Here in the UK most government contracts just go to the big enterprise shops (think Accenture, IBM, Logica, Cap Gemini, ATOS etc) who manage to negotiate fairly

Here in the UK most government contracts just go to the big enterprise shops (think Accenture, IBM, Logica, Cap Gemini, ATOS etc) who manage to negotiate fairly hefty long term deals and charge a healthy commission for taking them on and running them for years. This is why you run into legacy codebases that are 10-20 years old and will keep on going.