The government and Whitehall are warming to
a new way of testing complex new systems: trying them out on
captive taxpayers, benefit claimants and patients.
The latest trials involve the Home Office’s
Identity and Passport Service.
It went live in May with a system to enable people
to apply for passports online. The technology from Siemens did not
work as intended, staff complained to managers that it slowed down
the issuing of passports, and the system was taken out of
service.
But this was not explained to applicants who waited
for weeks for their passports to arrive. Some tried to complain by
phone but gave up after hearing continuous automated messages.
Only after Computer Weekly made inquiries did the
passport service admit that the new system had failed and it was
asking some of those who had applied online to make a new
application on paper.
Despite the passport service using live
applications rather than test cases, the Home Office insisted in a
statement that the go-live of its Electronic Passport Application
system – EPA2 – was a "trial."
It appears, then, that there is now official
endorsement of the idea that new technology can be tested on an
unwitting public.
When in 2002 the Child Support Agency introduced a
system for calculating entitlements, Whitehall officials knew the
equipment had 52 critical defects, according to a report published
last month by the National Audit Office.
The defective system was imposed on staff who were
not trained adequately to use or understand it, and its
ill-considered deployment contributed to thousands of payments
being wrongly calculated or held up. But nobody in Whitehall
lamented the use of claimants as guinea pigs for the new
systems.
Officials at the Office of Government Commerce also
gave the green light in 2002 to the go-live of a defective system
to support tax credits. Whitehall, and to a much lesser extent
ministers, had known that recipients of tax credits would routinely
receive large overpayments which they would later be called on to
pay back. Today more than £2bn in overpayments is outstanding.
Again, the public were used as guinea pigs to see how well or badly
the new system would work in practice.
This year Computer Weekly has revealed the effect
on patients of serious flaws in the introduction of a Care Records
Service which forms part of the NHS’s £12.4bn National Programme
for IT [NPfIT]. The flawed go-live of a basic version of the care
records service at Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre in Oxford led to
hospital operations being cancelled, some treatments being
deferred, patients being called in for appointments when clinics
were not expecting them, and patients not being notified of
scheduled appointments.
NHS papers show that some health officials were
aware of flaws in the new system before it went live. But it was
patients who suffered the consequences of its failed
introduction.
It used to be that government and senior
functionaries expressed regret in public over the failure of some
major projects. The chaos caused by the rushed introduction of a
new system at the London Ambulance Service in 1992, for example,
led to a public inquiry. Named individuals were held accountable,
and a useful report was published which identified the causes.
But in recent years the government and Whitehall
have introduced flawed systems without regretting failures that
have directly affected peoples’ lives.
It could be argued that the use of members of the
public as test cases would be slightly more acceptable if someone
were held accountable for IT-related calamities– as chief
executives of companies are responsible to shareholders for major
losses on failed IT projects.
But in public life, ministers and officials rarely
if ever accept that they have made mistakes. Indeed, ministers even
pass off failures as successes, perhaps because they are poorly
briefed.
On 14 June, prime minister Tony Blair was
challenged in the House of Commons to name "any major Government IT
project that has been delivered on budget or on time, or which
works". He replied: "There is one that is quite closely linked to
the identity card idea, which, of course, is the passport system.
It required a complicated computer project and it has worked
extremely well."
In fact, the passport service had unsuccessfully
introduced EPA2 on 16 May, a month before Blair’s assurance to the
Commons. At the time of Blair’s speech the passport service was
trying to cope with an increasing backlog of work. By last
Thursday, 5,000 passports which had been applied for online
remained to be processed.
One online applicant, Rob Dustall, told Computer
Weekly that his passport took six weeks to arrive, a month longer
than he expected, and only two working days before his holiday.
Most passports are issued quickly, and the staff
and managers who operate and run systems to support tax credits,
the Child Support Agency and the work of the NHS do their best to
provide an exemplary service to the public.
They should not be blamed for the decisions of
senior civil servants and ministers who seem to deem it acceptable
to tackle flaws in new technology based on the misfortunes suffered
by captive taxpayers, patients and claimants.