The crisis-ridden Child Support Agency (CSA) will be
axed, work and pensions secretary John Hutton will tell the House
of Commons today.
The move follows last month’s damning National Audit Office
report on the agency and its procurement of IT systems.
The report confirmed Hutton’s earlier admission that the CSA had
“failed” and was not fit for purpose. Around £3.5bn in child
maintenance payments are still outstanding.
The NAO revealed that the Treasury’s Office of Government
Commerce secretly agreed that deployment of a new £456m IT system,
built by EDS, should go ahead, despite known critical defects.
The public spending watchdog blamed the system’s failure on the
CSA as well as its IT supplier, pointing to lack of clarity in
deciding what was required from the IT and lack of compliance by
staff with the new system.
The damning NAO verdict followed a series of earlier reports as
the fiasco unfolded. An inquiry launched by the Commons Work and
Pensions Committee found last year that the IT system was “nowhere
near being fully functional”.
It highlighted a lack of transparency, poor planning, absence of
management information and a breakdown in communication with its IT
contractors as contributing to the catastrophic implementation of
the new IT system in 2003.
But the MPs also pointed to “organic and systemic” problems at
the CSA, adding that correcting the IT problems would not be enough
to bring the agency’s work up to standard.
It also emerged last year that hundreds of thousands of cases
held on an old IT system were still waiting to be transferred, two
years after the new EDS system went live.
And a report commissioned by the Department for Work and
Pensions found that poorly paid, demoralised staff entered false
information into systems in a bid to bypass software controls,
deleted cases and stockpiled claims – sometimes for years.
Hutton’s announcement today will be accompanied by publication
of a review of child support by Sir David Henshaw. Hutton is
expected to announce that in future, parents will be urged to make
their own child maintenance arrangements, with a new agency
targeting those who do not co-operate.
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