Following this year's Labour Party conference held in Manchester, Tony Collins analyses the Government's track record on IT projects in 13 departments:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Opinion: Why is Labour’s record on big IT-based projects so bad?
The Labour Party Conference has avoided any debate on the state of its largest IT projects and programmes, which, given its record, is to be expected.
All governments have unsung IT successes and large IT failures. But New Labour has had more large-scale government IT calamities on general exhibit than any government we can remember, despite earnest attempts to learn lessons.
The party’s record was summed up in November 2004 by the National Audit Office, whose reports are always carefully worded. It said: "The government has a poor record on delivering successful large IT-based projects and programmes." That perception remains today.
Ministers have launched "Transformational government", among many initiatives aimed at showing that government can use IT and unified working practices to provide cheaper, better services.
In 2000 the Cabinet office published "Successful IT", a worthwhile guide to avoiding not-so-obvious traps. The Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office have published many reports for more than a decade on what tends to make projects successes or not.
As well as these, the Office of Government Commerce launched the "gateway review" scheme early in the new millennium, which is supposed to filter out flawed projects and programmes before their defects become manifest to MPs, the media and public. Impressive government CIOs including Ian Watmore and John Suffolk have tried to prevent high-profile failures.
But still the roll-call of high-profile calamities drowns out the successes: the IT fiasco over SATs tests, delays of four years in the "Scope" system to help combat terrorism and other threats by linking intelligence services and providing interfaces with the MoD and government departments, the anger among junior doctors over the failed MTAS applications system, and some local implementations under the NHS’s £12.7bn National Programme for IT, which have seriously disrupted patient care and operations and appointments. These are just a few of New Labour’s IT embarrassments.
Why is its record on large projects so bad? The failures, we believe, have more to do with politics and culture than technical architectures and project management methodologies.
Building a bridge from the US to England may seem a good idea in theory but it's not practical. Yet ministers embarked on the technological equivalent with the NHS’s £12.7bn National Programme for IT because nobody they'd want to listen to told them it was fanciful.
One reason so many large public sector projects fail is that executives from some IT suppliers regularly propose to government unrealistic but ostensibly credible and beneficial solutions to problems civil servants did not know existed until suppliers explained what could be achieved with new technology.
The tenacity of some suppliers wears down civil servants. Indeed the centralising, self-aggrandising, and self-expanding instincts of bureaucracies play perfectly into the hands of some IT sales teams who have caught on to the "transformational" agendas of successive governments.
What's the solution? There's no real incentive to get it right. Senior Responsible Owners, ministers and permanent secretaries come and go. There have been countless civil service and ministerial leaders of the NHS’s IT scheme. Project committees are not accountable for their decisions.
One solution is for proper external scrutiny, including publication of internal audits of projects, and the publication of gateway reviews: the fear of getting it wrong, and being seen to get it wrong in real-time, would provide an incentive to get it right.
The National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee provide some important, objective scrutiny - but they've looked at only a fraction of the 100 or so mission-critical government projects, and usually the scrutiny is applied only years after the projects have started.
The NAO and PAC reports are deliberately de-personalised so there is no individual accountability. It’s not practical to solve the problem of a lack of individual accountability in government - it's part of the DNA of Whitehall. But you could force the bureaucracy to account for what it does and how it does it, though the routine publication of external audits.
The plethora of sound recommendations for fundamental change in the Poynter review has been the best thing that has happened to HM Revenue and Customs for many years - but it took the loss of two CDs with details of 25 million people on them.
Would that there were regular Poynter reports on the major projects and management of every government department and agency. Then perhaps we wouldn't see unrestrained, fanciful projects being launched, and so many schemes ending in failure.