Following this year's Labour Party conference held in
Manchester,
Tony Collinsanalysesthe Government's track record on IT projectsin 13 departments:
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Magistrates' courts
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Schools
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Intelligence services
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GCHQ
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Passports Service
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National Health Service
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Rural Payment Agency
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Criminal Records Bureau
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HM Revenue and Customs
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Department for Work and Pensions
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Department of Health
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The Department for Innovation Universities and
Skills
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Ministry of Defence
Magistrates' courts
Fujitsu was the only bidder in 1998 for the "Libra" contract to
deliver a
standard Libra case management system for magistrates' courts.
Fujitsu bid £146m in May 1998 and increased this to £184m by the
time the contract was signed in December 1998. The price was
renegotiated twice and Fujitsu ended up being paid £232m to deliver
only part of the original system: the technical infrastructure and
not the case management system.
The cost of the full system, from various suppliers,
is now put at more than £400m. There was a gross
underestimation of costs and complexity. Another key lesson
according to the National Audit Office: don't build IT to support
existing ways of working but re-work and simplify processes
first.
Schools
Education Secretary Ed Balls said
the contract with ETS for marking SAT tests had turned into a
"
shambles" after the company introduced an online service to
give schools a detailed breakdown of results and quicker access to
pupils' scores. But some markers were either locked out of the
system or found it too slow. This was one reason there were long
delays in publishing the results of Sat tests. Thousands of pupils
finished the school year without their results. It also
transpired that test papers were sent to the wrong schools or went
missing, pupils were marked "absent" in the ETS database even when
they took the tests, some pupils were given marks for tests they
had not taken and test papers were returned to schools unmarked.
MPs were given conflicting information by ministers and government
spokespeople on how well the new system was working and the
performance of ETS.
The government eventually cancelled the contract with ETS.
Intelligence
services
There have been delays of between two and four years to phases of
the "Scope" system to help combat terrorism and other threats
by linking intelligence services and providing interfaces between
MI5, the MoD, government departments and key overseas sites. It
appears that complexity was underestimated. The system operates at
the "top secret" level of electronic security. The Cabinet Office
claimed to Computer Weekly in August 2007 that, after some initial
delays, all was well with the system. The Intelligence and Security
Committee of MPs reported in January 2008 that there had been some
progress and benefits of phase one of the system. But it now
appears that phase two has been shelved. The Committee said: "We
remain very concerned by the numerous delays to this important
programme, including: delays to the delivery of phase one and phase
two a general lack of preparedness for full implementation amongst
SCOPE partners and difficulties in providing a secure environment
for the deployment of Scope overseas". Last week the Cabinet Office
refused to answer Computer Weekly's questions on phase 2 of Scope,
which was supposed to start this year. A Cabinet Office spokeswoman
cited state security as a reason for not discussing the project's
problems. The Cabinet Office has also refused to say how much the
system has cost, or who is supplying it.
GCHQ
In 1998, the Government's communications headquarters GCHQ
estimated the cost of a "box move" of technology from an old
building to a new one would be about £60m. But for reasons which
have never been explained, GCHQ's board had been told the cost of
the technical transition would be only about £20m. In fact even the
£60m was an underestimate. The final cost was more than £300m,
according to the National Audit Office in a report in July
2003.
Passports Service
New systems at the
Passport Service in 1999 slowed down the processing of passport
applications. Instead of travellers receiving passports within 10
days, some applications were taking up to 50 days to process. A
backlog of more than half a million applications built up.
Emergency measures were introduced, including free two-year
extensions to passports. The National Audit Office said there was a
"failure to assess and test adequately the time needed by staff to
learn and work the new passport processing system". Extending the
roll-out from Liverpool to Newport before problems were overcome
compounded the difficulties.
National Health
Service
The National Programme for IT in the NHS was announced in 2002
after it was approved in principle at a short meeting at Downing
Street.
The initial plans proved wildly optimistic. Computer Weekly
learned the National Programme for IT [NPfIT] was originally
planned as a three-year programme but later became a 10-year
scheme. The roll-out of the main system, a Care Records Service, is
running four years late. What was announced as a £2.3bn scheme is
now projected by the National Audit Office to cost £12.7bn. Doctors
support the objectives of the scheme but are critical of the way it
is being implemented. The programme has lost two of its four local
service providers. Implementations of patient administration
systems in London and the south of England have caused prolonged
delays in treatments and surgical procedures for patients,
including some with suspected cancer. Appointments have been
delayed, records have gone missing, and some hospitals have been
unable to track which patients have been treated and for what.
Also, trust finances have been hit by unexpected costs and being
unable to invoice for work they have done. Another example of a
major project in which over-optimism reigned - and arguably still
does.
Rural Payment Agency
In 2003 the
Rural Payment Agency appointed Accenture to handle its IT. In
2004 the
Rural Payment Agency's Single Payment Scheme was announced. By
2005 the costs of the Accenture contract, which included building
systems to support the Single Payment Scheme, were
escalating, partly because of
the growing complexity of the scheme. In March 2006 the Rural
Payments Agency was unable to meet its target for
making payments to farmers. The National Audit Office said the
failure "caused distress to a significant minority of farmers, cost
farmers money in additional interest and bank charges, and
undermined the farming industry's confidence in the agency". The
National Audit Office found the "risks and complexities involved in
delivery had not been fully appreciated. As a consequence the Rural
Payments Agency underestimated the amount of work involved
"Our analysis of events indicates that the pressure to meet
deadlines led the Agency to proceed without sufficient evidence of
the robustness of the overall business systems
"The Agency did not have the time to test the system as a whole
before introduction. Each key element of the system was tested
before introduction, but problems arose afterwards as the testing
could not fully simulate the live environment."
Notes of briefings by officials to ministers, which were
released under the Freedom of Information Act, showed that
ministers were repeatedly given over-optimistic assessments of
progress with the system.
Criminal Records
Bureau
Officials ignored warnings from the potential end-users of the
new IT-based
vetting service that
the assumptions underpinning the project were wrong. Potential
end-users had questioned the proposed use of a call centre and
argued that customers would prefer to apply for background checks
by paper rather than phone. The Bureau,
in partnership with Capita, went ahead with a call centre but
most applications came in by paper. Data entry screens had not been
designed for keying in data from paper forms. The optical character
recognition systems were designed for telephone applications and
had insufficient capacity to deal with the volume of paper
applications. Business processes were unable to cope with the
volume of errors and exceptions on paper applications and the
complexity of dealing with individuals and employers. The National
Audit Office said in February 2004: "Weaknesses in the business
assumptions made at the start of the project, and in
the delivery of systems to process all types of application,
were key factors in the Bureau's problems."
HM Revenue and
Customs
In April 2003 HMRC went live with a new
tax credits system.
EDS and
Capgemini were paid £236m until 31 August 2005, for running the
system (excluding software build costs), according to a government
statement. Software problems led to incorrect payments being made
to claimants. HMRC claimed software errors led to overpayments of
£184m in 2003-04 and 2004-05. The department spent a further £65m
on extra administration and fixing the system. EDS and HMRC reached
a
legal settlement over some of
the department's tax credits problems.
Department for Work and
Pensions
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) cancelled an IT
programme -
the Benefit Processing Replacement Programme - on which it had
spent £106m.
The cancellation came less than three months after the
government gave an assurance to Parliament that new funding for
aspects of the Benefit Processing Replacement Programme had been
approved. The government made no announcement of the cancellation
of the project: its abandonment was discovered by journalists. The
then Tory Work and Pensions spokesman
Philip Hammond MP said the discrepancy between the reassuring
parliamentary reply in June 2006 and the cancellation of the scheme
in August 2006 highlighted the poor quality of information provided
to Parliament on the progress of major IT schemes. The DWP's
three-year Benefit Processing Replacement Programme (BPRP)
programme was based on commercial off-the-shelf products from
Siebel, Curam and IBM. The DWP refused to explain to Computer
Weekly why Parliament was given information on the progress of the
project when the government was quietly planning to scrap it.
Department of
Health
Despite many warnings, the Department of Health introduced a
flawed, web-based system -
the Medical Training Application Service - to select junior
doctors for training in their chosen fields. The Association of
Surgeons in Training was among the many professional organisations
which complained to the Health Secretary about the system. The
president of the Association of Surgeons in Training, Conor Marron,
wrote to the government in 2007 about the "failure" of the Medical
Training Application Service (MTAS): "Despite serious concerns
being raised in the development stage that it would not serve
surgical trainees as required, this has been rushed through with
crucial deficiencies. The failure of the system and its
development, in such a tight timeframe, has led to major errors in
the quality control of the long-listing and short-listing processes
which has undermined the credibility of the entire process."
The system was
further discredited when it was revealed
doctors could read each other's applications. A High Court
judge, Mr Justice Goldring, said of MTAS: "The premature
introduction of the new system has had disastrous consequences."
The Labour-led Health Committee of the House of Commons said of the
MTAS system: "The reputations of both the Department of Health and
the leaders of the profession were severely diminished by the
events of 2007."
An inquiry into the
failings by Professor Sir John Tooke said in a
236-page
report in January 2008: "The [MTAS] system went live in January
2007. From early in the process there were reports of technical
problems and evidence of unacceptable variation in the individuals
selected for interview. There was also mounting evidence that
doctors who in prior selection processes would have been regarded
as first class candidates were not being shortlisted." The Tooke
report revealed that a gateway review in September 2006, four
months before the system went live, had said: "The major internal
risk lies with the online application system MTAS where the
schedule is too close for comfort and would not normally be
regarded as acceptable for an IT project". But officials at the
Department of Health concluded at the time of a gateway review
that: "MTAS is currently on schedule and deliverable".
John Turner, consultant physician,
told the British Medical Journal in June 2007: "Bullying
tactics created an unstoppable momentum for MTAS implementation,
regardless of the obvious problems piling up and the well based
objections of a majority of consultants."
The Department for Innovation
Universities and Skills
The Individual Learning Account scheme was announced in the
1997 Labour Party manifesto to support adult education with a
system of tax incentives from employers. The Individual Learning
Account (ILA) programme launched nationally in September 2000. A
month before, in July 2000,
Capita had been awarded a contract to run the Individual
Learning Account scheme. By October 2001 the scheme had 2.5 million
members registered as eligible to undertake subsidised
learning.
About 9,000 organisations had registered as learning providers,
but some had registered fraudulently. The Secretary of State
announced on 24 October 2001 that the programme was being suspended
from 7 December 2001 due to evidence of
abuse by a small minority of providers. After further serious
allegations of fraud and theft involving ILAs, the government
decided to
shut down the programme immediately on 23 November 2001. John
Healey MP, a minister at the Department told the Commons' Committee
on Education and Skills that the concept of Individual Learning
Accounts and policy were "very much inspired by the Chancellor of
the Exchequer [then Gordon Brown]".
Fraud and abuse are believed to have cost taxpayers tens of
millions of pounds but nobody knows how much. MPs said there was no
understanding of how much the system was being abused . Education
committee MPs said the department's officials should have better
understood the risks before they allowed the scheme to go live and
it was not clear how the supplier and department divided their
responsibilities. Labour MP David Chaytor said it was difficult to
obtain information on the project: "It strikes me that whereas in
the past few weeks we have been able to read in the financial pages
of the major newspapers full details of the accounts of Enron, and
more recently WorldCom, in minute detail, we cannot find out how
much the Department has paid, out of public funding, to Capita, or
what penalties have been incurred as a result of the failure to
deliver the skills training."
"The scheme ended up sticking a fire hose out of a window and
spraying taxpayers' money over anyone who happened to walk by,"
said Conservative MP Richard Bacon, a member of the House of
Commons' Public Accounts Committee,
during a debate on the scheme in the Commons on 27 June
2002.
Ministry of
Defence
The cost of the
Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) has soared from £2.3bn
to
£7bn. The National Audit Office in July 2008 found there had
been
"
major delays to the roll out of the first stage of the DII
programme. The Department contracted to have 62,800 DII
terminals in place at permanent defence sites by the end of July
2007. At the end of April 2008, only 29,000 had been delivered
"Currently the end date for installation of increment one is
running 18 months late against the estimated latest completion date
at contract signature".
The cost of the
project was announced originally at about £2.3bn, but the
latest cost estimate is £7bn, though not because of any fault of
the main contractor EDS. The National Audit Office found the costs
of the DII contracts with the Atlas consortium, led by EDS, are
under firm control. The MoD paid EDS less than the supplier had
originally expected because of an
18-month delay in the roll-out. The difference in costs is
because the MoD was not open and candid when announcing the costs
originally. The DII programme "assumed that the roll-out of
infrastructure and terminals
would be more straightforward than transpired," said the
National Audit Office.
See also:
Opinion - Why can't new Labour get IT right? >>