Another day and another outsourcing provider at the leading edge of public services has been telling the Government what went wrong.

ETS Europe bosses have been grilled by MPs today about the root causes of this year's SATS exam marking fiasco in England, which saw delays and other errors, such as children who took the tests being marked as absent. A small number of pupils' results have still not been provided.

Philip Tabbiner of ETS rightly told the Commons Schools Committee that the company was very sorry for the mistakes, which he blamed on “technical and operational problems”.

Now, this is where the story gets interesting: Dr. Tabbiner said these problems were mainly caused by changes to ETS' contract with the National Assessment Agency (NAA), which handles test results for the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA).

ETS had wanted the contract terminated in June – which would have presented the NAA with an even worse headache, you might imagine – but the NAA had instead insisted on a raft of late changes to the contracted terms.

Does this sound familiar? Cast your mind back to the summer (what a week that was!) and you might remember Fujitsu making a similar complaint to the Public Accounts Committee as it joined the lengthening queue of companies, Trusts and people exiting the NHS IT programme.

This is a Government, it seems, fond of moving the goalposts and increasing responsibilities at the last minute while piling greater and greater pressure on its outsourcing providers as deadlines loom.

Prudence, or merely tinkering? Tinkering with the patience of its private sector partners, on whom it is so fond of relying, I mean. That is not how you manage contracts.

ETS has several other Home Office Contracts, which will now be reviewed.

Throw in a year of embarrassing security lapses, and burgeoning problems elsewhere within the NHS National Programme for IT and you have a recipe for a winter of discontent in public sector outsourcing contracts.

PA Consulting's loss of a data stick of sensitive Home Office records has damaged its reputation as it, too, leaves a public sector contract in high dudgeon.

However, while PA Consulting has obviously been at fault, the Home Office's own record of data protection of late has been laughable at best – along with that of several other Government departments and agencies.

Public sector outsourcing was once a market to get into. One wonders to what extent outsourcing providers will now want to risk their professional reputations working for a Whitehall whose contractual meddling and micromanagement seems out of control, and whose own policies regarding data security and privacy seem frighteningly antiquated – even as it seeks to brand itself as modern, pragmatic and progressive.

To the NOA party tonight: all the gossip here, no doubt, later this week!