Category Archives: excessive secrecy

Labour promises new NAO inquiry into Universal Credit project if elected

Posted on 23/06/2014 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

“All our [Universal Credit] IT at the moment is working and it’s working well, which is why we’ve taken the decision to roll it out to the whole of the North West,” said Iain Duncan Smith on BBC Radio 5 Live’s Pienaar’s Politics programme at the weekend.

But IDS is not publishing any of the Department for Work and Pensions’ reports on Universal Credit  IT, such as the project assessment reviews, risk registers or issues registers, so it’s difficult to verify independently his assurances that the IT is working well.

Labour, meanwhile, has promised, if it wins the 2015 election,  a new National Audit Office inquiry into Universal Credit.

In an interview with BBC One’s Sunday Politics programme, shadow work and pensions secretary Rachel Reeves said:

“We set up a universal credit rescue committee in the autumn of last year because we had seen, from the National Audit Office [and] from the Public Accounts Committee, report after report showing that this project is …not going to be delivered according to the government timetable.

“We believe in the principle of universal credit, we think it is the right thing to do.”

Reeves criticised ministers for not being open about what had gone wrong with the project. “There is no transparency,” she said. “It’s going to cost £12.8bn to deliver and we don’t know what sort of state it is in.

“So we have said that if we win the next election we will pause… the build of the system for three months, calling in the National Audit Office to do a warts-and-all report on it.”

She said the “pause” would not involve halting the pilot schemes that were already in place. She urged coalition ministers to follow her prescription immediately.

“The government doesn’t need to wait for the next election,” she said. “They could do this today: call in the National Audit Office … and finally get a grip on this incredibly important programme.”

The Department for Work and Pensions has announced the roll-out of UC to all job centres in the north west by the end of this year but the IT will handle only the simplest of cases and some of these involve clerical intervention.

Integration with back-office systems is handled manually, and claims from couples or those with dependents are still not allowed.

The DWP said last month that the IT would be handle claims from couples starting this summer but this now seems unlikely.

UC claimants for the time being must be single, without children, newly claiming a benefit, fit for work, not claiming disability benefits, not have caring responsibilities, not be homeless or in temporary accommodation, and have a valid bank account and National Insurance number.

The National Audit Office in a report on UC last September questioned whether the IT will work for the millions of people whose claims are complicated.

Comment

Labour’s promise of an NAO investigation if it wins power – and its suggestion that the NAO publish an update to its September 2013 report on UC before the next election – are welcome.

Probably the last thing IDS wants at the moment is an up-to-date report by the NAO on Universal Credit. At present IDS and the Department for Work and Pensions can say without fear of authoritative contradiction that the IT is working well.  An NAO update would show whether that assurance is optimistic.

Labour if it wins the election cannot force the NAO to investigate the UC project. No political party instruct the NAO to investigate anything.  The NAO is independent of government and decides what to investigate, often in conjunction with the cross-party Public Accounts Committee.

It’s likely, however, that the NAO would agree to publish a new report on the UC project if Labour wins the next election.

Whoever wins the NAO will publish a new report on UC – it is already monitoring the programme – but is likely to do so sooner if Labour wins.

IDS could still win much credibility for the DWP and himself by deciding to publish the UC project assessment reviews, risk registers, issues registers and high-level milestone schedules.

Universal Credit creeps into north west 

 

1 Comment

Posted in Campaign4Change, DWP, excessive secrecy, IT projects, IT-related failures, Universal Credit

How well is new passport IT coping with high demand?

Posted on 13/06/2014 | Leave a comment

By T0ny Collins

In 1989 when the Passport Agency introduced new systems avoidable chaos ensued. A decade later, in 1999, officials introduced a new passport system and avoidable chaos ensued. Jack Straw, the then Home Secretary, apologised to the House of Commons.

Last year HM Passport Office introduced, after delays,  a replacement passport system, the Application Management System. It was built with the help of the Passport Office’s main IT supplier CSC under a 10-year £385m contract awarded in 2009.

The Passport Office said at the time the new system was designed “to be easier to use and enable cases to be examined more efficiently”. So how well is the system coping with unusually high demand, given that an objective was to help passport staff deal with applications more efficiently?

The answer is that we don’t know: open government has yet to reach HM Passport Office. It publishes no regular updates on how well it is performing, how many passports it is processing each month or how long it is taking on average to process them. It has published no information on the performance of the Application Management System or how much it has cost.

All we know is that the system was due to be rolled out in 2012 but concerns about how well it would perform after go-live led to the roll-out being delayed a year. In the past 18 months it has been fully rolled out.

Comment

Has there been a repeat of the IT problems that seriously delayed the processing of applications in 1989 and 1999? In both years, passport officials had inadequate contingency arrangements to cope with a surge in demand, according to National Audit Office reports.

Clearly the same thing has happened for a third time: there have been inadequate contingency arrangements to cope with an unexpectedly high surge in demand.

How is it the passport office can repeatedly build up excessive backlogs without telling anyone? One answer is that there is a structural secrecy about internal performance.

Despite attempts by Francis Maude and the Cabinet Office to make departments and agencies more open about their performance, the Passport Office is more secretive than ever.

It appears that even the Home Secretary Theresa May was kept in the dark about the latest backlogs.  She gave reassuring statistics to the House of Commons about passport applications being processed on time – and only days later conceded there were backlogs.

It’s a familiar story: administrative problems in a government agency are denied until the truth can be hidden no longer because of the number of constituents who are contacting their MPs.

David Cameron said this week that up to 30,000 passport applications may be delayed.

One man who contacted the BBC said he had applied for a passport 7 weeks before he was due to travel. The passport office website said he should get a new passport in 3 weeks. When it had not arrived after 6 weeks he called the passport office and was told he’d be called back within 48 hours. He wasn’t, so he called again and was told the same thing. In the end he lost his holiday.

In 1989 the IT-related disaster was avoidable because managers continued a roll-out even though tests at the Glasgow office had shown it was taking longer to process passport applications on computers than clerically. Backlogs built up and deteriorating relations with staff culminated in industrial action

In 1999 electronic scanning of passport applications and added security checks imposed by the new systems caused delays and lowered productivity.  Even so a national roll-out continued. Contingency plans were inadequate, said the National Audit Office.

Does the “new” Application Management System show down processing of applications? We don’t know. The Passport Office is keeping its 2014 statistics to itself.

Decades of observing failures in government administration have taught me that chaos always seems to take officialdom by surprise.

If departments and agencies had to account publicly for their performance on a monthly and not just an annual basis, the public, MPs, ministers and officials themselves, would know when chaos is looming. But openness won’t happen unless the culture of the Passport Office changes.

For the time being its preoccupation seems to be finding whoever published photos of masses of files of passport applications seemingly awaiting processing.

The taking and publication of the photos seems to be regarded as a greater crime than the backlogs themselves.  To discourage such leaks the Passport Office has sent a threatening letter to staff.

But innocuous leaks are an essential part of the democratic process. They help ministers find out what’s going on in their departments and agencies.  Has government administration really come to this?

 

Leave a comment

Posted in Campaign4Change, CSC, excessive secrecy, Government IT, IT and the Business, IT projects, Passport Office

Tagged , ,

CEO and CIO resign after troubled EHR go-live

Posted on 05/06/2014 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

At the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Georgia, in America’s deep south, about 70 miles from Atlanta, is Athens .

It was named at the turn of the 19th century to associate its university with Aristotle and Plato’s academy in Greece. It is home to the Athens Regional Medical Centre, one of the USA’s top hospitals.

There on 4 May 2014 the Centre went live with what it described as the most meaningful and largest scale information technology system in its 95-year history – a Cerner EHR implementation.

Now the Centre’s CEO James Thaw and CIO Gretchen Tegethoff have resigned. The Centre’s implementation of the electronic health record system seems to have been no more or less successful than at UK hospitals.

The main difference is that more than a dozen doctors complained in a letter to Thaw and Tegethoff.  A doctor leaked their letter to the local paper.

“Medication errors”

The letter said the timescales to install the Cerner EHR system were too “aggressive” and there was a “lack of readiness” among the intended users. They called the system cumbersome.

The letter referred to “medication errors … orders being lost or overlooked … (emergency department) and patients leaving after long waits”. An inpatient wasn’t seen by a physician for five days.

“The Cerner implementation has driven some physicians to drop their active staff privileges at ARMC [Athens Regional Medical Centre],” said the letter. “This has placed an additional burden on the hospitalists, who are already overwhelmed. Other physicians are directing their patients to St. Mary’s (an entirely separate local hospital) for outpatient studies, (emergency room) care, admissions and surgical procedures. … Efforts to rebuild the relationships with patients and physicians (needs) to begin immediately.”

The boldness of the letter has won praise in parts of the wider American health IT community.

It was signed by the centre’s most senior medical representatives: Carolann Eisenhart, president of the medical staff; Joseph T. Johnson, vice president of the medical staff; David M. Sailers, surgery department chair; and, Robert D. Sinyard, medicine department chair.

A doctor who provided the letter to the Athens Banner-Herald refused a request to openly discuss the issues with the computer system and asked to remain anonymous at the urging of his colleagues.

Swift action

One report said that at a meeting of medical staff 200 doctors were “solid in their vote of no confidence in the present hospital administration.”

Last week Thaw wrote in an email to staff: “From the moment our physician leadership expressed concern about the Cerner I.T. conversion process on May 15, we took swift action and significant progress has been made toward resolving the issues raised … Providing outstanding patient care is first and foremost in our minds at Athens Regional, and we have dedicated staff throughout the hospital to make sure the system is functioning as smoothly as possible through this transition.”

UK implications?

The problems at the Athens centre raise questions about whether problematic Cerner installations in the NHS should have consequences for CEOs.  Health IT specialists say that, done well, EHR implementations can improve the chances of a successful recovery. Done badly an EHR implementation can harm patients and contribute to death.

The most recent installations of Cerner in the NHS, at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Croydon Health Services NHS Trust, follow the pattern of other Cerner EHR go-lives in the NHS where there have been hints of problems but the trusts are refusing to publish a picture of how patients are being affected.

What has gone wrong at Athens Regional?

IT staff, replying to the Banner-Herald’s article, have given informed views on what has gone wrong. It appears that the Athens Regional laid off about a third of the IT staff in February 2014, about three months before go-live.

Past project disasters have shown that organisations often need more, not fewer, IT staff, advisers and helpers, at the time of a major go-live.

A further problem is that there appears to have been little understanding or support among doctors for the changes they would need to make in their business practices to accommodate the new system.  Had the organisation done enough to persuade doctors and nurses of the benefits to them of changing their ways of working?

If clinicians do not support the need for change, they may focus unduly on what is wrong with the new system. An organisation that is inherently secretive and resentful of constructive criticism will further alienate doctors and nurses.

Doctors who fully support an EHR implementation may find ways around problems, without complaining.

One comment on the Banner-Herald website says:

“While I have moved on from Athens Regional, I still have many friends and colleagues that are trying to work through this mess. Here is some information that has been reported to me…

“Medications, labs and diagnostic exams are not getting done in a timely manner or even missed all together. Some of this could be training issues and some system.

“Already over worked clinical staff are having to work many extra hours to get all the information in the system. This obviously takes away from patient care.

“Senior leadership tried to implement the system in half the amount of time that is usually required to do such things, with half the staff needed to do it. Why?

“Despite an environment of fear and intimidation the clinical staff involved with the project warned senior administration that the system was not ready to implement and posed a safety risk.

“I have ex-colleagues that know staff and directors that are involved with the project. They have made a valiant effort to make things right. Apparently an 80 to even a 100 hour work week has been the norm of late.

“Some questions that I have: where does the community hospital board stand with all this? Were they asking the questions that need to be asked? Why would the software company agree to do such a tight timeline? Shouldn’t they have to answer some questions as well?”

“Hopefully, this newspaper will continue to investigate what has happened here and not cave to an institution that spends a lot of money on frequent giant full page ads.

“Please remember there are still good people (staff, managers and administrators) that work at ARMC and I am sure they care about the community they serve and will make sure they provide great patient care.”

“The last three weeks have been very challenging for our physicians, nurses, and staff,” said Athens Regional Foundation Vice President Tammy Gilland. “Parts of the system are working well while others are not. The medical staff leadership has been active in relaying their concerns to the administration and the administration has taken these concerns very seriously. Maintaining the highest quality of patient care has always been the guiding principle of Athens Regional Health System.”

Keeping quiet

NHS trusts go quiet about the effect on patients of EHR implementations despite calls by Robert Francis QC and health secretary Jeremy Hunt for openness when things go wrong.

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, which comprises St Mary’s Paddington, Hammersmith Hospital, Charing Cross Hospital, Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital, and Western Eye hospital in Marylebone Road, went live with Cerner– but its managers and CEO are refusing to say what effect the system is having on patients.

An FOI request by eHealth Insider elicited the fact that Imperial College Healthcare had 55 different consultants working on the Cerner Millennium project and 45 Trust staff. The internal budget for electronic patient record deployment was £14m.

Croydon Health Services NHS Trust, which comprises Croydon University Hospital (formerly Mayday) and the Purley War Memorial Hospital, went live with Cerner last year, also under BT’s direction.

The trust has been a little more forthcoming than Imperial about the administrative disruption, unforeseen extra  costs and effects on patients, but Croydon’s officials, like Imperial College Healthcare’s spokespeople,  refuse to give any specific answers to Campaign4Change’s questions on the Cerner implementation.

Comment

It was probably unfair of doctors at Athens Regional to judge the Cerner system so soon after go-live but their fierce reaction is a reminder that doctors exist to help patients, not spend time getting to grips with common-good IT systems.

Would an NHS CEO resign after a rebellion by UK doctors over a problematic EHR implementation? It’s highly unlikely – especially if trusts can stop news leaking out of the effects on patients. In the NHS that’s easy to do.

Athens Regional CEO resigns

A tragic outcome for Cerner Millennium implementation?

Athens Regional is addressing computer problems encountered by doctors

Athens Regional is addressing computer problems after patients put at risk

CEO forced out?

 

Leave a comment

Posted in BT, BT Health, Campaign4Change, Cerner, change management, CIO, consultants, cost reduction, Department of Health, e-health, excessive secrecy, FOI, Freedom of Information, health records, IT-related failures, LPfIT, NHS, npfit, public sector, public services

Has DWP suppressed a “red” rating on Universal Credit project?

Posted on 28/05/2014 | 4 comments

By Tony Collins

The Cabinet Office’s Major Project Authority gave the Universal Credit programme a “red” rating which IDS and the Department for Work and Pensions campaigned successfully to turn into a neutral “reset” designation, says The Independent.

Universal Credit was “only given a reset rating after furious protests by Iain Duncan Smith and his department,” says the newspaper.

A “reset” rating is unprecedented. All major projects at red will need a reset. That is one of the reasons the Major Projects Authority gives a red rating: to signal to the senior responsible owner that the project needs resetting or cancelling. A “reset” designation is a non-assessment.

The MPA’s official definition of a red rating is:

“Red: Successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable. There are major issues on project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable. The project may need re-scoping and/or its overall viability reassessed.”

The suppression of Universal Credit’s red rating may indicate that the project, at the top, is driven by politics – the public and Parliamentary perception of the project being all-important – rather than pragmatics.

It is a project management aphorism that serious problems cannot be tackled until their seriousness is admitted.

Normally the Major Projects Authority will give even newly reconfigured projects traffic light ratings, to indicate its view of the risks of the revised plans.

The Independent calls for the replacement of Iain Duncan Smith as political head of the project.

Comment

The National Audit Office warned last September of the DWP’s fortress mentality and “good news” culture.

The suppression of Universal Credit’s red rating on top of the DWP’s repeated refusals to publish the Universal Credit project assessment report, risk register, issues register and milestone schedule shows that the DWP still avoids telling it like it is. That will make successful delivery of Universal Credit’s complexities impossible.

Well-run IT projects are about problem-solving not problem-denying.

The Independent is right to say that IDS is not the person to be running Universal Credit. He has too much emotional equity to be an objective leader. He sees himself as having too much to lose. The programme needs to be run by an open-minded pragmatist.

In asking the Cabinet Office to agree with a “reset” rating for Universal Credit IDS is acting like a schoolboy who has done something wrong and asks the school not to tell his parents. That’s no way to run something as important as Universal Credit.

IDS and DWP accused of hiding bad news on Universal Credit – The Independent

 

4 Comments

Posted in Agile, Campaign4Change, DWP, excessive secrecy, Gateway reviews, Government IT, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, managing change, openness and transparency, Universal Credit

Tagged , , ,

DWP – and Cabinet Office – hide new Universal Credit secrets

Posted on 23/05/2014 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

In 2009 Francis Maude promised, if the Conservatives came to power,  that his party would publish “Gateway” reviews on the progress or otherwise or big IT-based projects.

He was surprised when I told him that civil servants wouldn’t allow it, that they wouldn’t want Parliament and the media knowing how badly their big programmes were being managed. Maude said he couldn’t see a problem in publishing the reports.

When Maude and the Conservatives won power, the Cabinet Office promised in its forward plans to publish Gateway reviews but it never happened.

The Cabinet Office told me its forward plans were “draft” (although they were not marked “draft”) and the commitment to publishing Gateway reviews was no longer included. It didn’t say why.

Still Maude worked privately within government to persuade departmental ministers to at least publish the “traffic light” status of major projects – red, amber or green. Eventually this happened – sort of.

Senior civil servants and their ministers agreed to publish the traffic light status of major projects only if the disclosures were at least six months old by the time they were published.

Maude agreed – and last year the Major Projects Authority published its delayed 2013 annual report. It revealed the out-of-date traffic light status of big projects.

Today the 2014 Major Projects Authority annual report is published. Alongside publication, departments are publishing the traffic light status of major projects – except the Universal Credit programme.

Where the DWP should be publishing the red, amber or green designation of the UC programme the spreadsheet says “reset”.

Therefore the DWP is avoiding not only the publication of Universal Credit reports as part of a 2-year FOI legal battle, it has stopped publishing the traffic light status of the Universal Credit programme.

Secrecy over the state of the UC programme is deepening, which could be said to make a mockery of the Cabinet Office’s attempts to bring about open government.

It seems that the DWP is happy for MPs, journalists and the public to speculate on the state of the Universal Credit programme. But it is determined to deny its critics authoritative information on the state of the programme.

Universal Credit is looking to me rather like a programme disaster of the type seen during Labour’s administration. And the detail is being kept hidden – as it was under Labour.

The DWP argues that UC reports cannot be published because of the “chilling effect” on civil servants who contribute to the reports. In other words they will not be candid in their assessments if they know their comments will be published.

What’s remarkable about this claim is the assumption that the status quo works. The DWP assumes that publication of the UC reports – even if there is a demonstrable chilling effect – will have a bad effect on the UC programme. But how could things be worse than they are? The National Audit Office report “Universal Credit – early progress” showed that the programme was being poorly managed.

The absence of a chilling effect has not served the UC programme well. Will the non-publication of a traffic light status for UC serve the programme well?

It may be that more rigorous Parliamentary scrutiny – by well informed MPs – is essential for the UC programme’s welfare.

But for that to happen IDS and the DWP’s ministers and senior civil servants will need to be dragged kicking and screaming towards the door marked “open government”. Will it ever happen? I doubt it.

PS: It appears that the Cabinet Office and its Major Projects Authority have agreed with departments that the MPA’s Annual Report will be published today – a Friday before a Bank Holiday weekend . Is this to reduce the chances it will be noticed by the trade press and national media?  

Update:

Shortly after publishing the blog post above a DWP press officer gave me the following statement:

“Universal Credit is on track. The reset is not new but refers to the shift in the delivery plan and change in management back in early 2013.

“The reality is that Universal Credit is already making work pay as we roll it out in a careful and controlled way.

“It’s already operating in 10 areas and will start expanding to the rest of the North West in June. Jobseekers in other areas are already benefiting from some of its positive impacts through help from a work coach, more digital facilities in jobcentres, and a written agreement setting out what they will do to find work.”

The DWP says the “reset” rating reflects the fact that the Secretary of State decided to reset the programme in 2013, with a clear plan developed since then to deliver the programme.

Now this reset has taken place, future Major Projects Authority reports will give a traffic light status, says the DWP.

 

2 Comments

Posted in Campaign4Change, DWP, excessive secrecy, FOI, Freedom of Information, Gateway reviews, Government IT, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, Universal Credit

Tagged , , ,

Was Churchill more open with MPs in 1940 than DWP is over Universal Credit?

Posted on 22/05/2014 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

As the DWP manoeuvres again to stop reports on the Universal Credit programme being published it’s worth asking: has the DWP got its 2-year legal battle to keep the reports secret out of perspective?

Work and Pensions minister Lord Freud personally signed off his department’s request to keep the UC reports secret; and his secretary of state Iain Duncan Smith seems untroubled by MPs’ criticisms that Parliament is not kept properly informed about the UC programme’s problems.

The lack of openness and transparency over problems with the UC programme is “not acceptable,” said the all-party Work and Pensions Committee in April.

The four reports would, if published, inform Parliament about how much senior civil servants knew about the problems with UC while ministers and the department  were assuring MPs the scheme was on time and to budget.

This isn’t the reason the DWP does not want the reports published: it has an unofficial rule not to publish any reports on the progress or otherwise of its big IT-based projects and programmes.

Not even Parliament is allowed sight of minutes of UC meetings, the updated UC business case, UC risk registers, issues registers, project assessment reviews or high-level milestone schedules.

In its arguments to the Upper Tribunal this week lawyers for the DWP argue in paragraph after paragraph that publication of the UC reports would have a “chilling effect” on senior civil servants.

But the DWP may not appreciate the extent to which its attempts to keep Parliament, the press and public in the dark trivialise the vigorous and noble attempts by some prime ministers in the last century to keep Parliament well informed on what was going well or not with major government plans.

Churchill stands out as a PM who was remarkably open, even during one of the darkest times in the history of Britain, in 1940, when the government had every reason to marginalise Parliament. It’s easy to believe Churchill was too busy to attend Parliament and that he had the best possible excuse for not keeping MPs informed: he didn’t want to forewarn Britain’s enemies.

In fact Parliamentary archives show that Churchill in 1940 was meticulous about keeping Parliament informed – about his concerns as well as as his reasons for optimism.

With London being bombed and a fleet of 1900 fully-armed ships and barges gathered at German-occupied ports ready to invade Britain, Churchill came to the House of Commons to account for government actions. He even answered a Parliamentary question in September 1940 on pensions.

On 30 July 1940 Churchill opened a public debate in the House of Commons on whether Parliament should go into secret session. France had just fallen and the government was preparing for what Churchill called the Battle of Britain. He had every reason to go into secret session. He allowed a free vote.

Churchill also rejected calls for automatic secret sessions of Parliament. There had to be a debate and free vote each time.

Compare Churchill’s determination to keep Parliament properly informed at a time when the freedom of every British citizen was in peril and the DWP’s repeated attempts to stop information reaching Parliament, the press and the public on what departmental reports were saying about the Universal Credit programme in 2012.

Churchill and other MPs, including Labour’s Josiah Wedgwood, argued that openness was needed because criticism of the government by an informed press and Parliament was an essential part of the democratic process. Criticism could be a stimulus to act.

But what we now have at the DWP are departmental civil servants and ministers who want information on the Universal Credit programme to be state-controlled, apart from the one-off reports of the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee which the DWP cannot control.

Only the Work and Pensions Committee provides regular scrutiny of the UC programme – but its MPs complain of being kept in the dark.

Churchill in Parliament’s secret sessions had good reason for secrecy. His notes published after the war show that he spoke in a secret session of Parliament in 1940 on the need for British forces to “get through the next 3 months” then they will “get through the next 3 years”. He discussed the Allies’ military errors and German strengths and weaknesses.

Now we have the DWP marginalising Parliament – not publishing the contents of departmental reports on UC – because of the chilling effect on senior civil servants.

There can be little dispute that Churchill was more open in Britain’s darkest hour than the DWP is today on Universal Credit programme.  For even  when Parliament went into secret session in 1940, all MPs, including the government’s opponents, were included in the discussions. Only “strangers” – non-MPs – were excluded.

That’s a million miles from what’s happening at the DWP. All ordinary MPs are excluded from the DWP’s detailed discussions on the UC programme.  The DWP is shielding Parliament from knowing what is in the UC programme reports.

As I asked earlier: is the DWP’s fear of openness over UC reports out of perspective?

 

 

3 Comments

Posted in Campaign4Change, DWP, excessive secrecy, FOI, Freedom of Information, Universal Credit

DWP tries anew for leave to appeal FOI ruling on Universal Credit reports

Posted on 22/05/2014 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

The DWP is continuing its protracted legal fight to stop publication of four reports on the Universal Credit programme.

The department this week asked the upper tribunal for leave to appeal a decision of the first-tier information tribunal that the four reports be published.  The first-tier tribunal had refused the DWP leave to appeal.

As expected, the DWP is doing everything possible within the FOI Act to stop the UC programme reports being published. This is despite MPs on the Work and Pensions Committee saying there is a “lack of transparency” on the Universal Credit programme.

The reports in question are more than two years old but they would show how much ministers knew about UC programme problems at a time when the DWP was issuing regular press releases claiming the scheme was on time and to budget.

By law the DWP has to deal with every FOI request individually but in practice the department has rejected every FOI request for reviews and assessments of its major IT-enabled projects and programmes including Universal Credit.

The four reports in question are:

– A project assessment review on the state of the UC programme in November 2011, as assessed by the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority.

– A risk register of possible risks to the development or eventual operation of UC as perceived by those involved.

– An issues register of problems that have materialised, why and how they can be minimised or eliminated.

– A milestone schedule of progress and times by which activities should be completed.

In his request to the upper tribunal for leave to appeal the first-tier tribunal’s decision, the DWP’s lawyer  argues that the first-tier tribunal wholly misunderstood the nature of any “chilling effect” that publishing the reports would have on the frankness of civil servants contributing to them.

He said that the tribunal’s finding that disclosure of the reports would have no chilling effect was “perverse”, and that the tribunal failed to give due weight to the evidence of a senior civil servant Sarah Cox on the chilling effect.

He said that “many ex-ministers and others have spoken of the chilling effect of disclosure as an observable phenomenon within government” though he provided no evidence of this in his submission.

He added that the first-tier tribunal’s reasoning was “defective” in a number of respects. The tribunal had made a fundamental error of law, he said.

The tribunal’s “factual conclusion that disclosure of the disputed information would have no chilling effect whatsoever was one which no reasonable tribunal, properly directing itself as to the relevant legal principles, could have reached,” said the DWP’s lawyer.

Judge refuses DWP leave to appeal FOI ruling on Universal Credit reports

 

3 Comments

Posted in Campaign4Change, DWP, excessive secrecy, FOI, Freedom of Information, Gateway reviews, Government IT, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, project management, public sector, public services, Universal Credit

Tagged ,

Is working on Universal Credit a risk to health or career?

Posted on 14/05/2014 | 4 comments

By Tony Collins

IT-related projects are about solving problems – and  if you cannot own up to the most serious of them, how can they be solved? For those working on Universal Credit it may be stressful, perhaps even hazardous to health, if they cannot discuss serious project problems openly.

Could it be that the DWP’s unnatural grip on information – what the National Audit Office called a good news reporting culture that “stifled open discussion and challenge”  – is a major factor in the delays, rising costs and lack of success in the Universal Credit programme?

Could it also explain why the programme has had so many leaders – who perhaps found that speaking their minds was culturally unacceptable?

I had a taste of the DWP’s grip on information when I asked a department press officer last week about Howard Shiplee, Director General  of Universal Credit who went off sick with bronchitis. Was he back at work? He may no longer be working full time, suggests Computer Weekly.

The DWP appointed Shiplee in May 2013 and he went off sick in December 2013. He took over the UC programme from David Pitchford who quit to return to his native Australia. Terry Moran who ran the universal credit programme at its inception retired from the DWP last year after an extended  period of sick leave.

Philip Langsdale, a highly respected IT expert with public and private sector experience, took over responsibility for the UC programme in September 2012 but died four months later.

Another short-serving incumbent was Hilary Reynolds, a departmental civil servant who was appointed programme director in November 2012 but moved to another role four months later. She replaced Malcolm Whitehouse, who had stepped down as UC programme director.

Andy Nelson, Chief Information Officer at the DWP who had partial control of UC, has resigned after little more than a year in the job.

Truthful?

Government press officers and other public-facing officials usually like to be helpful, open and truthful. But they also reflect an organisation’s culture, whether it is open or closed, or liable to dissemble. The DWP press officer I spoke to last week seemed unable to depart from her pre-agreed script. Clearly she was allowed to say that Shiplee was “at work and fully engaged in delivering Universal Credit” – but no more about him.

“Howard Shiplee is at work,” she said.

Is it accurate to say he is “at work” when it’s for one day a week only?

“He is at work and fully engaged in delivering Universal Credit.”

Isn’t it misleading for the DWP to imply that Howard Shiplee is working full time on Universal Credit when he is only working one day a week?

“He is fully engaged in delivering Universal Credit.”

So he is working full-time on Universal Credit?

“He is at work. And we have announced the next steps in the Universal Programme …”

That started a different line of questioning on whether the DWP was being misleading in its announcement that the “full” Universal Credit benefit will be rolled out in the north-west of England in June.

I asked what “full” meant, when the reality is that new UC claimants must be single, without children, newly claiming a benefit, fit for work, not claiming disability benefits, not have caring responsibilities, not be homeless or in temporary accommodation, and have a valid bank account and National Insurance number. Specifically excluded from UC “pathfinder” claims – although the original plan was include them – are income support, housing benefits, working tax credits, child tax credits and difficult cases.

The DWP’s latest announcement on the next steps in the UC programme refers four times to the “full” UC benefit:

From the DWP’s May 2014 UC announcement:

“The expansion of the full [my emphasis] Universal Credit benefit to the rest of the North-West of England will start in June, it was announced today. On top of that claimants in 10 parts of the country are also benefiting from the better work incentives of the full benefit.”

“In total 90 jobcentres, or one in eight jobcentres in Britain, will offer the full Universal Credit once the North-West expansion is completed.”

“During the summer the new benefit will also be made available for new claims from couples in a number of jobcentres that already deliver the full Universal Credit, expanding to all the current live sites over time.”

The DWP press officer did not answer my question directly.  She said couples will soon be able to claim UC in parts of the country. It appears she was not allowed to lie. But was she also forbidden from telling the truth?

For nearly 2 years the press office’s script was that the UC programme was “on time and on budget”. As the Guardian reported in April last year:

“The DWP has repeatedly claimed that the development is on schedule and on budget.”

But after the National Audit Office reported in depth in September 2013 that the UC programme was in a mess and that tens of millions had been written off the press office changed its script. Now press officers are instructed to say, if asked if the programme is on time and to budget, that it is “on track”, whatever that means.

The Work and Pensions Committee has criticised the DWP’s lack of openness and transparency on the Universal Credit programme. It said:

“On two occasions, the Government has made public the details about major changes to the timetable for UC implementation only when forced to do so by the prospect of oral evidence in front of the Committee. This lack of openness and transparency is not acceptable.”

The National Audit Office identified a ‘fortress’ mentality within the programme team; and the Public Accounts Committee said that the DWP’s UC team became

“isolated and defensive, undermining its ability to recognise the size of the problems the programme faced and to be candid when reporting progress”.

Now the DWP may be looking for Shiplee’s replacement. If so, how long will the appointee stay in post – a few months at best? Can any good UC project leader survive the DWP’s closed and dissembling culture?

Comment

As competent and talented UC leaders come and go it’s becoming easier to see why turnover is so high. The DWP and Accenture successfully built the enhanced National Insurance Recording System (NIRS2), in part by having daily round-table discussions about project problems.  I sat in on one of them. The meetings were marked by the openness of the exchanges.

For that reason IDS may unwittingly be the worst sort of person to be boss of a big IT-based programme. Can the UC’s programme leaders take their workplace problems to IDS without their suffering stress or worse?

The DWP was becoming innately secretive, not open to internal or external challenge, even before IDS was appointed. Since he took over in 2010 the department has become more defensive, introspective, closed, and excessively sensitive to its public image and reputation.

Can anyone run a big IT-based government programme amid a good news culture that permeates all levels of the hierarchy and IT teams at the DWP? It especially infects the DWP’s entrenched US-based major IT suppliers.

IDS has the advantage of understanding the UC programme and he is right to slow down its introduction, but if he stood down as UC’s political leader, the programme’s leaders could find their lives becoming less stressful, less hazardous perhaps.

[A more suitable political leader of the UC programme would, perhaps, be a pragmatist who is a good listener and is not preoccupied with self-image and looking strong – perhaps Frank Field (Labour), Norman Lamb (Liberal) or Richard Bacon (Conservative). ]

Privately the DWP’s ministers would probably argue that being open would give ammunition to the opposition which exploits for party political reasons every supposed UC problem. But openness could have pre-empted that.

If the DWP would publish the UC reports it has so far repeatedly refused to publish it could show in detail how it is tackling the problems in a measured and open way.

Nothing will change its culture. All we can hope for is that scrutiny will be intensified. The Work and Pensions committee is doing a good job, as is the NAO, the Public Accounts Committee, the Information Commissioner and the Information Tribunal but the scrutiny is spasmodic, not month to month or week to week, let alone day to day.

So where is the UC programme heading?

It seems that the Universal Credit programme will remain inherently flawed until after the general election when a new administration may own up to the depth of the problems and a new long-term rollout will be announced, perhaps extending beyond 2020.

You won’t hear that from the DWP, and particularly not its press officers.  But if they’re not allowed to tell the truth spare a thought for those working on the programme. Some of them are highly paid. But what’s money when your health is at stake?

Brian Wernham on UC leadership changes

 

4 Comments

Posted in Accenture, change management, DWP, excessive secrecy, HP, IBM, IT-related failures, public sector, public services, Universal Credit

Tagged

Why the DWP wants Universal Credit reports kept secret

Posted on 24/04/2014 | 5 comments

By Tony Collins

Yesterday the Department for Work and Pensions, via Andrew Robertson, a lawyer in the Treasury Solicitor’s Department, issued the grounds for its appeal against an Information Tribunal ruling that four reports on Universal Credit be released.

The four reports in question are:

– A project assessment review on the state of the project in November 2011, as assessed by the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority.

– A risk register of possible risks to the development or eventual operation of UC as perceived by those involved.

– An issues register of problems that have materialised, why and how they can be minimised or eliminated.

– A milestone schedule of progress and times by which activities should be completed.

The DWP keeps losing appeals to stop the reports being published– but public money being no object when it comes to justifying departmental secrecy, it keeps spending on appeals. The latest appeal is to the “Upper Tribunal”. A decision on whether the appeal can go to the Upper Tribunal will come shortly from the “First-tier” tribunal.

The DWP says its main grounds for appeal is that the Information tribunal “wholly misunderstood the nature and/or manifestation of any ‘chilling effect’. [The chilling effect suggests that public servants will not tell the whole truth in project reviews if they know the reports will be published. The counter argument is that it is the job and duty of public servants to tell the truth, which they are more likely to do if the reports are published and they could be held accountable if it transpires later they had not told the whole truth.]

The DWP said the Tribunal’s misunderstanding about the chilling effect “amounted to an error in law” and was “perverse”.

The DWP’s appeal document is here: Application for Permission to Appeal & Grounds of Appeal 16.04.14 (as fi…

Comment:

The DWP’s appeal document shows the ease with which its lawyers could credibly argue – with an entirely straight face – that day is night, and night is day, on the basis that daylight in one part of the world always signifies darkness in another part of the world.

The DWP’s lawyers could also credibly argue that black is white, and white is black, on the basis that colour is simply a perception based on the light reflected back to our eyes and that if an object can reflect back all the light we see it is white, and black will be perceived only superficially since it is necessary to doubt everything when assessing the world from a fresh perspective, clear of any preconceived notions.

It is in this Orwell-parodying vein that the DWP’s lawyers argue that four Universal Credit reports need to be kept secret. Below are 2 extracts from the DWP’s appeal document. Anyone who understands what either of these paragraphs means deserves a prominent place in the DWP legal team. Here’s a clue. Having read the paragraphs below three times I think they’re saying that it is difficult to prove whether a leaked document has had a chilling effect.

Says the DWP appeal:

“Any argument as to the ‘chilling effect’ of disclosure is necessarily speculative, because it makes assumptions about the future effect of an event that has not yet occurred (i.e. the future effect of disclosure of particular information). Any argument as to the ‘chilling effect’ of disclosure in the past of any ‘chilling effect’ is likely to be the assertion of persons whose experience in particular working environments has enabled them to assess and evaluate how candour and frankness may alter, or may have altered, in the light of premature disclosure of information…”

Here’s another excruciating extract from the DWP’s appeal document:

“The Tribunal’s assumption that it would be ‘quite easy to assemble’ a ‘before’ and ‘after’ documentary comparison itself exemplifies its erroneous understanding of how a ‘chilling effect’ can be proved. Far from being easy, it would in the majority of cases be impossible to demonstrate that a particular type of document had changed fundamentally as a result of disclosure. That is because the likely effect of disclosure will very probably not be a change in the form in which a document (such as a risk register) is produced. It will rather be a change in the substantive content of the register, as a result of a conscious or subconscious decrease in the candour of those contributing to it. But it will equally be impossible to show what those contributors might have said, had it not been for disclosure: because they will not, in fact, have said it.”

Jonathan Swift, in perhaps the best satirical book of all time, Gulliver’s Travels, described lawyers as a society of men “bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid”.

It’s not that the DWP’s lawyers lie. They don’t need to. This latest appeal is a legal nicety, a way of stringing things out, a display of conformance with the FOI game. Nothing will convince the DWP that it should publish the UC reports in question. Nothing will convince the DWP that it should publish any of its reports on any of its major IT-related projects or programmes.

If they need to, Iain Duncan Smith or Lord Freud, his minister, will simply sign a ministerial veto preventing publication of the UC reports under the FOI Act. If there is a legal challenge to the veto, as with the veto on the release of Prince Charles’ letters, IDS will be pleased to have the matter kicked into touch; and while the legalities stretch out over years the UC reports will continue to moulder in locked DWP cupboards.. Eventually they may be released – when they are so old nobody will care what they say. Or they will have disintegrated ( and no, the DWP doesn’t always keep its most secret reports electronically).

That’s what open government means to the DWP… precisely nothing.

Millions of pounds of secret DWP reports

Judge rules that key Universal Credit reports should be published

DWP throws money at keeping Universal Credit reports secret

Too much dishonesty and secrecy over Universal Credit project?

DWP criticised for “worrying” secrecy

DWP refused to release Universal Credit report to MPs

“Outrageous” secrecy at DWP (2005) 

MPs criticise secrecy in DWP IT probe (2004)

5 Comments

Posted in Campaign4Change, DWP, excessive secrecy, FOI, Freedom of Information, Government IT, IT projects, IT-related failures, Universal Credit

Tagged

Survive a Public Accounts Committee hearing – a lesson for ministers and top civil servants?

Posted on 10/04/2014 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

Mark Thompson was Director General of the BBC for eight years from 2004 to 2012. He was one of the highest paid in the public sector, earning more than £800,000.  He’s now CEO of the New York Times Company.

When he went before the Public Accounts Committee in February 2014 he faced accusations he had mislead MPs over the BBC’s Digital Media Initiative which was cancelled in 2013. The BBC wrote off £98.4m on the project.

Thompson has emerged from the affair unscathed although he had presided over the project.  Indeed he seems to have impressed the committee’s MPs who are notoriously hard to please.

In today’s PAC report on the failure of DMI, MPs appear to have preferred Thompson’s evidence over that of other witnesses. So how is it possible to come to a PAC to answer accusations of misleading Parliament and end up winning over your accusers?

Today’s PAC report on DMI criticises the BBC for:

–  complacency in taking a “very high-risk” project in-house from Siemens

–  spending years working on a system that did not meet users’ needs

–  not knowing enough about progress which led to Parliament being   misinformed that all was well when it wasn’t

– ending up with a system that costs £3m a year to run, compared to £780,000 a year for the 40 year-old “Infax” system it was designed to replace. And Infax works 10 times faster.

In February 2014 Committee chairman Margaret Hodge began her questioning of Thompson over DMI by pointing out that, three years earlier, in 2011, he had assured the PAC that all was well with the project when it wasn’t.

Thompson told Hodge in February 2011 that DMI was “out in the business” and “there are many programmes that are already being made with DMI”. In reality, the DMI had been used to make only one programme, called ‘Bang Goes the Theory’ – and problems on the project at that time were deepening but, as in many public sector IT-based projects that go wrong, such as Universal Credit, bad news from the project team was not being escalated to top management (or the BBC Trust).

How Thompson won over PAC MPs

At the PAC hearing in February 2014 Hodge asked Thompson if he had misled the Committee when he spoke positively about DMI in 2011.

Thompson’s reply was so free of reserve that it appears to have taken the wind out of Hodge.

Thompson replied: “I don’t believe that I have misled you on any other matter, and I do not believe that I knowingly misled you on this one.

“I will answer your question directly, but can I just make one broad point about DMI before then? In my time at the BBC, we had very many successful technology projects—very large projects, some of them much larger than DMI. I believe that the team, including John Linwood [then the BBC’s Chief Technology Officer], who were in the middle of DMI, had many successes—for example, digital switchover, West One, Salford and BBC iPlayer.

“I just wanted to say … everything I have heard and seen makes me feel that DMI was not a success. It failed as a project. It failed in a way that also meant the loss of a lot of public money. As the director-general who was at the helm when DMI was created and developed and who, in the end, oversaw much of the governance system that, as we will no doubt discuss, did not perform perfectly in this project, I just want to say sorry.

“I want to apologise to you and to the public for the failure of this project. That is the broad point.”

Hodge (who would normally, at a point such as this, launch her main offensive) said simply:

“Thank you.”

Usually civil servants will deny that a big IT-based project has actually failed. Many times the archetypal civil servant Sir David Nicholson, when Chief Executive of the NHS, defended the failed NPfIT at PAC hearings.

But Thompson told PAC MPs:  “Here we are in the beginning of 2014—I am not going to debate with you whether or not this project [DMI] failed. I am sure we can talk about how, why, where and so forth, but it definitely failed.

“When I came to see you in February 2011, I believed that the project was in very good shape indeed. Why did I believe that? I had seen a number of programmes myself—I had been and seen parts of DMI working on ‘Bang Goes the Theory’; I knew that ‘The One Show’ had started to use elements of DMI a few weeks earlier; and I knew that a kind of prototype version of the technology had been used in the very, very successful ‘Frozen Planet’ natural history series.

“I have gone back and asked the BBC to look at all the briefing materials—I had a voluminous amount of briefing from the BBC—and there is a real consistency between the briefing I got – .”

Richard Bacon: Sorry, a real inconsistency?

Thompson: No, a real consistency between the briefing I got and the evidence that I gave. To be honest, some of this is going to go very much to the point Mr Bacon was making earlier on (about what is or is not a deployment).

Stephen Barclay: Just a second…So it was consistent, but consistently wrong, wasn’t it, because just the following month, after the consistent briefing, you were then aware that it was going to miss the key milestone? From March 2011 you knew it [DMI] was not going to hit the deadline.

Thompson: If I may say so, what I am trying to focus on at the moment is the question—I understand, given subsequent events, the perfectly reasonable question—about whether the testimony I gave in February 2011 misled you or not… My belief is that my testimony gave a faithful and accurate account of my understanding of the project at this point.

Hodge: But were you misled, then?

Thompson: Let me give you just a sense of my briefing. To be honest, there were echoes of this in John Linwood’s testimony a few minutes ago, and Mr Bacon has helped me to understand this by putting his finger on the use of one word in particular, which is ‘deployment’. This is the timeline …”

Thompson then did something civil servants rarely do, if ever, when they appear before the committee. He read from the internal briefings he had received on the project in 2010 and 2011 . Those briefings indicated all was well.

He was not even shown a draft Accenture report in December 2010 that said the elements of the DMI examined (by Accenture) were not robust enough for programme-making and that significant remedial work was required.

Thompson said that the day before he gave evidence to the PAC in February 2011 he was given an internal note which said:

“Our next release [of DMI], Enhanced Production Tools, entered into user acceptance testing this week. This release builds on the production tool we previously delivered in 2010, Fabric Workspace, and desktop editing and logging.

“We will deploy its release to pilot users in Bristol, the ‘Blue Peter’ production team, ‘The One Show’ current affairs team, ‘Bang Goes the theory’ — again — ‘Generation Earth’, weather and ‘Pavlopetri’ inside London Factual.”

Thompson had the firm impression that DMI was challenging but that the BBC was starting to deliver the system and users had been positive about the elements delivered.

Thompson said in February 2014, “Mr Bacon is right about the very bullish use of the world “deployed”, meaning, perhaps, elements that have been loaded on to a desktop but not really extensively used: that was the background to the remarks I made to you in February 2011. I am absolutely clear that at the time that was what I knew and believed about the project.”

Hodge: So you were misled?

Thompson replied, in essence, that the BBC’s business users tried to make DMI work but most of them gave up. There were tensions between the project team who were enthusiastic about DMI and the business users who, mostly, weren’t.

These were complicated, difficult issues, said Thompson. “There was a pronounced and, it would appear, growing difference of opinion between the team making DMI and the business users on how effective and how real the technology was.

“You will understand that I have been involved in a lot of projects at the BBC and in other organisations, and I can smell business obstinacy. I can smell when a business is unready, is not prepared to play ball or is constantly moving the goalposts.

“I absolutely understand John Linwood’s particular perspective, given what he was doing. He was a very passionate advocate of the project, and I understand all of that.

“In my time, which ended when I left in September 2012, I saw great efforts being made by the business—in other words, by colleagues inside BBC Vision, BBC North and elsewhere—to get DMI to work. Although there were tensions, I do not believe that those tensions, which frankly were more or less inevitable, were themselves a central and critical part of the project’s failure.”

Richard Bacon: … It sounds to me as if the people getting the business case through the main governance processes were technology and finance people. I want to be clear on what you are saying. It sounds to me as if the technology people were very gung-ho and the experience of the business people on the ground was that it was not necessarily working as well as they had been led to believe, so they probably lost faith in it. Is that a fair summary?

Thompson: “I believe that that was definitely what started to happen, certainly by the end of 2011 and through 2012. It happened for understandable reasons. This has been a troubled project…

“I thought great efforts were made in BBC Vision and in BBC North both by senior people and by some front-line programme makers to help us to get the thing to work.

“Where my perspective perhaps differs from John’s perspective – it is very easy for me to sit here and say that this project failed because some difficult programme makers refused to use it, although there may have been an element of that somewhere – is that I thought that, overall, this was a project on which there was a lot of work and effort to try to get it to work on the business side…”

Hodge asked again if Thompson had been misled when he assured the PAC in February 2011 that DMI was being used at the BBC.

Thompson: I believed it.

Hodge: You believed it?

Thompson: Yes.

Hodge:  You believed it, but were you being misled?

Thompson: “I think that the language that the team was using, combined to some extent with the fact that I had seen what looked like a very positive demonstration of it … I had heard that “The One Show” had also started using it, and I saw a list of other programmes that were also using it. That combined with the language in the briefing led me to believe that it was being more extensively used.”

PAC conclusion

The PAC could have concluded in its report today that the BBC had misled Parliament in February 2011. But MPs used the word “misinformed” instead.

“Neither the [BBC’s] Executive Board nor the [BBC] Trust knew enough about the DMI’s progress, which led to Parliament being misinformed. While [Thompson] assures us that he gave a faithful and accurate account of his understanding of the project at that point in early 2011, he was mistaken and there was confusion within the BBC about what had actually been deployed and used.

“In its reporting on major projects, the BBC needs to use clear milestones that give the Executive and the Trust an unambiguous and accurate account of progress and any problems.”

Comment

The PAC had every right to be angry.  So credible were the BBC’s assurances about DMI in February 2011 that the Committee published a report in April 2011 that reflected those assurances. It was wrong.

But there is a positive element in the failure of DMI – and that is the completely open and honest testimony of Mark Thompson.

MPs on the PAC are used to be being misled – usually by the sin of omission – when civil servants and ministers come before them. But when Thompson read from his internal briefings it was easy to see how he came to the view that DMI in February 2011 was showing signs of a success.

It was clear to MPs that Thompson had not set out to mislead.

Perhaps the moral of the story is that you can go far with honesty and openness. That’s not an easy lesson for the ministers and civil servants who have to appear before the PAC, but it has certainly served Thompson well.

BBC Digital Media Initiative – Public Accounts Committee report

 

3 Comments

Posted in Accenture, Campaign4Change, change management, Department of Health, excessive secrecy, Government IT, IT and the Business, IT projects, IT-related failures, managing change, npfit, public sector