Category Archives: excessive secrecy

Number of successful Universal Credit claims remains low – will IT be properly tested?

Posted on 19/02/2015 | 4 comments

By Tony Collins

Figures published yesterday on gov.uk show that the number of successful Universal Credit claims remains low.

It means the IT that is being designed to handle millions of claims has had only a relatively small number of actual claims to test it. The small number is because eligibility to claim is being kept narrow. Most successful claimants are single people with no children, are not on other benefits, and have straightforward claims.

Yesterday’s figures show that 35,620 of the people who have made a claim have, up to 8th January 2015, attended an initial interview and gone on to start Universal Credit.

This compares with 30,850 the previous month.

The figures were collected at a time Universal Credit was available within 96 Jobcentre Plus offices – about one in eight.

Universal Credit was rolled out to the whole of the North West of England on 15th December 2014. It is being rolled out to all Jobcentre Plus offices and local authorities across the country from 16th February 2015.

Robust?

The signs are that the IT being used to roll out Universal Credit is not as robust as claimed by the DWP.

One claimant who featured in a Government film about Universal Credit said later it is riddled with computer problems. In the DWP film, Daniel Pacey said Universal Credit helped him find work and was far better than jobseeker’s allowance.

Now Pacey, aged 24,  says his jobcentre struggled with failing computer systems, according to BBC Inside Out North West. A DWP spokesman told the BBC:

“The IT system adapts smoothly to claims as they become more complex, which we have already seen across the North West.

“Computer problems in offices are separate issues and are resolved quickly but these do not impact the operating system, or have an impact on claims.”

Comment

The DWP is right to be going slowly and cautiously with the Universal Credit roll out, especially as the IT seems to be less than robust.

What’s less understandable is that the DWP and IDS have trumpeted this week the start of a national roll out of Universal Credit – including more complex cases – as if this will prove that the system works.

How can anyone know whether the system works when so few people are being allowed to claim?

The DWP is refusing to publish its internal reports on the progress or otherwise of the Universal Credit IT programme.

Can IDS really expect his announcements on Universal Credit’s success to be credible when his department is keeping one side of the story hidden from public view?

Universal Credit’s latest statistics – gov.uk

Beyond the Universal Credit headlines: what IDS isn’t saying

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Posted in Accenture, BT, Campaign4Change, DWP, excessive secrecy, Government IT, HP, IBM, Major Projects Authority, Universal Credit

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Raytheon/Home Office IT dispute rolls on

Posted on 18/02/2015 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Another big, old government IT contract goes wrong. It’s part of civil service tradition that officials blame the supplier for missing milestones and not delivering what the end-users needed or wanted; and the supplier blames the customer for causing or contributing to the alleged defaults.

The Raytheon Systems/Home Office eBorders legal dispute is going along these lines – as did the Department of Health’s dispute with CSC over parts of the failed National Programme for IT [NPfIT].

It’s tradition for the civil service not to take big IT suppliers to court: a hearing could mean that civil servants have to talk about government business in an open courtroom.

Senior Whitehall officials do not want the public knowing how departments are really managed, or not managed.

In 2002 a 44-day court case between National Air Traffic Services and EDS [now HP] ended suddenly – minutes before a senior civil servant was due to give evidence.

Arbitration is different. It’s in secret so a long dispute can be tolerated.

And so a Home Office mega-contract awarded to US company Raytheon in 2007 has ended up in arbitration and is set for a sequence of hearings and appeals that could last years.

It took 10 years for an IT dispute between HP and BSkyB to be settled, and it could take this long for Raytheon and the Home Office to settle their dispute.

Chronology 

In 2003 Tony Blair launches the eBorders programme. He wants a database of foreign travellers entering and leaving Britain to help fight the war on terror.

A year later the Home Office launches Project Semaphore with IBM to pilot an electronic borders system.

In 2007 Jacqui Smith, Labour’s home secretary, signs an eBorders contract with Raytheon Systems as lead supplier and Serco, Detica, QinetiQ and Accenture as subcontractors. It’s worth £750m. Within two years Home Office officials are expressing concern that milestones are being missed.

In 2010 a new coalition government that’s determined not to put up with big, underperforming IT deals, terminates the Raytheon contract after a recommendation by the Major Projects Authority and a coalition review group.

In 2011 it emerges that Raytheon is threatening to sue the Home Office for £500m for repudiating the contract. Raytheon blames project delays on UK Border Agency mismanagement. It’s far from clear that officials knew what they wanted from the systems.  Arbitration proceedings begin.

In 2013 it emerges that IBM, Fujitsu and Serco are carrying out some of the original eBorders work.

Home Office loses arbitration

Last year an arbitration tribunal ruled that the Home Office must pay £224m to Raytheon. It found that the decision to terminate Raytheon’s contract was unlawful on a number of grounds. The Home Office had not fully considered the extent to which the Home Office and the UK Border Agency had caused or contributed to the alleged defaults.

Home Office wins appeal

Now the Home Office has won an appeal against the arbitration tribunal’s ruling. A good account of the appeal judgment is on the Pinsent Masons website. Pinsent Masons was acting for the Home Office.  The appeal judge found that the arbitration award had been tainted by legal irregularities that could have caused a substantial injustice. The judge took the unprecedented step of setting aside the arbitration award and ordered that the dispute be resolved by a new tribunal.

Raytheon appeal

Raytheon has announced that it is appealing. It points out that the arbitration had 42 days of oral hearings with testimony from multiple witnesses, and had issued a 276 page award decision. Raytheon says it is determined to recover the sums it is due because of the “wrongful” termination of the contract.

Comment:

It’s five years since Raytheon’s contract was cancelled. It could easily be another five years before all the rulings and appeals are finally over.

It’s easy in hindsight to say, but would it have been better if the Home Office and coalition ministers had spent longer negotiating with Raytheon rather than doing the macho thing of cancelling the contract?

Pinsent Masons – latest ruling

Raytheon contests Home Office’s High Court verdict over e-Borders
 

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Posted in Accenture, Campaign4Change, Department of Health, excessive secrecy, Fujitsu, Government IT, Home Office, IBM, IT-related failures, legal disputes, Major Projects Authority, Qinetic, Raytheon, Serco

A great speech in praise of the Public Accounts Committee

Posted on 13/02/2015 | 6 comments

By Tony Collins

Margaret Hodge spoke incisively this week about her five years as chairman of the 160 year-old Public Accounts Committee.

It’s assumed that civil servants answer to ministers who are then accountable to Parliament when things go wrong. Hodge mentioned failed IT projects several times.

But she painted a picture of senior officialdom as a force independent and sometimes opposed to Parliament. She said some senior officials had a “fundamental lack of respect for Parliament”. She had come up against an opposition that was “akin to a freemasonry”.

She said:

“With accountability comes responsibility. I can’t think how often we ask whether those responsible for dreadfully poor implementation are held to account for their failures.

“It rarely happens. People rarely lose their job. Those responsible for monumental failures all too often show up again in another lucrative job paid for by the taxpayer…”

Some excerpts from Hodge’s “Speaker’s Lecture” are worth quoting at length …

“… I have been truly shocked by the extent of the waste we have encountered. This is not a party political point. It’s not that this Conservative- Lib-Dem Coalition is worse or better than the previous Labour Government.

“It’s not that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector.

“It’s not about questioning the dedication of hundreds of thousands of public sector workers wanting to do their best… for me personally, sitting on the left of the political spectrum, I passionately believe in the power of public spending and public services to transform and equalise life chances.

“Yet if I am to ask other people to give up their money so that we can use it to secure greater equality, then I must earn their trust that I will use that money well.

“From £700m which I believe is likely to be written off with the botched attempt to introduce a politically uncontroversial benefit change with Universal Credit, to £1.6bn extra cost incurred by the previous Government in signing the contract for the Aircraft Carriers without any money in the Defence budget and then delaying its implementation; from the failure of successive Governments to tackle the many billions lost through fraud and error or IT investment, to the inability of successive Governments to deport foreign nationals who have committed crimes and ended up in our prisons, the failures are too many, they occur too often and they occur with persistent and unbroken regularity.”

Media shuns “good news” stories

“Of course we do things well. I think of recent positive reports on the Troubled Families programme, the Prison buildings programme or the implementation of the Crossrail contract. And trying to get proper recognition of these successes is well-nigh impossible. …

“I remember being rung up by a researcher on the Today programme who wanted me to go on to speak about education for 16-18 year olds. She asked what I would be minded to say and I told her that it was a good report and I would be complimentary. ‘I thought you would be critical’ she responded. No it’s a positive report I replied. Well, she said, I’d better go away and read it, She  rang me half an hour later to tell me they had dropped the item from the programme.

“But despite acknowledging the good things that are done, I remain frustrated and angry at so much wasted expenditure and poor value for money.”

Grandstanding

“… If we do want to ensure public attention is drawn to something, it may involve the occasional bit of grandstanding. I don’t apologise for that, for I have very few tools available which I can use to get purchase and have an impact.

“If a bit of grandstanding is the only way to stop something happening again and again, we will use it – with big corporations, top civil servants and any establishment figure whom we believe has a case to answer…”

PAC versus a civil service freemasonry?

“I received a letter from the departing Cabinet Secretary which was widely circulated around Whitehall and to officials of the House accusing the Committee of treating officials unfairly and reminding me that civil servants are bound by duties of honesty and integrity and therefore should only be asked to give evidence on oath as ‘an extremely unusual step’.

“Then a researcher from the Institute of Government came to see me, armed with a report of interviews she had undertaken with senior civil servants. She was just the messenger, but her message from senior civil servants was blunt. I quote:

‘The NAO/PAC are modeled on the red guards – not a convincing grown up model of Government… the chair is an abysmal failure… the worst chair I have ever seen….. MH is informed by friends in the media… PAC profile is seen to be bashing senior officials and determined to get media soundbites.’ ‘It is under appreciated how important dull committees are.’

And then the final shot…  ‘Should the PAC be broken up?’

“Basically, the explicit threat relayed to me was that if we did not change how we held civil servants to account, we would be closed down. Shut up or we’ll shut you down.

“The story sounds like something from Yes Minister, but more seriously demonstrates a fundamental lack of respect for Parliament that I find deeply worrying.

‘How dare you MPs touch us’ was what they were saying. It felt like we were up against something akin to a freemasonry.

“Now that was January 2012 and things have moved on… but have they?

Civil servants unaccountable?

“The sad truth is that in that struggle between civil servants and politicians, the civil servants are most likely to win, because whereas we are here today and gone tomorrow, they are there for the long term.

“There remains a deep reluctance among too many senior civil servants to be accountable to Parliament and through us, to the public. The senior civil servants hide behind the traditional convention that civil servants are accountable to ministers who in turn are accountable to Parliament.

“That principle worked when it was first invented by Haldane after the First World War and the Home Secretary worked with just 28 civil servants in the Home Office. Today there are over 26,000.

“It worked when the public did not demand transparency. Today they do.

“It worked when public spending was primarily funneled through large departments running large contracts. In today’s world with a plethora of autonomous health trusts and academy schools, in a world where  private providers are providing public services in a range of fragmented contracts, delivering everything from welfare to work, healthcare and now probation services, in today’s world the old accountability framework with the minister being responsible for everything is plainly a nonsense.

“And whilst we, of course, want to maintain an impartial civil service, that is not inconsistent with the need to modernize accountability to Parliament and the public.

“There is a fundamental problem at the heart of the traditional accountability system. How can civil servants be accountable to ministers if the ministers do not have the power to hire and fire them?

“It is the accountability framework that is broke and in need of reform – not the Public Accounts Committee…

Need for reform

“The promise to reform the Civil Service has produced a few welcome changes, like a Major Projects Academy to train people to manage big projects, but the change has been too little, too piecemeal and too marginal, not fundamental.

“We just need to build different skills and do it, not talk about it.

“We may need to pay more so that working in and staying in the public sector becomes a more attractive proposition for more talented people. Trumpeting success in keeping public sector salaries down is not sensible if you end up wasting money or hiring in expensive consultants to clear up the mess or do the work for you.

“We need to transform the way people get promoted. At the moment, you’re a success if you leave your post after two years in the job and move on.

“When I was Children’s Minister, after two years I had a better institutional memory than any of the civil servants with whom I was working.

“And when the PAC reviewed the Fire Control Programme, which aimed at reducing costs by rationalising how 999 calls were dealt with, but ended up costing nearly £1/2 bn when it was written off as a failure; we found that there had been 10 different responsible officers in charge of the project over a five year period.

“I know some projects take longer than the Second World War, but continuity of responsibility is critical to securing better value.

Centre of government “not fit for purpose”

“It is also clear to me that the way the centre of Government works is not fit for purpose. We have three departments Treasury, Cabinet Office and Number 10 all competing for power, rather than working together.

“And all of them seem to be completely unable to use their power to drive better value.  Treasury carves up the money and then does little to ensure it is spent wisely.

“They only worry whether the departments keep within their totals. This is not a proper modern finance function at the heart of Government that you would see in any other complex organisation.

“So, for instance we all know that early action saves money, be it in health, education, welfare spending or the criminal justice system. Treasury knows this too, but they are doing nothing to force a change in the way money is spent.”

Lessons unlearnt

“There is little learning across Government. The mistakes in the early PFI contracts are being repeated in the energy contracts negotiated by DECC [Department of Energy and Climate Change]…

“Nobody at the centre seems to think through the impact of decisions in one area on another. So of course cuts in local authority spending, where nearly 40% of their money goes on community care services, will impact on hospitals and bed blocking.”

“Too much thinking is short-term.  PFI, to which the current Government is as wedded as past governments, is building up a huge bill for future generations; assets worth £30bn today will cost £151bn over time. And using PFI locks us into ways of delivering services which quickly become outdated – like large district hospitals when we now want to care for people outside hospitals in the community.”

Price of fish 

“None of this is rocket science. So why doesn’t change happen? Why is there such resistance? Radically transforming the culture must be at the heart of securing better value.

“If the machinery of Government is so resistant, we need to take that challenge outside party politics. Only by working together across parties and over time will we be able to secure the culture, capability and organisation that we all need to deliver on our different political priorities.

“When I first took this job I read the IPPR study which said that whilst officials dreaded their appearance before the Public Accounts Committee, they were confident that it would never ‘change the price of fish’.

“I am determined to change the price of fish.

That is why we have instituted new ways. We now have regular recall sessions, calling back people to tell us why they haven’t accepted our recommendations, or why they haven’t implemented them. We bring back people after they have moved jobs to hold them to account for what they did in post.

“That caused a minor revolution when we first did it. I wanted Helen Gosch, who had moved from DEFRA to the Home Office to come back and account for the mess she had made administering the rural payments agency, paying farmers late, paying them the wrong amounts and having to send money back to Brussels because of the errors. She refused our invitation and only caved in when I ordered her to appear.”

More protection for whistleblowers please

“We try to use our analysis of past expenditure to improve spending in the future; understanding problems with past rail investment can help improve the delivery of future projects. We take regular evidence on the big change programmes, like Universal Credit or the Probation service.

“And I take seriously the material I get from whistleblowers. My time on the PAC has strengthened my respect for whistleblowers. Without them, we would have been less effective on tax avoidance and on the performance of private companies receiving taxpayer’s money to deliver public services.

“A major regret for me is that I was unable to prevent the treatment meted out to Osita Mba by HMRC. He was the official who sent us the documents on the Goldman Sachs affair. The department used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, designed to get terrorists, to get into not just his emails and phone calls, but into his wife’s phone records. In the end he couldn’t stand it any more and quit HMRC. We clearly need to do more to protect whistleblowers.”

Investigative journalism

“I am also probably one of very few MPs who has a good word to say about journalists. From  eye Eye to the Times and from the Guardian to Reuters, their fantastic investigative work (when they do it properly) has helped us uncover abuse, malpractice and waste in a way we just couldn’t have done without them.

“For despite the excellent work produced by the National Audit Office, they are constitutionally separate from and different to the Parliamentary Committee. So we need our independent sources of help.”

My goal

“Unlike our American counterparts, who have 120 staff working to their committee, 80 working for the majority party and 40 for the minority party, we have a small committee staff who focus purely on process.

“If select committees are to increase their effectiveness they need to be better resourced. It’s partly about people, although I would hate to mirror our American colleagues because their system is very much more partisan.

“But it is also absurd that when we wanted to hold an international conference on tax avoidance we were told we had no money. It is just plain wrong that when we wanted to test whether a parliamentary committee should have access to company tax files to hold HMRC properly to account, we were unable to fund legal advice to support our case that HMRC should be accountable to us.

“Both the NAO and HMRC paid for expensive legal advice to oppose us. We had no money to secure our own advice.

“Select committees should have clear statutory powers to call for all papers and people to help them hold the Executive to account. We still don’t know whether Vodafone should have paid £6bn or £2bn with an interest free staging of the payments when they settled their tax bill with the Revenue. We should know and you should too…

“Reflecting on what I have said may leave you thinking everything is wrong. I know that there are many brilliant public sector workers and many stunning public services.

“Inevitably our work focuses on the problems and the challenges. But I come at it with a determination to seek and secure improvements. Because I care about public service and because I passionately believe in the power of public services to transform people’s life chances and to create greater equality in our society. That is my goal.”

Comment

One of the striking things about the PAC is the way it leaves crude tribal party politics at the door. That’s one of the reasons it’s quietly disliked by some senior officials: they cannot condemn the committee’s partisanship. It produces 60 unanimous reports a year. But do they make any difference?

One irony is that senior officials cite the PAC as a key Parliamentary device holding them to account. They lasso and rope in the PAC for their own purpose.

The work of the PAC in holding the civil service to account is cited by lawyers for the Department for Work and Pensions in repeatedly refusing to release four old Universal Credit documents.

In reality the PAC does not make much difference to the way Whitehall departments are run. But waste would probably be much greater if it didn’t exist.

What’s not in doubt is that Hodge is a great chairman of the PAC. If anyone can change the price of fish she will.

Governup

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Posted in Campaign4Change, change, cost reduction, DWP, excessive secrecy, Firecontrol, FOI, Freedom of Information, Government IT, HMRC, Institute for Government, IT projects, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, National Audit Office, openness and transparency, oversight, project management, public sector, public services, Universal Credit

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Post Office Horizon IT – Commons hearing today

Posted on 03/02/2015 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Paula Vennells, Chief Executive of the Post Office, is due to answer MPs’ questions today on whether the PO’s Horizon system was partly responsible for ruining the lives of dozens of subpostmasters.

A hearing of the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee will give MPs a chance to question Vennells directly rather than through a minister, as before.

At issue  is the irreconcilable. On one side are PO officials who say the Horizon system has no systemic problems and has not been proven to have caused shortfalls in accounts that led to subpostmasters being accused of theft, fraud or false accounting.

Years after the discrepancies occurred it may be impossible to prove the existence – or absence – of any faults in the system at the time.

On the other side are more than 150 subpostmasters who are represented by Alan Bates, Chairman, Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance. They cannot prove that shortfalls shown on the Horizon system were not their fault.

In the middle are forensic accountants Second Sight who were called in by the Post Office to investigate possible miscarriages of justice. After Second Sight raised questions about Horizon’s possible fallibility, the PO criticised Second Sight’s findings.

A complicating factor is confidentiality. Under pressure from MPs, the PO set up a mediation scheme to adjudicate on individual cases. Several times the PO has invoked the need for confidentiality as a reason for not discussing reasons for the mediation scheme’s slow progress. The scheme was set up in August 2013 and is ongoing.

It’s unclear why there is a need for confidentiality given that subpostmasters have been willing to discuss their cases and prosecutions are in the public domain.

Labour MP Kevan Jones has called the ruin of many subpostmaster lives a national scandal. He told the House of Commons in December 2014:

“That more than 150 individual sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses, who have worked tirelessly in their local communities, for decades in some cases, have suddenly all worked out that they can defraud the system is complete and utter nonsense.”

Witnesses at today’s hearing of the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee are:

– Andy Furey, Assistant General Secretary, Communication Workers Union

– George Thomson, General Secretary, National Federation of SubPostmasters

– Alan Bates, Chairman, Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance

– Kay Linnell, Chartered Accountant, Kay Linnell & Co

– Paula Vennells, Chief Executive, Post Office Ltd

– Angela van den Bogerd, Head of Partnerships, Post Office Ltd

– Ian Henderson, forensic computing expert, Advances Forensics (Second Sight Ltd)

A Parliamentary campaign  for justice for the postmasters has been led by MP James Arbuthnot. Referring to today’s hearing, Arbuthnot told Computer Weekly that at a select committee hearing people cannot avoid answering questions because the MPs will keep returning to the question until they are satisfied.

Comment

Nobody outside the Post Office believes the subpostmasters were guilty of taking money.  But the subpostmasters are in no position to prove they didn’t.

It’s a seemingly irreconcilable situation, especially as the righting of miscarriages of justice will require “give” –  possibly even compassion and humility – on the part of PO officials.

Update:

Regarding Kevan Jones’s comment, the Post Office has pointed out that a minority of cases in the Mediation Scheme involve criminal convictions, not 150. There were 150 applications to the Scheme and some of these have been resolved.

Private Eye on the Horizon controversy

Jailed and bankrupt because of “unfit” IT systems? What now?

Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance

 

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Posted in Campaign4Change, excessive secrecy, Fujitsu, Post Office IT

Post Office “tries to sabotage” mediation scheme it set up after IT complaints?

Posted on 10/12/2014 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

BBC R4’s Today programme broadcast interviews yesterday with campaigning Conservative MP James Arbuthnot (who is standing down at the next election) and Mark Davies, Communications Director at the Post Office.

At issue is whether the Post Office wants genuinely to establish the facts after complaints by more than 150 subpostmasters that they have been unfairly treated – in some cases jailed, made bankrupt or forced to remortgage their homes – because the PO’s Horizon IT system wrongly showed cash shortfalls.

The Post Office contends that there’s no evidence the systems were faulty in the cases in question.  But, as I am quoted in today’s Financial Times as saying,

“It’s going to be very hard to detect what went wrong. The Post Office is behaving as if its system was virtually infallible when, in fact, no system is, especially when there are many different network interactions involved.”

Last year the Post Office set up a mediation scheme, in part to respond to 144 MPs who’ve had representations from former subpostmasters about the Horizon system.

But the MPs announced yesterday that they have lost faith in the mediation scheme.

Arbuthnot, who leads the group, said in a press release, “The [mediation] scheme was set up to help our constituents seek redress and to maintain the Post Office’s good reputation. It is doing neither.

“It has ended up mired in legal wrangling, with the Post Office objecting to most of the cases even going into the mediation that the scheme was designed to provide.  I can no longer give it my support. I shall now be pursuing justice for SubPostmasters in other ways.”

Andrew Bridgen MP said:

“MPs have been working with the Post Office for two years now in the belief that they would work towards a solution to this issue. It would appear that this belief is increasingly looking misplaced.”

Mike Wood MP said:

“Either the Post Office is awash with criminals who open Sub Post Offices for personal gain or something has gone terribly wrong. MPs are inclined to believe the latter and we are all shocked that the Post Office seems not to want to get to the bottom of all this.”

Kevan Jones MP who will lead the Parliamentary campaign for justice for subpostmasters when Arbuthnot stands down at the election, said: “My constituent has lost everything – his livelihood, his house, his good name, and he is not the only person who faced ruin.”

Huw Irranca-Davies MP said: “The mediation process has failed even those sub-postmasters who were originally included. But there are also many who fell outside the scheme, and have had no chance to be heard. They all deserve fair play, they all deserve justice, so the fight goes on.”

The big unanswered question is whether the Post Office is deliberately hampering mediation because the scheme, as it turns out, is not going in its favour.

The Post Office hired forensic accounts Second Sight to investigate the Horizon system. It found that the system was not fit for purpose in some branches. The Post Office has said the leak of that Second Sight report was “regrettable” and it has not released it.

Yesterday on the Today programme (approx 0735) Arbuthnot told presenter John Humphrys:

“At considerable public expense the Post Office set up a medication scheme but sadly they are now trying to sabotage that very mediation scheme they set up. They are doing it in secret. It’s an extraordinary story.

“They are trying to bar from mediation 90% of subpostmasters for whom it was set up. They are arguing that those like Jo Hamilton, who pleaded guilty to false accounting, shouldn’t have the mediation scheme available to them, despite having agreed expressly with MPs that those who had pleaded guilty to false accounting should have it available to them. They are doing it in secret, and they are doing it at a stage when there is no legal representation available to these subpostmasters…  I am afraid I have no confidence that the Post Office is trying to clear it up.

Humphrys:  What they say is that they  pay for people to get independent advice; they have advertised for people to come forward with their stories; they have investigated the cases; they have done everything that could be reasonably requested of them.

Arbuthnot: “They talk about this legal advice but then they try to prevent the subpostmasters from going into the mediation scheme at a stage of the process when the subpostmaster is not represented.

“You won’t get any of the [Post Office’s] legal advisers coming onto this programme because the Post Office has bound them to secrecy.  You won’t get Second Sight, the independent investigators, coming onto this programme, because the PO has bound them to secrecy.”

Humphrys:  They have a relationship  with their clients and therefore they are inevitably bound to secrecy?

Arbuthnot: “Yes. There was a concern at the beginning of this that Second Sight, the independent forensic accountants whom the Post Office chose and are paying for, did have a relationship with the Post Office. That worried MPs about whether they would have the independence required, but they have had.

“Now that they have shown that independence the Post Office is doing its utmost to pooh-pooh the recommendations that Second Sight  is putting forward. It is trying to override those recommendations, possibly because of that very independence.

Humphrys:  The investigation isn’t over. That may change.

Arbuthnot: “That is my hope.  But since this investigation and mediation scheme which is in the hands largely of the Post Office is paid for by the Post Office, for myself I have lost faith in the Post Office’s determination to see this through to a proper end.”

Humphrys turned to Mark Davies, the Post Office’s Director of Communications. It is a very serious charge: that you sabotaged this scheme?

Davies: “It is an extremely serious charge John, and clearly we reject it outright. It is very regrettable, some of the things Mr Arbuthnot has said.”

What did he say that was wrong?

“To go back to the original setting up of this inquiry, we the Post Office take our responsibilities extremely seriously.”

What did he say that was wrong?

“If I could just finish the point. It is really, really important to set this out. The Horizon system that Mr Arbuthnot refers to is used  every single day by about 80,000 people. In the course of the last decade half a million people have used that system, without any problems, face to face with customers,  across the 11,500 branches in the Post Office network.

“That said, a very small number of people came to us  through their MP with some questions, some issues. They said they had problems with the system. That amounts to 0.03% of those people who have dealt with the Horizon system.”

It’s still 150 people …Each individual with their own life being ruined. Now what was it that Mr Arbuthnot said  about your handling of this scheme that is wrong?

“What is wrong is that the scheme, first and foremost, hasn’t finished yet, John.  Two and half years ago we set up a review into the Horizon system. That review has found no evidence at all of any systemic problems with the Horizon system.”

That was your own review?

“It was with independent forensic accountants John. We set up the complaints mediation scheme for those 150 people who came forward. Look – we advertised for people to come forward.  We went to our people across the Post Office network and said, if you feel you have been treated unfairly please come and talk to us about that. If we weren’t taking this seriously we would not have done that.

But you heard the story of Jo Hamilton there. She has tried to do everything that she could … and she has got nowhere.

“You’ll forgive me John for not getting into an individual case.”

I understand that but nonetheless she is representative of many like her and they are in desperate trouble now. They have a case don’t they?

“I am really sorry if people have faced lifetime difficulties – lifestyle problems – as a result of their having been working in Post Office branches. It does not necessarily follow though that the Post Office is responsible for the issues people have had. I think our commitment to seeking to look at every single case is underlined …

But you have barred 90% of them?

“No. That’s not true. I don’t accept that figure at all.”

What is the figure?

“If the working group, which is chaired independently by a former High Court judge, is bound by confidentiality, the Post Office is bound –

So you can’t tell me how many have been barred? It might be 90%?

“I’m afraid I can’t John because the working group was set up with confidentiality in mind. We are bound by that.”

I am not asking you for the names of the people. I am asking you for the number of people who have been barred [from the mediation scheme].

And I cannot go into the details of …

So we’re entitled to accept what Mr Arbuthnot said which is that it is 90%?

“I don’t accept that at all. It is not 90%.”

Without being able to give me a figure, with the best will in the world, it is impossible for us to do anything other than accept the figure Mr Arbuthnot’s gives.

“We are being placed in an intolerable position at the Post Office because we are bound by a confidentiality agreement which was agreed with all parties including the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance.

“We are in an extremely difficult position. It’s not the case that 90% have been rejected. We are actually looking at every single case, on a case by case basis. We are absolutely committed to doing that… in some cases there is evidence whereby we have looked at what’s happened and we have held our hands up and said in some cases we could have done some things differently and we have reached agreement with some people. In other cases we have not reached that conclusion because we have to take it extremely seriously.

“We are a large retail organisation. We conduct audits in our branches, across 11,500 branches, every single day. Where there are cases of losses in those branches,  then clearly we have a duty to look at those, and you’d expect  us to do that on behalf of customers, on behalf of taxpayers.”

A very quick word Mr Arbuthnot?

Arbuthnot: “Mark Davies says it is a tiny proportion of transactions in the Post Office and yet one single miscarriage of justice ought to galvanise the nation. I have more than 140 MPs, some of them with more than one case. This is not a small problem.”

Davies: “If evidence emerges where there is evidence that a case should be looked at through the legal processes, absolutely the Post Office has a legal duty to take that forward and we will do so.”

Pleaded Guilty

Jo Hamilton, Arbuthnot’s constituent, used to run a sub-post office from her village shop in South Warnborough, Hampshire. She pleaded guilty to false accounting following a discrepancy of £2,000 in December 2003.

She told the BBC: “I rang the helpdesk and they told me to do various things and I did that and the amount I was down doubled.  I asked to speak to a supervisor.  Whatever we did, it would not go back to minus £2,000. The upshot  was they asked me to pay the money into the Post Office which I didn’t have.  Then they decided to take my wages to pay it back. …at the time they told me I was the only person who had had problems with Horizon. I did think I was the only person in the world who had had problems with it.  I hadn’t taken any money but I didn’t know what the hell was  going on…

“I had to remortgage the house and repay the money. Originally, I was charged with stealing. They said if I repaid and pleaded guilty to 14 counts of false accounting, they would drop the theft, so the decision was made – I’d be less likely to go to prison for false accounting than theft.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, excessive secrecy, Fujitsu, Government IT, Post Office IT

Universal Credit full business case “a long way from Treasury approval”

Posted on 26/11/2014 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

Yesterday in Parliament Iain Duncan Smith gave a statement on Universal Credit – then MPs asked him questions.  Conservative MP Nigel Mills asked IDS a straightforward question:

“Can the secretary of state confirm that the Treasury has now signed off the whole business case and laid to rest that fear that they were not going to do that?”

IDS gave a clear reply: “That is exactly what was being asked before the summer break and the answer is they have …”

But the UC programme has not received Treasury approval for the full business case, nor even the outline business case. Today’s National Audit Office report “Universal Credit: progress update” says that the UC programme received approval in September 2014 for the “strategic outline business case” only.

An NAO official says this is a “long way from Treasury approval” of the full business case.

Until the full business case is approved, UC has no formal funding beyond the current spending review. Meanwhile the Treasury has been funding UC in “small increments” according to the NAO.

The Department of Work and Pensions is due to produce the outline business case next summer, before the next government’s spending review.

The “outline” business case is supposed to set out how the programme is affordable and will be successfully delivered. It summarises the results so far and sets out the case for proceeding to a formal procurement phase.

The “full” business case documents the contractual arrangements,
confirms funding and affordability and sets out the detailed management
arrangements and plans for successful delivery and post evaluation.

The absence of approval for the outline or full business case underlines the uncertainties still in the UC programme. Indeed the latest NAO report says it’s too early to tell whether UC will prove value for money.

But the DWP has reduced risks by extending the roll-out. The programme is now not expected to be completed before 2020. The original completion date was 2017.

The DWP has a twin-track approach to the UC IT programme. It is paying its existing main IT suppliers to support the introduction of UC – the so-called “live” service – while an agile team develops a fully-automated “digital” service that is designed to do all that the “live” service cannot do without manual intervention.

The agile system has yet to be tested – but it has cost only about £8m compared with more than £90m spent on the “live service”.

Porkies?

Labour MP Glenda Jackson, who is a member of the Work and Pensions committee, suggested to IDS yesterday that his promises to MPs on Universal Credit’s roll-out have all been broken and that he has told the House of Commons “porky pies”.

IDS replied that his intention is to ensure that UC is rolled out in a safe and secure way.

Comment:

You’d never know from IDS’s replies to MPs yesterday that the Universal Credit programme doesn’t yet have either outline business case approval or full business case approval.

In other words, the Treasury has yet to be convinced the UC programme is feasible or affordable. It is paying for the programme in increments.

IDS told MPs the programme has business case approval. He did not make it  clear that the programme has the early-stage strategic outline business case approval.

His comments reinforce the need for the National Audit Office to scrutinise the Universal Credit programme. Left to the Department for Work and Pensions, the facts about the programme’s progress, problems and challenges would probably not emerge, not in the House of Commons at least.

Some MPs have said for years that Parliament is the last place to look for the truth.

IDS also said yesterday that the original deadline for completion of UC by 2017 was “artificial” – though he has quoted the 2017 date to MPs on several occasions.

Will UC succeed?

UC as an IT-based programme is not doing too badly, to judge from today’s NAO report.

Indeed it seems that the Department for Work and Pensions, when under intense scrutiny, can start to get things right.

Though existing systems from major suppliers look increasingly unlikely to be able to handle the predicted volumes without a large and expensive amount of manual intervention, the agile digital system, though delayed by 6 months, looks promising, at a fraction of the cost of the conventional “live” system.

Scrutiny

The NAO is scrutinising the programme. The DWP’s own auditors seem to be doing a good job. The Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority is making useful recommendations. And the programme has an independently-chaired board. [The NAO says the programme board has been hampered by limited information and suggests this is because the DWP gives the board “good news” statements rather than facts.]

All this scrutiny is powering the programme in the right direction, though the uncertainties remain massive. As Campaign4Change predicted, the programme will not be complete before 2020. But who cares, if it works well in the end and losses are minimised?

DWP officials are learning lessons – and UC could end up as a template for big government IT-enabled programmes  The twin-track approach of using existing suppliers to deliver support for major business changes that yield problems and lessons  that then feed into an entirely new agile-based system is not a cheap way to develop government IT –  but it may work.

What DWP officials have yet to learn is how to be open and truthful to Parliament, the media – and even its own programme board.

Universal Credit: progress update

Some highlights of today’s NAO report

NAO warns over costs of further Universal Credit digital delay

Universal Credit: watchdog warns of costs of further delays

Government may have to write off more than £200m invested in IT on Universal Credit

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Posted in Accenture, Agile, BT, Campaign4Change, Cloud, DWP, excessive secrecy, G-Cloud, Government digital Service, HMRC, HP, IBM, Legacy ICT, Major Projects Authority, National Audit Office, project management, public sector, public services, Real-Time Information, Universal Credit

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Universal Credit and its IT – an inside track?

Posted on 28/10/2014 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

An excellent BBC Radio 4 “Inside Welfare Reform” Analysis broadcast yesterday evening gave an insider’s view of the IT-based Universal Credit programme from its beginnings to today.

It depicted Iain Duncan Smith as a courageous reformer who’s kept faith with important welfare changes that all parties support. If they work, the reforms will benefit taxpayers and claimants. The broadcast concludes with an apparent endorsement of IDS’s very slow introduction of UC.

“When real lives and real money are at stake, being cautious is not the worst mistake you can make.”

So says the BBC R4 “Analysis” guest presenter Jonathan Portes who worked on welfare spending at the Treasury in the 1980s and became Chief Economist at the Department for Work and Pensions in 2002. He left the DWP in 2011 and is now director at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.

The BBC broadcast left me with the impression that UC would today be perceived as meeting expectations if DWP officials and ministers had, in the early days:

– been open and honest about the complexities of IT-related and business change

– outlined the potential problems of implementing UC as set out in internal reports and the minutes of programme team meetings

– explained the likelihood of the UC programme taking more time and money than initially envisaged

– urged the need for extreme caution

– made a decision at the outset to protect – at all costs – those most in genuine need of disability benefits

– not sold UC to a sceptical Treasury on the basis it would save billions in disability claims  – for today thousands of disability claimants are in genuine need of state help, some of whom are desperately sick, and are not receiving money because of delays.

Instead UC is perceived as a disaster, as set out in Channel 4’s Dispatches documentary last night.

A £500m write-off on IT?

Other noteworthy parts of the BBC R4 Analysis broadcast:

– The Department for Work and Pensions gave selective responses to the BBC’s questions. Portes: “We did ask the Department for Work and Pensions for an interview for this programme but neither Iain Duncan  Smith nor any minister was available. We sent a detailed list of questions and have had answers to some.”

– Margaret Hodge, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, gave her view that the next government will have to write off £500m on IT investment on Universal Credit – about £360m more than the Department for Work and Pensions has stated publicly.

Hodge told the BBC: “We are now on our fourth or official in charge of the project and the project has only been going four or five years. Anyone who knows about project management will tell you that consistency of leadership is vital. I don’t think there has been ownership of the project by a senior official within DWP.  I think they and ministers have only wanted to hear the good news. Management of the IT companies has been abysmal.

“I still believe, though I haven’t t got officials to admit to this, that after the general election we will probably be writing off in excess of half a billion  pounds on investment in IT that had failed to deliver… The investment in IT that they are presently saying they can re-use in other ways is not fit for purpose. The system simply cannot cope.”

The BBC asked the DWP for its comment on the scale of the write-offs. “No answer,” said Portes.

Parliament told the truth?

Stephen Brien, who has been dubbed the architect of Universal Credit, gave his first broadcast interview to Analysis. He worked with IDS at the Centre for Social Justice, a think tank set up by IDS in 2004. Brien saw IDS on a nearly daily basis.

Portes asked Brien when IDS first realised things were going off track. “The challenge became very stark in the summer of 2012,” said Brien.

Portes: What was your relationship with IDS?

“My office was across the corridor from his.  I would join him for all the senior meetings about the programme. I would keep him updated as a result of the other meetings I was addressing within the programme team. When it became materially obvious we had to change plans it was over that summer [2012].

Portes: But that was not the public line. In September 2012 this is what IDS said (in the House of Commons):

“We will deliver Universal Credit on time, as it is, on budget, right now.”

IDS appears to have given that assurance while being aware of the change to UC plans.

UC oversold to Treasury?

Portes: “The really big savings were supposed to come from disability benefit. And here trouble was brewing. The problem was the deal IDS had done with the Treasury. The Treasury never liked UC. It thought it was both risky and expensive. And the Treasury, faced with a huge budget deficit, wanted to save not spend.

“With pensions protected disability benefits were really the only place savings could be made.  The previous government had contracted ATOS to administer a new medical test – the Work Capability Assessment – to all 2.5 million people on Incapacity Benefit but only a few pilots had started.

“IDS and the Treasury agreed to press ahead.  Some claimants would be moved to new Employment and Support Allowance but the plan was that several hundred thousand would lose the benefit entirely – saving about £3bn a year.

“Disability living allowance which helps with the extra cost of disability would also be replaced with the new, saving another £2bn…

But …

“By now the new work capability assessment was supposed to have got more than 500,000 people off incapacity benefits. Instead they are stuck in limbo waiting for an assessment.

“By now the new Personal Independence Payment should have replaced disability living allowance saving billions of pounds more. Instead it too has been dogged by delay.

“Just a few days ago the Office for Budget Responsibility said delays in these benefits are costing taxpayers close to £5bn a year. This dwarfs any savings made elsewhere and leaves a potential black hole in the next government budget.”

How many people left stuck in the system?

The BBC asked the Department of Work and Pensions’ press office how many claimants, and for how long, they have been waiting for claims to be resolved. Portes: “They didn’t answer. But their own published statistics suggest it is at least half a million.

“One aim of the reforms was to cut incapacity benefit and the numbers had been on a long slow decline between 2003 and 2012 but now it is rising again. So much for the Treasury saving.”

Who is at fault?

Publicly IDS talks about a lack of professionalism among civil servants and that he has lost faith with their ability to manage the UC-related problems. Rumours in the corridors of Westminster are that behind the scenes IDS has attempted to blame his permanent secretary Robert Devereux.  On this point, again, the DWP refused the BBC’s request for a comment.

Gus O’Donnell, former head of the civil service, who appointed Devereux, told the BBC that tensions between IDS and Francis Maude at the Cabinet Office did not help. “Robert [Devereux] was in a very difficult position. He was in a world where Francis Maude was trying to deliver, efficiently, programmes for government and on the other hand IDS was seeing the centre as interfering and criticising whereas he knew best: it was his project; he was living it every day. There was a lot of tension there. Really what we need to do is get everyone sitting round a table trying to work out how we can deliver outcomes that matter.”

Was Devereux set up to fail?

O’Donnell: “With hindsight one can say this is a project that could not be delivered to time and cost.”

Were DWP officials to blame?

Stephen Brien said: “There was a real desire from the very beginning to get this done. I think there was a desire within DWP to demonstrate that it could again do big programmes. The DWP had not been involved in very large transformation programmes over the previous decade. There was a great enthusiasm to get back in the saddle,  a sense that it [UC] had to get underway and it had to be well entrenched through Parliament.

“These forces – each of them – contributed to a sense of ‘we have got to get this done and therefore we will get this done.’”

Too ambitious?

Richard Bacon, a member of the Public Accounts Committee, told the BBC: “If you know what it is you want to do and you understand what is required to get there, then what’s wrong with being ambitious?

“The trouble is that when you get into the detail you find you are bruising people, damaging people, people who genuinely will always need our help. Taxpayers, our constituents, expect us to implement things so that they work, rather than see project after project go wrong and money squandered.

“There may come a point where we say: ‘we have spent so much money on this and achieved so little, is the game worth the candle?’”

Thank you to Dave Orr for drawing my attention to the Dispatches documentary. 

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Posted in Accenture, Agile, Atos, BT, Campaign4Change, change, change management, DWP, excessive secrecy, HP, IBM, outsourcing, public sector, public services, Universal Credit

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Universal Credit’s “multiple frustrations and complications”

Posted on 08/10/2014 | 8 comments

By Tony Collins

universal creditJournalists who are trying to find out the current state of the Universal Credit programme will get little help from the Department for Work and Pensions unless its press officers sense that the eventual outcome will be positive.

Sometimes journalists call me as part of their research. They want to know whether UC will end up as another government IT disaster. I had such a call yesterday.

The conversation focused on IT. But it’s a maxim in the industry that major change programmes in the public sector usually fail or are delayed for managerial rather than technical reasons.

The introduction of a new passport system failed when a better, more secure system slowed down the issuing of new passport applications.

Instead of halting the roll-out to see how to speed up the issuing of passports – by changing procedures or spending more on staff and equipment – the Home Office continued the rollout and chaos ensured. That wasn’t the fault of the IT.

It may be a similar story with Universal Credit. Even if the IT as far as it goes works well, claims handling is a laborious process,  The main systems do not handle calculations of gross income, net income or back-office integration, all of which are managed manually.

Chaos is unlikely because the rollout is going so slowly.  But the amount of manual intervention required means the slow rollout is enforced rather than merely voluntary.

[This slow rollout is despite an IT budget for UC including migration costs from 2010 to 2014/15 of £812m as at December 2012. Within this budget, £303m had been spent to March 2013, mostly with the DWP’s main IT suppliers Accenture, IBM, HP and BT.]

The programme is also running into non-IT difficulties such as delays in issuing first-time payments to claimants because of a variety of reasons around the complexity of new procedures, and tenants unable to pay rent because the money hasn’t gone directly to landlords.

If UC goes nationwide, as Iain Duncan Smith says it will next year, it will still be able to handle only limited numbers of claimants, in the tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands and certainly not millions.

This article is a reminder that Universal Credit faces problems that go beyond the IT. A North West housing association said a survey of its tenants had exposed flaws in the universal credit system, with some claimants turning to pay day lenders to get by.

After taking part in a pilot in 2013 of the roll out of UC, First Choice Homes Oldham found that their tenants had suffered “multiple frustrations and complications with the system”. Data collected this summer from 40% of the housing association’s tenants on UC found that:

• 55% found the period between making their UC claim and receiving their first payment very difficult. 44% managed financially by borrowing and 18% had taken out a pay day loan.

• 74% had not been offered personal budgeting support by the Department for Work and Pensions. However, 57% of the tenants that were offered this service took up the offer.

• 37% did not receive their payment on the same day each month, making budgeting even more difficult.

• 59% of tenants had not found work since claiming UC.

When asked by FCHO to name the first three bills that would be paid once they were in receipt of UC, 19% of tenants did not name rent as a priority bill.

So will UC succeed?

It’s laudable that the coalition is trying to simplify the benefits system. No pain no gain. But it’s not doing it openly. IDS pretends all is well when clearly it isn’t.

This means that UC becomes an impossible project to manage well. No programme leader can take big problems to IDS because big problems are not supposed to exist. UC desperately needs a new political leader who has no emotional equity in its success.

It’s right (and largely involuntary) that the DWP is going slowly in rolling out UC. This way chaos is avoided.

But to handle millions of claims, the processing of UC transactions and payments needs to be a fully automated process. The DWP is working on that – what Iain Duncan Smith calls an “enhanced digital service”.  Nobody seems to know much about it. IDS says it is going to be tested later this year.

Uncertainty

Now into its fourth year of implementation, UC is still mired in uncertainty, despite IDS’s self-confident remarks at the Tory conference.

The facts are likely to emerge when the National Audit Office publishes its updated report which is expected before the end of this year. The DWP may already have drafted its press release saying the NAO report is outdated, which is part of the problem with UC and other big government IT-based programmes: they are more governed by politics than pragmatism.

 

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Posted in Accenture, BT, Campaign4Change, change management, DWP, excessive secrecy, Fujitsu, Government IT, HP, IBM, Major Projects Authority, Politics, project management, public sector, public services, Real-Time Information, Universal Credit

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Labour asks good questions on Universal Credit programme

Posted on 22/09/2014 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

Labour has a “Universal Credit Rescue Committee” whose membership includes a former Rolls Royce CIO Jonathan Mitchell.

Mitchell is quoted in Government Computing as saying that it would be irresponsible for a Labour government to continue spending large amounts of money on Universal Credit without getting answers to important questions such as:

  • Is there a comprehensive business case – one that clearly outlines the expected benefits, demonstrating that the Universal Credit project is viable?
  • Is the business case agreed by all stakeholders?
  • Is there clarity about what needs to be achieved?
  • Is there a stable specification explaining exactly how the new processes will work and how they will be automated?
  • Is the project being managed and staffed by people and organisations with appropriate levels of experience, track-record and expertise, all of whom are capable of delivering the benefits of the project and ensuring safe roll-out in a timely manner?
  • Is the project fully under control?
  • Can it absorb the changes demanded by a new incoming Government? If not, can the project be brought under control at an acceptable cost with respect to the business case, through a re-planning exercise?
  • Once such a re-planning exercise is completed, are we convinced that it was successful and that the project will now proceed to a satisfactory completion in a controlled fashion?
  • Are there appropriate “control gates” in place to ensure that all aspects of each phase of the plan are fully completed (and that projected costs to completion preserve the business case) before allowing the project to move safely onto each next stage?

Mitchell said, “Universal Credit is one of those applications that might look straightforward when you first look at it, but this is most definitely not the case. I believe there are significant process and technical challenges to overcome.”

Comment

Good questions, most of which the Department for Work and Pensions is unlikely to be able to answer satisfactorily today.

The Treasury still hasn’t approved the full business case, which is odd for a project that started in earnest more than three years ago.

It’s hard to see, given the rate of progress, the amount of work being completed manually, the lack of integration with legacy systems, the complexity of changes of behaviour required, the reliance on other parties such as local authorities, the inflexibility of some supplier contracts, regularly changing project leadership, the variable performance of HMRC’s RTI systems, and the DWP’s poor history of success on big IT-related projects, how the UC programme will be completed before 2020 whoever wins the next election.

Labour committee outlines Universal Credit “rescue” strategy – Government Computing

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Posted in Accenture, BT, Campaign4Change, change management, DWP, excessive secrecy, Government IT, HP, IBM, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, managing change, managing outsourced services, public sector, Real-Time Information, Universal Credit

DWP’s advert for a £180k IT head – what it doesn’t say

Posted on 06/08/2014 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

Soon the Department for Work and Pensions will choose a Director General, Technology.  Interviewing has finished and an offer is due to go out to the chosen candidate any day now.

The appointee will not replace Howard Shiplee who runs Universal Credit but has been ill for some months. The DWP is looking for Shiplee’s successor as a separate exercise to the recruitment of the DG Technology.

In its job advert for a DG Technology the DWP seeks a “commercial CIO/CTO to become one of the most senior change agents in the UK government”.

The size of the salary – around £180k plus “attractive pension” – suggests that the DWP is looking for a powerful, inspiring and reforming figure. The DWP’s IT makes 730 million payments to a value of 166bn a year.

In practice it is not clear how much power and influence the DG will have, given that there will be a separate head of Universal Credit (Shiplee’s successor) and there is already in place a Director General for Digital Transformation Kevin Cunnington.

What’s a DG Technology to do then?

The job advert suggests the job is about bringing about “unprecedented” change.  It says:

“The department is undergoing major business change, which has at its heart a technology and digital transformation of the services it provides, which will radically improve how it interacts with citizens.”

The role, says the advert, involves:

  • “Designing, developing and delivering the technology strategy that will enable unprecedented business change.”
  • “… Reducing the time to taken to develop new services and cutting the cost of delivery.”

The chosen person needs “a clear record of success in enabling the delivery of service driven, user focused, digital business transformation,” says the advert.

What the DWP doesn’t say

If DWP officials took a truth pill when interviewing candidates they might have said:

  • “No department talks more about change than we do. We regularly commission reports on the need for transformation and how to achieve it. We issue press releases and give briefings on our plans for change.  We write  ministerial speeches on it. We employ talented people to whom innovation and productive change comes naturally. The only thing we don’t do is actually change. It remains an aspiration.
  • “We remain one of the biggest VME sites in the world (VME being a Fujitsu – formerly ICL – operating system that dates back to the 1970s). VME skills are in ever shorter supply and it’s increasingly costly to employ VME specialists but changing our core software is too risky; and there is no commercial imperative to change: it’s not private money we’re spending.  We’ve a £1bn a year IT budget – one of the biggest of any government department in the world.
  • DWP core VME systems run an old supplier-specific form of COBOL used on VME, not an industry standard form.
  • We’ve identified ways of moving away from VME: we have shown that VME-based IDMSX databases can be transitioned to commodity database systems, and that the COBOL code can be converted to Java and then run on open source application servers. Still we can’t move away from VME, not within the foreseeable future. Too risky.
  • We’d love the new DG Technology to work on change, transformation and innovation but he/she will be required for fire-fighting.
  • It’s a particularly difficult time for the DWP. We are alleged to have given what the Public Accounts Committee calls an unacceptable service to the disabled, the terminally ill and many others who have submitted claims for personal independence payments. We are also struggling to cope with Employment and Support Allowance claims. One claimant has told the BBC the DWP is “not fit for purpose”.
  •  The National Audit Office will publish an unhelpful report on Universal Credit this Autumn. We’ll regard the report as out-of-date, as we do all negative NAO reports. We will say publicly that we have already implemented its recommendations and we’ll pick out the one or two positive sentences in the report to summarise it. But nobody will believe our story, least of all us.
  • If we could, we’d appoint a representative of our major suppliers to be the head of IT.  HP, Fujitsu, Accenture, IBM and BT have a knowledge of how to run the DWP’s systems that goes back decades. The suppliers are happily entrenched, indispensable. That they know more about our IT than we do puts into context talk of SMEs taking over from the big players.
  • One reason we avoid major change is that we are not good at it: Universal Credit (known internally as Universal Challenge), the £2.6bn Operational Strategy benefit scheme that Parliament was told would cost no more than £713m, the £141m  (aborted) Benefit Processing Replacement Programme, Camelot which was the (aborted) Computerisation and Mechanisation of Local Office Tasks,  and the (aborted)) Debt Accounting and Management System. Not to mention the (aborted) £25m Analytical Services Statistical Information System.
  • They’re the failures we know about. We don’t have to account to Parliament on the progress or otherwise of our big projects, and we’re particularly secretive internally, so there may be project failures not even senior management know about.
  • We require cultural alignment of all the DWP’s most senior civil servants. This means the chosen candidate must – and without exception – defend the department against all poorly-informed critics who may include our own ministers.
  • The Cabinet Office has some well-meaning reformers we want nothing to do with. That said, our policy is to agree to change and then absorb the required actions, like the acoustic baffles on the walls of a soundproofed studio.

 

 

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