Thursday January 6 2000
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Thursday January 6 2000 |
The millennium bug may not have yet caused chaos but the bureaucracy bug, it seems, has already hobbled much of the government's information technology. Unlike computer systems which can be re-programmed, this problem, caused by managerial incompetence in the public sector, will be far more difficult to overcome. According to a report published yesterday by the House of Commons' Public Accounts Select Committee, during the 1990s the implementation of more than 25 public sector IT systems resulted in "delay, confusion, and inconvenience to the citizen" and "poor value for money". Ministers might claim the credit for avoiding a computer catastrophe at midnight on New Year's Eve, but hi-tech chaos is commonplace beneath their noses.
The most widely-reported IT fiasco was the "operational problems" which beset the Passport Agency's new computer system last summer, resulting in a large backlog of passport applications. Yet the report shows that this was not an isolated incident. For example, delays in implementing a new National Insurance Recording System, which maintains more than 65 million national insurance accounts, meant that an estimated 170,000 pensioners may have underpaid in respect of their Serps by up to #100 a week. A new IT system for the Ministry of Defence, which cost more than #40 million, was obsolete a year after its completion and never used. If a new Benefit Agency computer system, designed to combat fraud, had been implemented on time, the Government might have saved some #190 million in welfare payments.
Ministers yesterday tried to blame the previous government for this litany of incompetence: and 23 of the 26 projects mentioned by the Public Accounts Committee were agreed before the last general election. But such political point-scoring ignores the lessons contained in the report. Civil servants, not their political masters, had been charged with the procurement and implementation of these projects. On many occasions, they appear not to have been up to the job.
Regarded as "technical issues", the report found that Whitehall's "senior management" lacked the skills needed to manage complex IT projects. Departments paid outside-contractors for overly ambitious schemes, which were often embarked upon in too tight a timescale, without any contingency plan in case of failure. Worse, confusion over what a new system should deliver meant that its specifications were sometimes changed in mid-development. The committee found that basic errors were "repeated time and again but lessons do not seem to have been learnt".
Such problems are more than just costly technical hitches which the on-going Cabinet Office investigation into IT might iron out. New Labour claims to be surfing the waves of the digital revolution. By 2002, ministers want a quarter of the public's dealings with government to be achievable by electronic means. Seven billion pounds was spent on public sector IT in 1998-99 alone. If this e-farce is allowed to continue, taxpayers might soon be demanding a refund. The Prime Minister has made the modernisation of the Civil Service his personal crusade. This is where he must log-on, and stay on.
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