The Government has been urged to open up its service provider
agreements with IT outsourcing companies to parliamentary scrutiny,
following the collapse of its Individual Learning Account (ILA)
scheme.
The recommendation, made by a cross-party committee of MPs, is part
of a damning report published today which criticises both the
Government and IT supplier Capita for their poor management and
flawed implementation of the £55m training programme.
The ILA scheme was abruptly closed by ministers last year following
mounting concerns that it was running at least £60m over budget and
was being abused by fraudsters. Some companies were found to have
exploited weaknesses in Capita's IT systems to claim government
funds for training they did not provide.
The MPs called for the Government to guard against future
programmes falling into the same trap by sweeping away the secrecy
surrounding its agreements with private sector service
providers.
"The lack of scrutiny of the delivery model did nothing to improve
the ILA scheme's chance of success. We recommend that in future the
non-confidential clauses of any such major service providers should
be laid before Parliament at least three weeks before coming into
effect," the report said.
The MPs accused the Government of failing to listen to the concerns
of its own experts that the scheme was likely to be abused unless
quality control procedures were put in place to monitor the quality
of training offered to the public.
Officials at the Department for Education and Skills were said to
have overlooked the concerns of the previous government, which
decided that an ILA scheme would not be practical, and failed to
learn from the experience of IT projects in other government
departments.
"We regard the failure of the department to learn from the mistakes
made in the past by its predecessors and other government
departments to be one of the most disturbing aspects of the ILA
experience," the report said.
It should have been possible to design a scheme that was not open
to fraud or misuse, but the lack of quality assurance made abuse
almost inevitable, the report concluded.
Until remedial measures were taken in the summer of 2001, Capita's
ILA Centre could not prevent unscrupulous training providers, who
had complete access to Capita's ILA computer systems, using them to
claim government subsidies for individuals they had not trained or
who did not even exist.
Capita should have made a more speedy assessment of the
Government's plans to use the existing Learndirect database to
accredit training providers, the report said. The plans were
dropped just before the scheme was launched because of difficulties
in linking Learndirect to the ILA database.
"We find it hard to credit that Capita, a major player in winning
contracts for work contracted out to the private sector, should not
have pointed out that, without a quality threshold for providers,
the ILA was a disaster waiting to happen," the report said.