West Sussex County Council has once again delayed the implementation of Oracle Fusion for HR and payroll following a series of setbacks that have seen expected costs swell to more than 15 times the original estimate. The program team has confirmed that Oracle Fusion would now be implemented in October 2026, pushing back what was already supposed to go live in April.
The project, which began in earnest in November 2019 with a modest budget of £2.6 million, has become a case study in how technology implementations can spiral beyond control. The southern English authority, which manages a budget of around £2.3 billion annually, initially agreed to spend £2.6 million, then later reset the budget to £14.07 million, including £7 million in March 2021 and £7.07 million in October 2022. The council has now committed to a total of approximately £41 million.
The council said the revised timeline reflects the scale of the change, impacting over 20,000 users, and the need to ensure a safe, stable system with a reliable and accurate payroll, particularly for schools and term-time employees.
What is particularly striking about West Sussex's troubles is how the council has funded the overruns. The council has taken the step of allowing capital receipts mainly from the sell-off of council buildings to fund the project, with the expected use of funds from the sell-off set to triple in the current financial year compared to a year earlier, up from £4 million in 2024/25 to £12 million in 2025/26. This represents an unusual approach to IT spending: capital receipts are typically reserved for infrastructure projects like schools and libraries, not software licensing.
The council's partnership with systems integrator DXC proved problematic. Throughout its period working with the council on the project, DXC was paid around £6.6 million, more than 50 percent above the original contract price, having begun working under a five-year, £4 million contract which began in May 2020. The council terminated the DXC agreement in September 2023 after more than three years of troubled delivery.
West Sussex is not alone in struggling with Oracle Fusion. The pattern repeating across UK local government suggests systemic problems with how enterprise software is procured and implemented. Birmingham City Council is attempting the same migration and is expecting to spending around £131 million, a massive increase on the £19 million originally estimated, with the system yet to produce auditable accounts more than two years after implementation. That council even issued a Section 114 notice, the equivalent of declaring bankruptcy, with auditors finding that governance and risk management failures were at the heart of the failure.
The honest case for these delays is this: replacing systems that have worked for two decades is complex work. According to an independent audit, West Sussex County Council also failed to ensure it had adequate assurance it could manage its Oracle ERP project or its systems integration partner. That reflects a real problem in local government: many councils lack the in-house expertise to oversee vendors and contractors effectively.
Yet the cost escalation raises hard questions about procurement discipline and accountability. The council's decision to use asset sales to fund an IT project rather than absorbing the cost within operating budgets suggests the true scale of the problem may have been obscured from public scrutiny. When an authority that services 2.3 billion pounds annually cannot estimate a software project cost within a reasonable range, something in the governance framework requires examination.
West Sussex has engaged new implementation partners and claims to be taking a more cautious approach. Whether October 2026 proves any more reliable than previous dates remains to be seen.