No, it goes even beyond that. An IT consultancy company called Accenture used to have the bulk of the NHS IT contract, quite probably with the usual aim of any private company - to extract the maximum amount of profit from the scenario. However as you can see from this Guardian story from 2006, they made a loss on the deal, and eventually ended up paying a £63million penalty to be allowed to withdraw from the project. Can you imagine a builder or a plumber or an electrician quoting for a job on your house, doing a portion of the job, and then paying you to release him from the contract and get one of his rivals to come in and do the work instead? You'd have to be the customer from hell, asking for the impossible... ... oh.