And Now He Is Coming For More

[00:00:00]19 million pounds. That is what Birmingham City Council budgeted to replace their computer system. 19 million. All right, reasonable enough.

[00:00:09]New software, migrate the data, train the staff, yada yada yada. 19 million.

[00:00:15]But the actual cost? 216 million pounds and counting. That is not a typo. That's not adjusted for inflation. That is 11 times the original budget for a single IT project [music] at a single council. A council that then went bankrupt. Europe's largest local authority serving over a million people issued a section 114 notice, effectively declaring itself insolvent, and this IT disaster was one of the reasons why. The company that sold them the software?

[00:00:51]Oracle. One of the biggest technology companies on Earth, worth over 300 billion dollars, and the British taxpayer is conservatively their best customer. Hey, I'm Andy and this is the fine print. I've been going through the government procurement records, National Audit Office reports, and council meeting minutes so that you don't have to. And what I found is that the UK government has paid Oracle over a billion pounds in direct revenue since 2022 alone, with committed contracts [music] worth north of 2 billion pounds. [music] That is roughly 70 quid out of your pocket, personally, for software that has a track record of going catastrophically wrong. Oh, and the punchline? gov.uk notify, the government's own service for sending you text messages and emails, runs on a database called PostgreSQL. It is free. Completely free. But we'll get to that.

[00:01:50]So, who is Oracle? If you're not in tech, you might not have heard of them.

[00:01:55]They're not flashy like Apple or Google.

[00:01:58]They make the boring non-sexy stuff like databases and enterprise software, the unglamorous plumbing that organizations use to manage their money, their staff, and their data. It's boring, but it is essential, and it is extremely expensive.

[00:02:14]Oracle was founded by Larry Ellison in 1977. Ellison is now the third richest person in the world worth somewhere north of 200 billion dollars. He lives on a Hawaiian island. Not on a Hawaiian island. He owns most of one.

[00:02:31]Lanai. He bought it in 2012 for 300 million dollars, you know, as you do.

[00:02:38]In the UK, Oracle is classified as a strategic supplier by the Cabinet Office. So, that means that the government spends over 100 million pounds a year with them. In 2022-23, direct spending hit 290 million.

[00:02:52]But, that's just the money going straight to Oracle. Billions and billions more flow through middlemen companies like IBM and Capita, who are paid to install and run Oracle systems.

[00:03:04]Oracle gets the revenue, the middlemen get the blame when it goes wrong. I mean, to be fair, that's not a bad arrangement if you're Oracle. The real number is this though, the government has committed well over 2 billion pounds to Oracle in identified contracts alone.

[00:03:19]In 2024, they handed Oracle a 711 million pound deal to run systems across the DWP, Ministry of Justice, Home Office, and Defra. The Ministry of Defense has its own quarter billion pound Oracle contract.

[00:03:36]There's another 54 million from the Home Office.

[00:03:39]Divide 2 billion by 32 million taxpayers, and you, yes you watching this, have personally paid something north of 70 pounds for Oracle software.

[00:03:50]70 quid for software that you've never seen made by a company you've probably never heard of that, [music] as we are about to find out, has a habit of not working. So, the question is, is it any good? [music] Well, let's talk about Birmingham.

[00:04:11]Birmingham City Council is the largest local authority in Europe with a budget of 3.2 billion pounds, over a million residents. In 2018, they decided to replace their existing computer system, an SAP system that by all accounts worked fine, with Oracle Fusion Cloud.

[00:04:28]The budget was 19 million pounds. The project was supposed to take a couple of years. It was described internally as adopt, not adapt, meaning take the software as it comes, don't try to customize it. Simple enough. Well, it went live in April 2022 against explicit warnings from a financial impact assessment. The bank reconciliation system failed immediately. The system posted 2 billion pounds in transactions to the wrong financial year. 2 billion to the wrong year.

[00:05:00]Fraud detection was disabled for 18 months across a multi-billion pound budget. I need to say that again. You need to hear it and pay attention because I am still not entirely sure I believe it. They turned off fraud detection on a system managing billions of pounds of public money in the government of politicians who are known to be trustworthy. And that was for a year and a half. And apparently, nobody flagged that as a problem. The council became unable to produce auditable accounts.

[00:05:32]Suppliers went unpaid. Disabled residents were left in debt because the system couldn't process direct debits for disability payments. A council insider told Computer Weekly that they were withholding thousands of suppliers' payments because we couldn't make any payments.

[00:05:48]Government commissioners later described it as the poorest ERP deployment they had ever seen. A forensic audit by Grant Thornton found that bad news was not welcome. The audit committee had been misled and a whistleblower had to contact external auditors to expose what was happening. By January 2026, the project cost had reached a hundred and forty four million pounds. A 7.6 times overrun. Independent analysts estimated total loss, including foregone savings, at 216 million.

[00:06:24]That is about 200 quid per person in Birmingham for a computer system that, as I record this, still doesn't work. In September 2023, Birmingham issued a section 114 notice, effectively declaring bankruptcy.

[00:06:39]Council tax has gone from around 1750 pounds to over 2300.

[00:06:46]That's 600 quid more per household per year. All the time while libraries have been closed, youth clubs have been shut, and they have sold over a thousand publicly owned sites. The Bordesley Green Road site went to Birmingham City FC for 50 million two years after the council turned down an 80 million pound offer for it.

[00:07:09]30 million in public value gone. And after all that, after all of it, Birmingham hired Oracle again for another 10 million pounds. Funny how that works, isn't it?

[00:07:26]Now, if this was just Birmingham, you might call it bad luck, bad management, or a one-off, but it is not. West Sussex County Council budgeted 2.6 million pounds in 2019 for a similar Oracle integration. The current cost 41 million. They're selling a former fire station to pay for it. A fire station to fund a computer system. Not ideal if I'm honest.

[00:07:50]But here's the detail that I just keep coming back to. In 2021, while West Sussex was just hemorrhaging money on this project, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, the man who owns the Hawaiian island, personally cited West Sussex as a success story on an investor earning call. I mean, I'm sure to them it is a success story. The project wasn't finished. It wasn't finished. It's not finished now. It's 5 years late and 15 times over budget. But I guess from Oracle's perspective, I suppose that is a success.

[00:08:26]2.6 million became 41 million. That is a phenomenal return on someone else's money, your money.

[00:08:35]East Sussex, 25 million contract failed to go live, placed on red status. The Bank of England's Oracle migration tripled from 7 to 21 million. The NHS's Oracle finance system replacement, processing 170 billion pounds in annual funding, was rated unachievable by the government's own infrastructure and project authority. And the overall government strategy for migrating departments to Oracle also rated unachievable by the government about their own plan using the software they keep choosing.

[00:09:10]At what point does someone in Whitehall pull up a chair, open a spreadsheet, and just look at the pattern?

[00:09:17]Is there a number? Is there a threshold where someone goes, "You know what?

[00:09:21]Maybe the 15th failed Oracle project is maybe this is the one where we should draw the line. Maybe try something else."

[00:09:33]But behind the spreadsheets, behind the contract numbers, and the overruns, there are real people. And this is where it stops being darkly funny. Emily Hartley-Road was 31 years old. In December 2022, she collapsed and was taken to University Hospital of North Durham. The hospital had recently installed a new electronic patient record system, Oracle Cerner. The old system used a simple traffic light rating to flag critically ill patients.

[00:09:59]Red means urgent, kind of hard to miss.

[00:10:02]New Oracle system replaced that with simple rules that required clicking through multiple screens.

[00:10:08]Emily wasn't flagged clearly enough. She didn't receive blood thinning treatment in time, and she died the following morning from a pulmonary embolism.

[00:10:17]Assistant Coroner Rebecca Sutton issued a prevention of future deaths report to two organizations, the NHS Trust and the Oracle Health UK. She said there was a risk that future deaths could occur unless actions were taken.

[00:10:31]Over 2,000 potential patient harm incidents at County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust alone have been linked to the Oracle Cerner system.

[00:10:41]A BBC Freedom of Information investigation across 116 NHS trusts found 126 instances of serious harm linked to IT issues, three patient deaths, and over 200,000 medical letters left unsent. In the United States, the same Oracle Cerner system was deployed across the Department of Veterans Affairs in a $10 billion contract. At least four veterans died due to system errors. 826 major incidents in 3 and 1/2 years.

[00:11:11]11,000 clinical orders at a single facility were routed to what's called an unknown queue, meaning they just went nowhere into the ether. No one saw them, gone forever.

[00:11:22]Same company, same product, same outcome. Now spreading across two continents. So, here's something I have been thinking about while going through all of this. We've just seen what happens when a corporation gets its hands on government data. Billions of pounds of transactions, no fraud detection, no audit trail. And that's the stuff they're doing with your money.

[00:11:42]Oh, now think about what's happening with your emails. If you're using Google or Gmail, and statistically most of you probably are, well, Google is scanning every message that comes into your inbox, not to protect you, but to sell you. Every receipt, every appointment confirmation, every message from your GP, it's all being read, profiled, and used to target you with ads. Your WhatsApp is encrypted, your Signal is encrypted, but your email, whoa, wide open. That's why I use ProtonMail, and I actually have done for years. It's end-to-end encrypted, which means not even Proton can read your messages. No ads, no trackers. They block those invisible tracking pixels that companies hide in emails to monitor you when you open them. They monitor where you are and what device you're using. All of that, it's all blocked by default. And one of the things I really like about Proton is their backstory. It was started by scientists at CERN, the particle people, and it's based in Switzerland, which is some of the strongest or has some of the strongest privacy laws in the world. It's not a Silicon Valley company trying to monetize your data. It is the opposite of everything we've been talking about today. And it's free to sign up. And if you're on Gmail, switching is genuinely painless. They've got a migration tool that automatically pulls everything across in a few clicks. Link is in the description, or you can go to proton.me/fineprint.

[00:12:59]And if this video is making you think about who's handling your data, well, that is probably a good place to start. Right. Anyway, back to Oracle, because we are not done. Oh, no, no, no, no. We are not even close.

[00:13:18]>> Larry Ellison has this financial relationship with the the Tony Blair Institute, has donated 200 for 57 million dollars to it. And so, >> Here's the question. Why does the government keep buying from Oracle?

[00:13:32]Their projects fail publicly, repeatedly. The auditors say so, the government's own ratings say so, and yet their contracts keep on rolling. Why?

[00:13:44]Oracle can't donate to UK political parties directly. They're an American company.

[00:13:50]Oh, but here's what they can do. Larry Ellison's foundation has donated or pledged at least 257 million pounds to the Tony Blair Institute since 2021.

[00:14:01]257 million. A joint investigation by Lighthouse reports and the New Statesman, based on 4 months of interviews with 29 current and former TBI staff, found the two organizations were described internally as inseparable. It's the love story [music] of the century.

[00:14:20]They hold joint retreats, and one TBI employee's job was specifically to manage the Oracle relationship. And here's where it stops being about money and starts being about access.

[00:14:30]FOI documents showed Tony Blair personally meeting technology secretary Peter Kyle and telling him AI was the only route to productivity. Well, Kyle then instructed his department to work with TBI. His email read, "Attaching the initial scoping work from TBI here."

[00:14:46]Not from civil servants, not from an independent review, from TBI. TBI's health policy director got a seat on a government working group shaping the NHS 10-year plan. And a TBI staff member, a man called Tom Westgarth, was placed directly inside the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology to work on the government's AI strategy, while still on the TBI's payroll. So, let me just trace this chain out for you. Larry Ellison funds TBI. TBI embeds staff in government departments. Those departments write technology policy, and those technology policies send contracts to Oracle. [music] Oracle's founder funds TBI, and I'm sure there's a perfectly innocent explanation for all of this. I am sure it is just a coincidence that the man worth $200 billion is pouring a quarter of a billion into an institute that just so happens to have its people writing government policy that just so happens to benefit his company. I'm sure all of that is just very, very bad luck for everyone involved. The UK registrar of consultant lobbyists investigated TBI and concluded it had not conducted unregistered lobbying, which I guess it's technically true in the same way that you haven't burgled a house if someone gives you the key. UK lobbying law only covers third-party lobbyists. If you're embedding your people directly inside the department, you don't need a lobbyist. You are the department. And globally, Oracle spends $11 million a year on US federal lobbying alone. 64 lobbyists. They've been charged twice by the SEC for bribery, slush funds, and subsidiaries in Turkey, the UAE, and India. $23 million settlements in 2022. They also paid $200 million in 2021 for overcharging the US government. A whistleblower on that case received $40 million.

[00:16:48]This is the company the British government describes as a strategic supplier.

[00:16:54]One imagines there were some difficult conversations when they were choosing that label.

[00:17:02]And here is the thing that makes all of this genuinely inexplicable.

[00:17:08]gov.uk notify, the government's own service for sending you text messages, emails, and letters, and all of that, runs on PostgreSQL, a free, open-source database, [music] and in November 2023, the Government Digital Service migrated Notify's 400 GB, 1.3 billion row database with 11 seconds of downtime. 11 seconds with free software. 11 seconds with free software.

[00:17:38]The Met Office uses it, too.

[00:17:41]An Oracle [music] database license, by comparison, costs 47 and a half thousand dollars per processor. SQL costs nothing.

[00:17:51]I've checked. I've worked with it before. It costs literally nothing. The government's own technology code of practice explicitly states that departments must show they've considered open-source alternatives before buying proprietary software. That's their own rule, written by them, for them. And yet, other councils have left. Hull ended a 22-year Oracle relationship and signed with Workday for about a million a year.

[00:18:16]Barking and Dagenham walked away from after 20 years. The City of London chose SAP. Nine central departments chose Workday over Oracle for their own systems. [music] So, it is not impossible. It's just expensive.

[00:18:29]And that is by design. Oracle's licensing model is so complicated that an entire [music] industry of Oracle license compliance consultants exists purely to help customers understand what the hell they're even paying for. I mean, just think about this for a second. There are companies whose entire business model is just explaining Oracle's pricing. And if you try to leave, Oracle sends in audit teams. FOI research found one in six London boroughs has been targeted. The Campaign for Clear Licensing surveyed over a hundred Oracle customers and found the relationship was, their words, not mine, predominantly hostile and filled with deep-rooted mistrust.

[00:19:11]One customer asked what they liked about Oracle's licensing and they said, "Nothing. Such practices should be considered illegal." The Cabinet Office's own digital team warned in 2024 that vendor lock-in is undermining the government's negotiating power.

[00:19:28]Their exact phrase was that within a decade the government could face the end of its ability to negotiate favorable terms. I mean, these muppets can't do that anyway, but hey. The end, not a reduction, the end, and they're still signing. The government's own services run on free software. The government's own rules say to use it. The government's own auditors say Oracle projects fail. The government's own digital team says they're losing the ability to walk away, and the government keeps signing.

[00:20:02]Birmingham's 216 million pound Oracle loss could have funded free SQL databases and open-source ERP for every council in England, every single damn one. It's easy math to do. It's not even close.

[00:20:17]Instead, the money went to a company whose founder is the third richest person alive, who owns a Hawaiian island, and who's pouring a quarter of a billion pounds, that's 250 thousand million pounds, into a former Prime Minister's institute, [music] an institute that now has staff sitting inside the departments that write the policies that sends the contracts back to Oracle. Round and round it goes.

[00:20:43]Emily Harker Road was 31. She died in a hospital because a computer system didn't clearly flag her condition.

[00:20:49]Catherine Sennett 66 in Selly Oak can't let her grandchildren visit because the rats in her neighborhood are, in her words, bigger than the damn cats because Birmingham can't afford proper waste collection anymore, partly because of what they've spent on Oracle. The council tax went up. The libraries closed. The software still doesn't work.

[00:21:09]And Oracle?

[00:21:10]Oracle just signed another billion pounds worth of UK government contracts.

[00:21:15]The system works exactly as designed. It just doesn't work for you. And here's why I'm asking you to share this one.

[00:21:21]Oracle isn't a household name. Most people have never heard of them. They don't know that a single software company has cost Birmingham taxpayers 200 quid each. They've contributed to patient deaths in NHS hospitals and built a quarter billion pound influence pipeline into the heart of government.

[00:21:39]This stuff survives because nobody's paying attention. So, if this made you angry, and it bloody well should have, send it to someone. Not for my numbers, although that is nice, I do admit, but because more people who know how this works, the harder it's going to be for them to keep doing it.