Thursday January 5 2000
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Thursday January 5 2000 |
By Jill Sherman, Whitehall editor
Repeated failures of government computer systems have led to costly delays and unacceptable disruption to the public, a public spending watchdog says today.
A highly critical report from the all-party Public Accounts Committee lambasts the Government for a catalogue of computer failures in the past decade and calls for a complete overhaul of information technology projects.
It accuses Whitehall of failing to respond to criticism in its individual reports and calls for more co-ordination between departments to avoid further disasters.
Many of the new systems involved joint projects with the private sector, but many contracts did not impose high-enough penalties for failure, the report says.
Two of the worst examples are the fiasco at the Passport Agency last summer when hundreds of people had to queue for their passposts, and the debacle over the National Insurance Recording System when thousands of pensioners lost out on benefit payments.
Last year the Government spent about #7billion on IT systems, mainly in defence, health and education, but implementing these has caused headaches.
David Davis, chairman of the committee, said: "Basic errors are repeated time and time again but lessons do not seemed to have been learnt. It is imperative that the Government acts quickly to improve its record on the management of IT projects. Such projects are often delivered late or not at all; they come in over budget or fail to work as intended."
The consequence of such poor performance was that the citizen lost out, he said.
The report outlines 25 cases from the 1990s where it says that IT systems have resulted in "delay, confusion and inconvenience to the citizen, and in many cases poor value to the taxpayer". It argues that departments should not take on projects that are too ambitious and should ensure that they are phased in to cause minimal disruption. The Child Support Agency reforms have now been delayed for two years so that the department can set up a computer system to manage the new payments.
Skilled project managers should be brought in to ensure that systems were delivered on time and to budget, and senior managers should be heavily committed, it says. More projects should be centralised, particularly if the project crosses several departments. In this case a "senior level board should be formed for the project to champion it and drive it through". It also calls for much more scrutiny of external contracts to ensure that they are properly negotiated: "With large sums of public money at stake, any lack of clarity or debatable interpretation in a contract can lead to expensive misunderstandings that might have to be resolved in the courts". Staff should also be trained in setting up the computer systems, using them and maintaining them. Departments should also have contingency plans to ensure that adequate services are maintained in the event of a computer failure.
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