The six-month inquiry examined massive amounts of evidence. Everyone blamed everyone else, and the report ran to 700 pages. Part of the lawyers' job was to speculate how their client might be found liable for the problems-in the event, I am aware of no claims of any substance having been mounted.

Legal precedents

In strict legal terms, though, the landscape for liability is reasonably clear. In the event of mishap, various public bodies will be judged on whether they breached their statutory duty. Just because something goes wrong or is miscommunicated does not mean that the public body involved has breached its statutory duty. A breach usually means there has been clear negligence by one or a few key decision makers. The public body may have caused or contributed to a problem without triggering its own liability, and this leaves defenses open to other parties to the argument.

Suppliers of IT systems have their own potential liabilities and defenses. The supplier's primary point of responsibility is its contract, and the only people who can sue on that contract are the parties to it. Where there is a problem attributed to the supplied system, the complaining party (normally the owner of the system) must first show that it (here, the owner) has been caused loss (nearly always measurable financially) by a breach of the contract. So if the owner has not lost any money (probably because it has not been sued by someone else), or if the system cannot be shown as an appreciable cause of the problem, a contractual claim will not succeed.

Even where the cause does seem to be clearly referable to the system, the supplier may have a good legal reason why it is not liable, or liable to such a limited financial extent that a lawsuit is not worthwhile. The supplier: may have built the system in reliance on a design prepared by someone else; may establish that the failure is due to an integration problem and did not assume the role of systems integrator; may say that the system passed all its acceptance tests, so the risk of operation has passed to the owner or; may have a limitation or exclusion of liability clause that the owner agreed to as part of the risk apportionment during contract negotiations.