahead of the court case. Atos said: “As this lawsuit will soon go to court we won’t be commenting at this time.”
