MPs on the Public Accounts Committee demand that details of major
government projects be made public.
MPs on the Public Accounts Committee are on a collision course with
the government over demands for transparency and accountability on
public sector IT projects.
The dispute centres on whether Gateway reviews - assessments by the
Office of Government Commerce of IT projects at stages in their
lifecycle - should be published. This is one of the principal
elements of Computer Weekly's Shaking Up Government IT
campaign.
PAC chairman Edward Leigh said last week that the reviews should be
in the public domain and that the OGC should have "teeth", which
would enable it to force the adoption of good practice in IT
project management across Whitehall departments. This would make it
less likely that departmental heads ignore lessons from past IT
failures.
Ministers, top civil servants, and the OGC have rejected the
publication of Gateway reviews, though MPs have repeatedly
expressed frustration that they receive no information on failing
IT projects until their constituents are affected by poor
services.
Reports by the public spending watchdog National Audit Office have
catalogued why IT projects fail, but come too late for remedial
action to be taken.
Leigh made his remarks at the end of a PAC hearing where MPs
questioned John Oughton, chief executive of the OGC, and John
Bourn, head of the National Audit Office.
The PAC members pressed Oughton and Bourn to devise a way of
bringing greater Parliamentary scrutiny to large IT-related
projects that are in serious danger of failing.
The two senior civil servants agreed that arrangements could be put
in place "very quickly", but MPs were concerned about how effective
these arrangements would be.
Bourn emphasised he had access to all papers relating to IT
projects that were in deep trouble. "It is available to us to
report on their progress, but I suppose more focus could be given
to that if it became part of procedure," he said.
Creating a project notification structure and a quarterly report to
the committee on troubled IT projects would be practical, "because
there would not be an enormous number of projects with that degree
of danger attached to them," Bourn said.
However, there could be tension between Oughton, Bourn and MPs over
which problem projects would be reported to Parliament. Oughton
indicated that he wanted the alerts to be confined to a narrow band
of projects which had received two consecutive "red lights" in
Gateway reviews.
But Tory member of the committee Richard Bacon said several
projects that had failed when they were introduced, including
systems to support the Criminal Records Bureau and Tax Credits, had
passed Gateway reviews with green lights.
Like Leigh, he wants Gateway reviews published so Parliament can
scrutinise the progress of all major high-risk IT projects.
During the hearing, Bacon quizzed Oughton about whether he would
publish Gateway reviews under the Freedom of Information Act, which
comes into full force on 1 January 2005.
Oughton replied that he was looking at exemptions under the Act.
This could allow some reviews to be kept secret. He said each
request under the Act would be considered on a "case-by-case
basis".