It’s a well-known tune.

“How much will it cost to do this internally?” ‘£50 million, and we’d need to commit to staff to maintain it. But then we’d own it, and it would be about as financially efficient as possible’ “OK, this big company says they can do a basic version for £49m, and with the first year of support for free” ‘That won’t even do half of it. And they’ll just ramp the cost up later’ “No, this is a good plan, we should use the free market to efficiently do these things”

The project then becomes £330m once the private company quotes up including all the essentials that weren’t in the original quote, but the wheels are already turning, so it happens