MoJ electronic monitoring programme fails to achieve value for money, says NAO

Contract shambles

The issues led to conflicts between the MoJ and its suppliers. Its first preferred bidder, Buddi, and the MoJ disagreed on how to handle location data and protect intellectual property, which led to the ministry terminating the contract, replacing it with another supplier, Steatite, in March 2014. However that contract also ended in difficulties, with the MoJ terminating the deal with the supplier in November 2015.

Capita, which was responsible for the integration part of the contract, also encountered difficulties with the project. The NAO report said the two parties had “differing expectations of what this role entailed”.

The Ministry expected Capita to act like a traditional prime contractor, but Capita had no contractual responsibility for the work and performance of the other suppliers,” the report said, adding that eventually the two settled their differences and the MoJ brought the integration in-house.

During the project it also became clear that the contracts didn’t specify who would provide the electronic link to transfer data between the old tags and a central data centre.

“It only became clear after the contracts were signed that no party had made plans to build the link. Agreeing on who was responsible for doing the work and meeting the cost proved a lengthy distraction, until the parties agreed not to proceed with this electronic link, the NAO said.

NAO head Amyas Morse said the case for expansion of tags using GPS “was unproven, but the MoJ pursued an overly ambitious and high risk strategy anyways”.

“Ultimately it has not delivered. After abandoning its original plans, the Ministry’s new service will now, ironically, be much closer to its existing one. Even if it launches in 2018, it will still be five years late. The Ministry has learnt costly lessons from its failings but significant risks still remain,” he said.

Addressing the issues

The programme also suffered from a high turnover of senior responsible officers (SROs) –  a common denominator in failed government technology projects. Since its inception in 2011, the project has had five different SROs.

The ministry’s governance arrangements were weak, resulting in slow decision-making and allowing internal disagreements to persist. The Ministry did not consistently fulfil its own obligations on the programme,” the report said.

“Until 2016, internal and external reviews noted a lack of accountability to the SRO and unhelpful disunity between operational, technical, commercial and programme staff. The ministry’s decision-making on some critical matters was excessively slow, creating delays of several months on the programme, and preventing suppliers from progressing their work.”

In 2015 and 2016 the project underwent significant external and internal reviews. This included a Cabinet Office review which found that continuing with the four-supplier model was the “least bad” option, considering the cost that would occur by starting over again.

The NAO said the ministry has taken action to address many of the issues as a result of the reviews. The MoJ has now moved away from developing a bespoke tag to procuring tags already available in the market. G4S, one of the original suppliers, will now work with the other suppliers to “integrate its tags with their systems”.