The Ministry of Justice is in talks with EDS to reduce
the cost of a prisons project which has more than doubled in
estimated cost even though its scope has been cut.
Officials want to reach a deal which could reduce their
embarrassment when a report on the National Offender Management
Information System (Nomis) project is published by the National
Audit Office early in 2009.
Nomis adds a fourteenth scheme to Computer Weekly's list of
Labour's 13 unlucky IT projects.
The purpose of Nomis was to provide a single record of an
offender across the criminal justice system, from appearing in
court to being put on probation or going to prison.
Its problems suggest that Gateway reviews are not preventing
projects from ending up incomplete and over budget. The reviews are
independent assessments by the Office of Government Commerce of
high- and medium-risk projects at stages in their lifecycle.
The estimated cost of Nomis has escalated from £234m when it was
initiated in June 2004 to £690m by August 2007. In the meantime,
the project has been downscaled and the full system will be
installed in prisons only, not the Probation Service as well.
Officials say the main part of Nomis is the system being built
by EDS. But it is unclear how the estimated cost of Nomis in 2004
can be reconciled with the fact that
EDS's initial contract on the system was only £39m. EDS
declined to comment.
The National Audit Office is looking at whether the de-scoped
cost of Nomis represents value for money.
In the absence of Nomis - there has been a limited roll-out only
- prisons and probation staff have been exchanging data on
prisoners via paper forms and e-mail.
It is not known when Nomis is being rolled out to prisons. The
Ministry of Justice declined to say whether the programme was on
hold pending the outcome of talks with EDS.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Justice also declined to answer
Computer Weekly's questions on why costs have escalated. The
department issued a statement to Computer Weekly this week, which
referred to the project in positive terms only.
It said, "Commercial negotiations with EDS are continuing
regarding implementation and live service costs of Prison Nomis We
are committed to continuing the successful implementation of the
Offender Management Model and to ensuring that offender managers
have access to the necessary information to allow them to
effectively manage offenders within custody and in the community,
and to replace unstable, at-risk IT systems across the Probation
and Prison Services. The revised Nomis programme reflects this
commitment, while providing a clear development path for the
future.
"The revised Nomis programme will preserve and build upon the
work completed to date to offer substantial benefits in the
management of offenders. It will see improved sharing of
information between the Prison and Probation Services, allowing
staff in both organisations access to the information required to
support offender management. In addition, the programme will
provide improvements to offender assessment systems."
About £177m had been spent on Nomis by the end of the 2007/08
financial year.
A blow for offender management
Last year the Thames Valley Probation Board said the
cancellation of Nomis for the Probation Service was a "real blow
for end-to-end offender management and created a serious new risk
for Thames Valley". Officials and ministers had hoped that the
original plan of "one offender, one record" would help cut the
risks of criminals re-offending.
The governor of Birmingham's Winson Green Prison put part of the
blame for a prisoner's escape on the absence of Nomis. Inmate
Raheem Ahmed strolled out of the prison in Autumn 2007 by swapping
identities with another prisoner who was to be freed.
Governor Mike Shann told the Birmingham Post and Mail, "As
governor, I had supported the view that, with C-Nomis [the
forerunner of Nomis] around the corner with photo identity built
in, we should not expend money on a new photo system for
reception."
In December 2006, the then home secretary, John Reid, told
Liberal Democrat MP Nick Clegg that the Nomis project was
"currently within allocated funds". He added, "The business case
for the project is regularly reviewed and more than meets the
criteria for return on the investment proposed."
The true cost of Nomis
In September 2008 the National Audit office put the total
estimated of the Nomis project - to exclude the Probation Service -
at £793m, which is a trebling of the original £234m projected
cost.
The £793m figure was removed from the National Audit Office's
website, after Computer Weekly put questions about it to the
Ministry of Justice and the NAO.
The NAO said the £793m figure was a mistake and that £690m is
the estimated total cost of the original project as of August
2007.
The increase in estimated cost made the original programme
unaffordable. In January 2008, the justice minister announced that
Nomis would be installed in prisons only. The Probation Service
would have read-only access to the Nomis database.
Read more on Tony Collins' blog >>