Ouch. Defra cancelled an EDRM project in 2005 which had already spent £12.6m. Another paused project cost £9.9m to deliver £0.25m of outputs. That said, there aren’t enough cancelled projects in my opinion: once they are running a life they start having a life of their own. Project and programme governance good practice has plenty of ways of closing down early: they aren’t often used.
BIS looks a lot healthier (although it is a far smaller department). I wonder how many government IT projects have the same acronym (I noticed two SPIREs).