Alistair Darling’s budget was always going to be about saving money. A lot of money. It turns out that the Ministry of Justice has to find nearly £1.1bn in savings, and the Law Officers Departments must find £94m (see online news).

But what I would find amusing if it wasn’t so serious is where Mr Darling thinks he will find this money – or rather, where he thinks Jack Straw will find it.

In the Budget report, it states that the Law Officers Deparments will find £37m in savings ‘through the reform of corporate services including pursuing shared service solutions, collaborative procurement and maximising the potential gains from investment in IT’.

The report also states that the MoJ will find £120m ‘from the Prison Service’s shared service centre, providing back office shared services for 128 prisons and other government departments’, £82m in ‘savings in the National Offender Management Service’, and £82m ‘from streamlining administrative processes in the Courts Service’. This is about as likely as I am to grow wings.

Anyone who has even glanced at the newspapers in the last few years knows this government’s record on IT projects is miserable – and that its record in delivering savings through streamlining and efficiency within the justice system is equally miserable.

As the Gazette has reported, Whitehall’s attempt to plug together the Prison Service and probation and other key criminal justice elements, the National Offender Management Service and its IT layer, C-NOMIS, have been disasters. C-NOMIS is a failure, has wasted upwards of £41m, cost £226m so far and is set to cost £513m by the time it’s ‘finished’ – not that ‘finished’ is a fair word to use, as it will only connect the Prison Service to, er, itself.

Had the government not wasted so much on IT projects that don’t work, maybe you would have the money in the bank to forestall such swingeing cuts now. The nation’s financial travails can’t all be blamed on irresponsible bankers…