Tucked away near the back of areport published this monthby
theNational Audit Officeare some
remarkable words.
They refer to £161m that the Home Office spent on the IT-based
project, C-Nomis. The project aimed to provide a single database of
offenders, to be accessed by prison and probation officers.
The NAO said: "We have not been able to ascertain precisely what
this money spent
on."
The Home Office had not kept proper records on the C-Nomis
project, said the authors of the report.
How is it possible, in the age-old machinery of government, for
£161m to be spent without proper records being kept, such that
auditors have to speculate on where the money went?A disinterested
observer is entitled to ask whether the Home Office has opened the
door on anarchistic practices and the risk of corruption.
We "believe", said the NAO, that the Home Office spent most of
the £161m developing the software and testing it in prisons. But it
does not know for certain.
The report's authors were unable to "determine the full value of
the waste and inefficiencies associated with the failure of the
C-Nomis project with certainty". This was because the National
Offender Management Service's recording of costs was poor, it
said.
The audit office found major decisions were taken without proper
authority. There were no formal controls on changes to the contract
and initially no penalties on the supplier for late delivery. There
was a "vacuum of leadership".
There have been improvements since Jack Straw's Ministry of
Justice took over the project in 2007.
But the NAO still finds some surprising lapses. Information on
the expected cost and time-to-completion of C-Nomis was missing.
This is the information one would expect to be depicted in lights
on any large IT-based business change project or programme.
With characteristic reserve, the NAO says of the information
that is missing: "Without this information the project manager
cannot identify where money has been spent or what has, or is, to
cost more than planned."
Even today the Ministry of Justice relies on "unvalidated cost
figures".
Ministers gave good reports to Parliament on the state of
C-Nomis in 2006 when the project was failing, so it is possible
that Jack Straw will not be told the whole truth.
A technical report on the project was submitted by Accenture in
September 2008. It said:"C-Nomis suffered from cost over-runs,
scope changes, delays, restructuring and insufficient governance
management lacked early warning of programme failure."
The project was due to cost £234m but
the latest estimate is £513m for a scheme that has been reduced in
scope. Accenture has warned that costs might rise further.
Press releases issued every month by Whitehall give the
impression that the government machine runs as smoothly as Big Ben.
The Office of Government Commerce does regular assessments on
dozens of mission-critical IT projects and programmes in the public
sector.The OGC has thousands of online pages of advice on project
management.
But it slipped out in 2003 that some
project planning in government was all but non-existent.
Peter Gershon, then Chief Executive of the OGC, said in a
speech: "There are still far too many projects reviewed by
Gateway teams where, frankly, project planning is little better
than something on the back of a cigarette packet."
Has much changed?
Several NAO reports have recognised IT-related successes in
government. But it's the failures that people remember, and it is
especially worrying when the NAO cannot establish precisely how
millions of pounds has been spent on an IT-based project.
It is a matter likely to be taken up by the Public Accounts
Committee when it interviews civil servants on the C-Nomis project
in the coming months.