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‘Toxic’ errors caused student loan fiasco, says MP

Commenting on the Commons public accounts committee’s report on the delivery of student finance by the Student Loans Company, South Norfolk MP Richard Bacon, a member of the committee, said:

“The Customer First Programme aimed to centralise and modernise delivery of grants and loans to students from England.  However, a toxic mix of basic errors and poor operational judgement by the Student Loans Company plunged the programme into meltdown.  

“The linchpin of the operation was a document scanning system that had not been tested properly and which subsequently collapsed under the volume of applications.   This failure was compounded by the Student Loans Company’s bizarre decision to process application forms in County Durham while scanning related documents in Glasgow.  As a result of these mistakes, over 100,000 students started university without their funding in place. 

“The failure to test new systems adequately is a well known flaw in public sector IT, so it hard to understand why departments and agencies keep blundering into the same bear-traps.  Those involved in this fiasco could have and should have known better.  If we are to have any hope of stopping departments from making these mistakes time and again, then this debacle needs to serve as a cautionary tale across Whitehall”. 

7 December 2010

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