Category Archives: excessive secrecy

Should Liverpool Council smile now it’s ending BT joint venture?

Posted on 14/03/2014 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

Liverpool Direct Ltd describes itself as the largest public/private partnership of its kind in the UK. BT and Liverpool City Council formed the joint venture in 2001. At one point it employed more than 1,300 people.

Last year the joint venture had a visit from  Prince Edward who met its apprentices and trainees.

Now Liverpool City Council is taking full ownership of the joint venture. BT is handing back its 60% share in Liverpool Direct to the council. But the way the dissolution is being handled is like a theatre compere smiling exaggeratedly at the audience while he pushes off stage a performer who has overstayed his welcome.

Indeed the council’s report on why BT is being pushed out has an oversized grin on every page. Too much self-conscious praise for BT, perhaps. Which may show how political outsourcing deals have become.

This is the first sentence of the council’s report on why the joint venture with BT is ending:

“BT and Liverpool City Council have enjoyed a long and successful partnership through the joint venture company Liverpool Direct Limited.”

And then:

“The ethos of the Partnership was to place the ‘customer at the heart’ of the organisation through the development of innovative new ways of working building on BT’s global brand and reputation.”

There’s much more praise for BT. From the council’s report:

Groundbreaking achievements have included:

  • Establishment of the first ever 24x7x365 local government contact centre including a call centre which is top quartile
  • The only ‘Benefits Plus’ service in the UK.
  • A comprehensive and integrated network of One Stop Shops serving 350,000 visitors each year.
  • First class ICT infrastructure.
  • Creation of 300 new jobs supporting 3nd party business won by LDL.

But there’s a give-away line in one of the sets of bullet points on some of the benefits of the partnership. In 2011 came a refresh of the 10 year-old deal. The benefits of the refresh:

  • Further price reduction of £22.5m.
  • Increased share of third party business. Potential investment of £17m.
  • Continued sponsorship of ( e.g. BT Convention Centre 2012-2017)
  • The ‘write off’ by both parties of potential legal claims against Liverpool City Council estimated by BT of approximately £56m.
  • Increased ownership level from 20% to 40% in favour of the council.

Spot the anomaly – a write-of legal claims against each other of £56m? So the partnership wasn’t quite so wonderful. But that was 2011. Why is the council now pushing out BT from the Liverpool Direct joint venture – what the council calls officially “The Way Forward”?

Amid all the praise for BT it is not easy to see at first glance why Liverpool Direct is being taken into the council’s full ownership. It turns out that austerity is the reason. The council needs to make more cuts than BT is willing to make, and it recognises that BT needs to make a profit. Which raises the question of whether the council was willing to pay BT a decent profit during bountiful times until cuts began to bite.

From Liverpool Council’s report:

“In the early Autumn of 2013, both parties were in active discussions in an effort to resolve the serious financial savings Liverpool City Council needed to make between 2014 and 2017.

“As a result of these discussions and negotiations, BT agreed a further price reduction of £5m contribution to the budget process for 2014/15 together with a further £5m for the following financial year.

“Whilst the Council really appreciated BT’s continued commitment to the city, the current budget deficit would require a far more substantive financial contribution from the Contract both for 2014/15 and for future years.

“Unfortunately BT feels unable to commit to any further price reduction within the Contract as they need to sustain their own financial position. Moreover, the City Council is now well placed, as a result of the long collaboration with BT and the learning gained from the Partnership, to continue to drive forward business transformation and run the services with consequent cost savings to the city.”

The result is that negotiations will continue with a view to transferring BT’s 60% share in Liverpool Direct to the council by 31 March 2014; and the good news doesn’t stop there.

“The City Council and BT both believe that the transfer will enable additional savings to flow to the council including all income from third party contracts.

“BT remains committed to serving residents and businesses in Liverpool and its long and successful relationship with Liverpool City Council will carry on with BT continuing to provide a range of services to the council. During negotiations in late 2013 BT announced it plans to recruit a further 240 staff in Liverpool to support the growth of high-speed broadband services and has recently committed to being a major sponsor of the 2014 International Festival of Business.”

A dark side?

Behind the smiles Liverpool City Council has, it seems, an unusually secretive side.   Richard Kemp CBE has been a member of Liverpool City Council for 30 years having held major portfolios in both control and opposition. He is leader of the Liberal Democrats on the Council. He was Vice Chair of the Local Government Association of England & Wales for more than 6 years.

He says on his blog that has “taken the very unusual step of asking for two independent enquiries into activities of Liverpool City Council”. He adds: “The cases are related and refer to the tangled web of relationships which surround the Liverpool/Liverpool Direct Ltd/Lancashire/One Call Ltd/BT activities.

“In the first instance I have asked that the Lancashire Police extend their Lancashire investigation into Liverpool. In the second I have asked the Information Commissioner to look at the appalling record of the council in responding to freedom of information requests about any matter relating to Liverpool Direct Ltd.”

He says the council has an excellent record of responding to FOI requests – except when it comes to LDL. “When I raised this with the Mayor at the Mayoral Select Committee I didn’t get any answers …”

He also says:

“I find it amazing that I have been told that no contract exists between Liverpool, Lancashire and BT only to find that there is a legal agreement! As a layman I am unclear as to what the difference is between these two positions.

“We now need external scrutiny and investigation to examine these tangled relationships and work out not only who agreed what and when but also whether Liverpool and Lancashire tax payers are getting value for money for this deal.

“In a system where there is no internal scrutiny, Liverpool Labour members have to ask permission to raise issues in the scrutiny process, I feel that I have no alternative but to ask for help in looking at these affairs outside the council.

“In my career I have not only been a councillor for a long time but also asked to work in other councils which were in severe difficulties with their governance structures. Liverpool feels as bad as any council that I have worked in. There is no clear definition of Member and Officer roles.

“ No effective challenges exist within the system and a centralised almost Stalinist decision-making process pertains … I hope that these external investigations will take place and then that they force change in this secretive and opaque council.”

Infighting

A local paper, the Liverpool Echo, has also been investigating the council and its deal with BT.

It says the deal “has been dogged by accusations of infighting between BT and the Council, after top QCs were brought in to settle disputes over how much work would be awarded to LDL under the terms of its contract”.

An internal council report obtained by the Echo before agreement for the contract refresh in 2011 “showed the it took place amid the threat of costly legal claims by BT if city bosses pulled the plug and did not stay in partnership with them until 2017”.

Private/public deals too secretive – MPs today

A report by the Public Accounts Committee published today Private Contractors and Public Spending says private and public partnerships are too secretive – and they lie largely outside the FOI Act. Indeed a BBC File on 4 investigation into the growing influence of accountancy companies such as Capita in public life reached similar conclusions. File on 4 suggested that even if the contract between Service Birmingham, Capita and Birmingham City Council were published in full it could prove impenetrably complicated.

Margaret Hodge MP, chairman of the Public Accounts Commitee, said today:

 “There is a lack of transparency and openness around Government’s contracts with private providers, with ‘commercial confidentiality’ frequently invoked as an excuse to withhold information.

“It is vital that Parliament and the public are able to follow the taxpayers’ pound to ensure value for money. So, today we are calling for three basic transparency measures:

– the extension of Freedom of Information to public contracts with private providers;

– access rights for the National Audit Office; and

– a requirement for contractors to open their books up to scrutiny by officials.

Comment:

It’s remarkable how council outsourcing deals are becoming more cabalistic despite many initiatives toward more open government.

It’s a pity that things have reached a point where Richard Kemp, a Liverpool councillor of 30 years, ends up reporting his authority to the police and the Information Commissioner.

Meanwhile Liverpool City Council, which is one of the most self-image-protecting authorities in the UK, ends a long-standing joint venture with BT by giving the supplier nothing but praise – in public.

Democracy is a form of government in which all eligible citizens participate equally, either directly or indirectly through elected representatives. Clearly that’s not happening properly in Liverpool – or  some other parts of local government.

Reasons I have asked police and Information Commissioner to come in 

BT ad Capita  –  outsourcing joint ventures under pressure in Liverpool and Birmingham 

Private contractors and public spending – Public Accounts Committee report published today

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Posted in BT, Capita, excessive secrecy, FOI, Freedom of Information, legal disputes, local democracy, local government, managing outsourced services, outsourcing, public sector, public services, public-private partnerships, reducing cost strategically

Another DWP leader quits – is Universal Credit IT really working?

Posted on 12/03/2014 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

As the head of the Universal Credit programme, Howard Shiplee, returns to work after being off sick with bronchitis, news emerges that the DWP is to lose its IT head Andy Nelson whose responsibilities include Universal Credit.

The highly regarded Nelson is to leave this summer after little more than a year as the DWP’s CIO.

The DWP’s press office – which for more than a year had a brief to tell journalists that Universal Credit was on time and to budget – is saying that Nelson’s brief was the whole of the DWP’s IT. The implication is that Nelson had little to do with Universal Credit.

But Nelson’s brief specifically included Universal Credit. At the weekend IDS told the BBC’s Sunday Politics that the IT for Universal Credit is working. If that were so, wouldn’t Nelson want to be associated with such a high-profile success?

The FT, in an article in February on Shiplee’s sick leave, pointed out that Terry Moran, the civil servant in charge of universal credit at its inception, retired from the department last year after an extended period of sick leave.

Hilary Reynolds, a department civil servant who was appointed programme director in November 2012, moved to another role four months later. She in turn had taken over from Malcolm Whitehouse, who had stepped down from the programme around the same time as Moran.

Departures of top DWP people may be one of the few outward signs of the true state of UC IT until the next government reviews the programme and perhaps announces the results.

Open?

On the BBC’s Sunday Politics programme on 9 March 2014 IDS suggested he is being entirely open about the Universal Credit programme – he invited the media and come and see where it is being rolled out. But the DWP keeps hidden its internal reports on the actual state of the programme.  The Information Tribunal is currently weighing up whether the DWP should be ordered to publish one of its internal reports on the Universal Credit project.

IDS on BBC’s Sunday Politics

Below is a partial transcript of IDS’s interview with presenter Andrew Neil on the Universal Credit project. IDS refers incorrectly to write-offs of £28bn on IT programmes by the last government,  and he gives some seemingly contradictory answers.  If the government needs a spokesman to argue that day is night and night is day, IDS is probably the man.

Andrew Neil (presenter) Why has so much been written off on UC although it has barely been introduced?

IDS: “It’s a £2bn project and in the private sector IT programmes write off 30%-40% regularly because that’s the nature. The point I want to make here is that UC is already rolling out. The IT is working. We are improving as we go along. You keep your eye on the bits that don’t work and you make sure they don’t create a problem for the programme.

“The £40m that was written off was to do with security IT. I took the decision over a year and half ago. That is the standard write down – the amortisation of costs over a period. The existing legacy systems were written down in cost terms years ago in the accounts but they continue to work right now.

“We are doing pathfinders and learning a lot about it but I am not going this again like the last government did which is big bang launches and then you have problems like they had with the health IT and it crashes. You do it phase by phase, you learn what you have to do and you make the changes, then you continue to get the rest of it out.

“The key point is that it is rolling out and I invite anybody from the media etc to come and look at where it is being rolled out …”

Neil: You say it [Universal Credit] is being rolled out but nobody notices. You were predicting that one million people would be on universal credit by April and now it’s March and there are only 3,200 are on it.

IDS: “I am not bandying figures around but it is 6,000 and rising. I changed the way we were rolling out over a year ago. Under the advice I brought in from outside – he said: you are better off Pathfinding this out, making sure you learn the lessons, roll it out slower and you gain momentum later on.

“On the timetables for the roll-out we are pretty clear. It is going to rollout in the timescales originally set [completion by October 2017] but the scale of that rollout … so what we are going to do is roll it out in the North West,  recognise how it works properly, and then you roll it out region by region.

“There are lot of variations and variables in this process but if you do it that way you won’t end up with the kind of debacle the last government had in the health service and many others where they wrote off something in the order of £28 billion pounds of IT programmes. We won’t be doing that. There is £38bn of net benefits so it is worth getting it right.”

Neil: When will UC be universal – when will it cover the whole country?

IDS: “By 2016 everybody who is claiming a benefit will be claiming universal credit.

Neil: But not everybody will be getting it by then.

IDS: “Because there are some who are on sickness benefits and they will take longer to bring on because it is a little more problematic, and a bit more difficult because many of them have no work expectations. For those who are on tax credits and job seekers allowance they will be making claims on universal credit and many are already doing that now. There are over already 200,000 people around the country who are on parts of universal credit now.”

Neil: When will everybody be on UC?

IDS: “We said they would be on UC by 2018.”

Are you on track for that?

“Yes we are. 2016 is when everybody claiming this benefit will be on. Then you have to bring on those who have been on a long time on other benefits. UC is a big and important reform. It is not an IT reform. IT is only the automation. The important point is that it will be a massive cultural change.   The change is dramatic. You can get a jobseeker to take a small part-time job immediately while they are looking for work. That improves their likelihood of getting longer work and it means flexibility for business.”

Comment

The DWP says it needs a “safe space” to discuss the progress of its projects without the glare of publicity. That’s one reason it refuses to publish any of the reviews it has commissioned on UC. But the hiding of these reports, which have cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of pounds, means that IDS can go on TV and say almost whatever he likes about progress on the Universal Credit project, without fear of authoritative contradiction.

Why does the Cabinet Office allow the DWP and other departments to keep secret their internal reports on the progress or otherwise of their IT-based projects and programmes? Probably because the Cabinet Office’s minister Francis Maude doesn’t want to be too intrusive.

So we’ll be left guessing on the state of big IT-enabled programmes until the scheme’s defects are too great to be hidden or the NAO publishes a report. Will the former that be the fate of Universal Credit IT?

Andy Nelson quits as DWP CIO

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Posted in Accenture, Campaign4Change, Capgemini, change management, DWP, excessive secrecy, Freedom of Information, Government IT, HP, IBM, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, operational issues, Real-Time Information, Universal Credit

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Is IDS losing his cool over Universal Credit IT?

Posted on 06/02/2014 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

IDS was polite and calm, almost deferential, when he went before MPs of the Work and Pensions Committee in September 2012.  “Can I say it is always a privilege to be here?” he said.

At at Monday’s hearing of the same committee, though, he was at times tetchy, patronising and mildly bullying. “I don’t think this committee can run the department,” he replied when asked why he hadn’t told the committee in 2012 of problems with the Universal Credit IT project.

Several times he talked over the MP who was asking him questions, with the result neither could be clearly heard.

[If he’s like that at meetings with DWP officials would anyone want to tell him something he doesn’t want to hear? Perhaps his loss of cool on Monday reflected the baffling complexity, and rising costs, of the waterfall part of  Universal Credit’s  IT programme.]

IDS might also have been shaken by the absence of his most authoritative ally, Howard Shiplee, who has been off sick since shortly before Christmas.

Hidden 

Over a period of more than a year, the DWP and IDS fed the work and pensions committee good news about progress on the Universal Credit IT project. The truth didn’t surface until the National Audit Office published its report on UC in September 2013.

Unknown to the committee in 2012, the DWP was struggling at that time to set out how the detailed design of systems and processes would fit together and relate to the objectives of Universal Credit. This was raised repeatedly in 2012 by internal audit, the Major Projects Authority and a supplier-led review. The committee wasn’t told.

Hence Dame Anne Begg, the softly-spoken chairman, came to Monday’s meeting with a direct question. Why, when IDS came before the Work and Pensions committee in September 2012, did he make no mention of having commissioned a red team review into the Universal Credit project several months earlier.

“Because it was an internal review,” replied IDS. “We were looking the results of that and trying to take whatever decisions were necessary. It was about some of the issues that were going on in the UC team…”

Begg: “But why didn’t you tell us a review was going on?”

IDS: “I don’t tell the committee everything that is happening within the Department until we have reached a conclusion about what is actually happening.”

Begg: “It was an ideal opportunity when you appeared before us in September [2012] that you could have said there were concerns about what was happening with Universal Credit but at that session you were very bullish about how successful everything was.”

IDS: “I still remain very confident about how successful it will be. [Note a difference in tenses between the question and answer]. At the time we were working out how we would make the reset.”

Sir Humphrey

At IDS’s sided was Robert Devereux, Permanent Secretary at the DWP, who seemed at times a parody of Sir Humphrey. [Animated in the delivery of some of his answers Devereux looked as if he was saying something interesting until you listened to the words.]

One MP asked Devereux why the DWP had given written evidence to the committee in 2012 that Universal Credit was on track when it wasn’t. Devereux said that UC was a large and complex programme. “You are constantly evaluating and re-evaluating your forward plans … as you go along things change.” MPs were none the wiser.

Misled?

Begg [to IDS]: Did you not think it appropriate that this scrutiny committee of the House of Commons, which oversees the work the department does, [should have been kept] informed about changes?

IDS: “With respect we did keep the Committee informed as and when we had clarified what we were actually doing and what we thought the problem was and where it existed and how you isolate it and what changes you made. I don’t for one moment agree in any way at all that we hid stuff. We knew we would be accountable to the committee and all would become public… I don’t think this committee can run the department.”

Begg pointed out that IDS had failed to mention a report of the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority in February 2013. That report had notified the DWP of flaws in UC governance, management and programme design – despite the same matters having been raised in previous MPA reports.

Begg:  “You gave oral evidence to us on 10 July [2012] … but you did not refer at that session to the critical Major Projects Authority report or the reset which had already taken place earlier that year.”

IDS: “I cannot remember what I said to the committee. I have no desire to look back.”

Begg said the DWP told the committee that the pathfinder projects demonstrated that the IT systems worked. “You cannot get any more definitive than that,” said Begg. IDS gave no clear answer.

Obfuscation

Mid-way through the hearing, the mood of some of the exchanges was summed up by Labour MP Debbie Abrahams who told IDS:

“I cannot say with the strongest feeling my concern about the hubris that you have demonstrated in the tone to this committee. You haven’t explained, certainly to my own satisfaction – anybody who is watching will draw their own conclusions – you have not given any satisfactory explanation about how you have informed, or kept this committee informed, about the difficulties the department was experiencing.

“There have been obfuscation and smoke and mirrors even up to a few weeks before the report from the National Audit Office [in September 2013]. The memorandum that was released in August – this was clearly saying everything was fine and dandy. It is clearly not. I give you one more opportunity to answer, so you can explain to this committee, why such poor information is provided by your department.”

IDS replied: “I just don’t agree with you, and I don’t agree that we have done anything else but be open and honest about what the issues are, as and when they have been identified and what we would do about them as and when we have made our decisions about them…

Open?

“When we found something wrong we went and sorted it out. As we sorted it out we made clear direction about that, and eventually through the NAO, the PAC [Public Accounts Committee and the [Work and Pensions] committee.

“I think we have been pretty open about it. I don’t think there’s anything more. In fact in a sense we are going round and round in circles here at this committee hearing at the moment.”

Begg:  “We are not convinced you have got it sorted out.”

Comment

Monday’s hearing shows how ministers and officials justify the hiding of reports on costly IT-enabled projects that are going wrong. IDS didn’t even tell MPs in July 2013 that the Major Projects Authority had four months earlier recommended an immediate pause in the programme.

Most worrying of all, officials and IDS seem content that the DWP gave the work and pensions committee – in September 2012 and July 2013 – a good news story on the state of the Universal Credit IT project while truth about the project’s problems stayed hidden.

IDS suggested it was not necessary to tell MPs about reports until ministers have “reached a conclusion about what is actually happening” That may be never.

It’s time for public accounts and work and pensions MPs to insist on seeing Major Projects Authority reviews, and other reports, on the progress or otherwise of big government IT-enabled programme such as UC. MPs should not have to wait for an NAO report to get the truth.

Governments, whatever their hue, will always refuse to publish these reports contemporaneously, such is the will of departmental heads. They have been refusing to publish the reports for more than 20 years.

But if MPs keep insisting with an unbreakable tenacity on their publication  – and for publication before they are out of date – it may eventually happen, and gone will be the power of ministers and officials to mislead MPs on the state of big IT-enabled programmes.

Until publication happens, is there much point in MPs questioning IDS or his officials on the UC IT programme? They will get only the public relations version of the truth.

 

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Posted in Campaign4Change, DWP, excessive secrecy, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, openness and transparency, procurement, project management, public services, Real-Time Information, Universal Credit

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Dare anyone criticise this IT project – with the CEO as leader?

Posted on 03/02/2014 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Croydon Health Services NHS Trust has had mixed success with its go-live of the Cerner Millennium system.

It is said to be a technical success but last week board members of the Croydon Clinical Commissioning Group expressed concerns about ongoing problems with the system.

Fouzia Harrington, director of quality and governance told the Croydon Advertiser: “The implementation [of Cerner] itself went well in technical terms, but there have been some implications about how it has been used by staff.

“It’s had far more impact in terms of the time it takes to book people in, for example. There have also been implications in terms of lost information about patients.

“There has been a lack of information about hospital activity, which has an impact on finances and, potentially,the quality of services patients are receiving…”

David Hughes, a lay member of the board, was not satisfied with that reassurance.

“You say that no harm has occurred,” he said,  “but while we’ve had no direct incident so far, patient care has definitely suffered.

“You talk about increased waiting times and there’s a risk that harm may occur because of the difficulty in getting in touch with clinicians who actually know what is going on with the patient.

“I’m very concerned from a quality point of view that our main provider has a serious problem with its information systems.”

Hughes called for action. Although the trust may not be aware of an incident yet it may “come out through further investigation that there has been”.

Some waiting times have increased,  the CCG cannot be certain of exact levels of activity at the hospital, and missing information has made it difficult to commission some services.

The concerns were raised at a board meeting on Tuesday.

Dr Tony Brzezicki, chairman of the CCG, said new system would eventually lead to improvements.  “Hospital patients had five sets of notes before. That in itself posed a risk that Cerner will mitigate,” he said.

“However, there have been administrative delays which mean longer waiting times for patients.There are also issues for the service to primary care which is a significant risk. Some of the problems have been resolved though I am concerned at the time scale because they are certainly impacting on my practice.”

Success

John Goulston is the Croydon Health Services NHS Trust CEO. One of his previous jobs was as Programme Director of the London Programme for IT at NHS London. The LPfIT was formerly part of the National Programme for IT. 

As well as CEO, he chairs the trust’s Informatics Programme Board which has taken charge of bringing Cerner Millennium to Croydon’s community health services and the local University Hospital, formerly the Mayday.

Goulston reported to his board that the Cerner go-live – on 30 September and 1 October last year – was a success.

“Our partners Cerner, BT and Ideal have commented that the Trust has undertaken one of the most efficient roll-outs of the system they have worked on, with more users adopting the system more quickly and efficiently than other trusts … the success we have achieved to date is the result of the efforts of every single system user and all staff members,” said Goulston.

Goulston has said the trust deployed the “largest number of clinical applications in a single implementation in the NHS”. 

The Department of Health provided central funding, and the trust paid for implementation “overheads”.  The Health and Social Care Information Centre was the trust’s partner for the go-live.

The Croydon Advertiser asked Croydon Health Servicesa series of questions about Cerner, including its cost to the NHS, but was sent a short statement.

A spokesman told the Advertiser the system would improve patient administration and means that nurses have access to “quality, detailed information” when delivering care.

He added: “During the initial switch over of systems in September while staff were getting used to the system, some patients did need to wait slightly longer to check in for their clinic appointments.

“The trust has maintained and surpassed our 18 week referral to treatment targets from the initial roll out.”

Croydon’s response

Campaign4Change put some questions to the Croydon trust. These are the questions and its responses: .

Is the trust being completely open – taking seriously the duty of candour –  about problems arising from the Cerner Millennium go-live?

“The Trust takes its duty of candour on all issues very seriously; we believe that transparency is essential in running a modern NHS organisation. We are held to account by our board at public meetings, where the public are able to attend and question our senior management team, by our local health overview and scrutiny committee and our commissioners.

“Recent press coverage on CRS Millennium appeared in the local press when the system was discussed in a public meeting of our commissioners.”

As the CEO is leading the Cerner Millennium project, does this make it difficult for trust staff and trust directors to say anything even mildly critical about the implementation?

“Staff opinions on the implementation of CRS Millennium, both positive and negative, are welcomed by the Trust. Staff have given their frank opinions of the system directly to the Chief Executive both in our monthly all staff meetings and at the open staff engagement surgeries held by our Chief Executive and Chairman. All staff opinions are taken seriously and are acted upon appropriately.”

Given the CEO’s enthusiasm for the implementation is there a special onus on the press office to defend the implementation and play down problems? [I note that the Croydon Advertiser implied its questions had not been answered, and that the Trust gave a short statement instead.]

“The communications team respond to and facilitate a large number of external requests, including from the media, in a transparent, timely and appropriate manner. This same approach is followed on questions about CRS Millennium.

“CRS Millennium will bring about many improvements to patient care and Trust efficiency and we are enthusiastic about communicating these; it is unfortunate that recent press coverage did not consider these positive benefits in any depth.”

A comment on the Croydon Advertiser’s website says:

“When I checked in to out-patients I supplied all my personal details; however the post code I gave was declared invalid by the new system. That filled me with confidence. I also gave my contact as a mobile; however they tried to ring me using an old landline number.”

Comment

It’s generally accepted that having a high-level sponsor for an IT project is essential but when the lead is the CEO, does that make it difficult for people to challenge and constructively criticise?

A “good news” culture tends to prevail – as happened on Universal Credit, on the BBC’s Digital Media Initiative, and within the Department of Health on the NPfIT. Nobody dared to speak the whole truth to power. The truth tends to surface only when a new administration takes over or, in the case of Universal Credit, the minister obtained his own independent reports on project progress.

Campaign4Change put it to the Croydon trust that board directors see reports on the Cerner implementation only every two months and much can happen in the intervening period. This it did not deny.

Even if the trust’s directors met daily would they dare to challenge the CEO? And will the full facts  ever emerge? Things could be much better than CCG directors believe  – or much worse.

After nearly every major NPfIT implementation of the Cerner Millennium system in London and beyond (such as North Bristol) the facts were scarce, and reassurances that no patients had come to harm were plentiful. 

Here we go again?

**

Should lessons have been learned from these Cerner go-lives?

Barts and The London

Royal Free Hampstead

Weston Area Health Trust

Milton Keynes Hospital NHS Trust

Worthing and Southlands

Barnet and Chase Farm Hospitals NHS Trust

Nuffield Orthopaedic

North Bristol.

St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust

University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust

Birmingham Women’s Foundation Trust

NHS Bury

GPs asked to contact hundreds of patients who may have missed treatment after hospital’s cancer referrals blunder  – Pulse

London LMCs alert over Imperial cancer waits mix-up – Pulse.

GPs kept in the dark over hospital cancer blunder – Pulse

 IT system has increased waiting times and led to lost patient data.

Patient records go-live success – or NPfIT failure

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Posted in BT, BT Health, Campaign4Change, Department of Health, e-health, excessive secrecy, health, health records, LPfIT, NHS, npfit, openness and transparency, operational issues

Are Govt IT-based project disasters over? Ask the Army

Posted on 16/01/2014 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

When senior civil servants know an IT-based project is in trouble and they’re unsure how bad things are, they sometimes offer their minister an all-encompassing euphemism to publicly describe the status of the scheme – teething.

Which may be why the defence secretary Philip Hammond told the House of Commons in November 2013 that the IT project to support army recruiting was having “teething” problems.

Now Hammond knows more, he says the problems are “big”. He no longer uses the “t” word. Speaking about the £440m 10-year Recruitment Partnering Project in the House of Commons this week Hammond said:

“Yes, there are big problems with the IT and I have told the House on repeated occasions that we have IT challenges…”

Only a few days ago Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude suggested that Government IT was no longer a byword for disaster, though he accepted there were still challenges.

In a speech on how he expected the UK to become the G8’s most digital government by next year (whatever that means) Maude said: “… it’s great news that DVLA is about to launch online driving records which can be used by anyone with a driving licence as well as by the insurance industry.

“Back in 2010 our digital offering was limited at best and government IT was a by-word for disaster … There are still challenges but with the help of the Government Digital Service I am determined that the UK will be the G8’s most digital government by next year.”

A few days later The Times reported on a leaked Gartner report on the army Recruitment Partnering Project. The report expressed concerns about the entire plan, including a poor project management team and delays that were allowed to spiral out of control.

It claimed that the Army’s recruitment division had failed to challenge MoD policy in 2011 that had apparently favoured the less suitable of the two competing bidders chasing the contract.

Hammond is said to be mulling over a £50m payout for Capita to build a new infrastructure for the recruiting system instead of trying to integrate it with systems supplied by the “Atlas” consortium under the Defence Information Infrastructure project. Hammond told the House of Commons this week:

“… there have been initial difficulties with that recruiting process as we transition to the new recruiting arrangements with Capita.

“In particular, we have encountered difficulties with the IT systems supporting the application and enlistment process. The decision to use the legacy Atlas IT platform was deemed at the time to be the quickest and most cost-effective way of delivering the new recruitment programme.

“An option to revert to a Capita hosting solution was included in the contracts as a back-up solution.

“I was made aware in the summer of last year that the Army was encountering problems with the integration of the Capita system into the Atlas platform. Since then we have put in place a number of workarounds and mitigation measures for the old IT platform to simplify the application process, and we have reintroduced military personnel to provide manual intervention to support the process.

“Having visited the Army’s recruitment centre in Upavon [Wiltshire] on 30 October, it became clear to me that, despite the Army putting in place measures to mitigate those problems in the near term, further long-term action was needed to fix the situation.

“It was agreed in principle at that point that the Atlas system was not capable of timely delivery of the Capita-run programme and that we would need to take up the option of reverting to Capita building a new IT platform specifically to run its system, which will be ready early next year.

“… we have already taken action to bring in a range of new initiatives that will make it progressively easier and quicker for applicants … the introduction this month of a new front-end web application for Army recruitment; a simplified online application form; more streamlined medical clearance processes …

“With an improved Army recruitment website, streamlined medicals and an increase in the number of recruiting staff, recruits should see a much-improved experience by the end of this month.

“.. we are looking at further ways of improving the management of the recruiting process in the intervening period before the introduction of the advanced IT system now being developed in partnership with Capita, which is expected to be deployed in February 2015…”

Vernon Croaker, Labour’s defence spokesman, said the recruitment project was an IT fiasco. He wondered why Hammond had initially described the problems as teething.

“Today we have learned [from newspapers] that the problems are even worse than anyone thought and still have not been fixed.

“Will the Defence Secretary tell the House which Minister signed off the deal and who has been responsible for monitoring it?

“… Will the Secretary of State also confirm that £15.5m has been spent building the existing flawed computer system behind the project? Finally, is it correct that this continuing disaster is costing taxpayers £1 million every month?…”

Croaker quoted a minister Andrew Robathan as telling MPs on 10 April 2013 that the “Recruiting Partnering Project with Capita…will lead to a significant increase in recruiting performance”.

Croaker said: “Is there any Member of this House, any member of our armed forces or, indeed, any member of the British public who still believes that?”

In March 2012 Capita announced that the Recruitment Partnering Project was valued at about £44m a year for 10 years and was expected to deliver benefits in excess of £300m to the armed forces. It would “release military recruiters back to the front line” said Capita.

Comment. Francis Maude is probably right: there don’t seem to be as many big IT-based project failures as in previous decades. But then the truth isn’t known because progress reports on big IT-related schemes are not published.

Indeed little would be known about the Capita Recruitment Partnering Project is not for the leaked report to The Times. Without the leak, public information on the state of the project would be confined to Hammond’s “teething problems” comment to MPs last November.

Internal and external reports on the state of the Universal Credit IT project continue to be kept secret.  It’s not even clear whether ministers are properly briefed on their big IT projects. Hammond almost certainly wasn’t last year. IDS was left to commission his own “red team” review of Universal Credit IT.

Perhaps the “good news” reporting culture in Whitehall explains why the NHS IT scheme, the NPfIT, continued to die painfully slowly for 7 years before senior officials and ministers started to question whether all was well.

Hammond is still getting wrong information. He described “Atlas” systems in the House of Commons as the “legacy IT platform”.

The Atlas contract for the Defence Information Infrastructure was awarded in 2005 for 10 years. It doesn’t even expire until next year. It may be convenient for officials to suggest that the reason Capita has been unable to link new recruitment systems into the DII network is because DII is old – legacy IT.  But the multi-billion pound Atlas DII project cannot be accurately described as “legacy” yet.

If ministers don’t get the truth about their big IT projects until serous problems are so obvious they can no longer be denied, how can Parliament and taxpayers expect to get the truth?

Lessons from NASA?

NASA put in place processes, procedures and rules to ensure engineers were open and deliberately adversarial in challenging assumptions. Even so it has had difficulties getting engineers to express  their views freely.

Diane Vaughan in her excellent book “The Challenger Launch Decision” referred to large organisations that proceeded as if nothing was wrong “in the face of evidence that something was wrong”.  She said NASA made a series of seemingly harmless decisions that “incrementally moved the space agency towards a catastrophic outcome”.

After the loss of Challenger NASA made many changes. But an investigation into the subsequent tragedy of the Columbia space shuttle indicated that little had actually changed – even though few of the top people who had been exposed to the lessons of Challenger were still in position.

If NASA couldn’t change when lives depended on it, is it likely the UK civil service will ever change?  A political heavyweight,  Francis Maude has tried and failed to get departments to be more open about progress or otherwise on their big IT-based projects.  Permanent secretaries now allow the out-of-date “traffic light” status of some projects to be published in the annual report of the Major Projects Authority. That is not openness.

The failure so far of the Recruitment Partnering Project, the routine suppression of information on technology-based scheme such as this, and the circumscribed “good news” briefings to ministers, suggest that government IT-based project failures are here to stay, despite the best intentions of the Cabinet Office, GDS and the Major Projects Authority.

Thank you to campaigner Dave Orr for his email on the recruitment project

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Posted in Accenture, Agile, BT, Campaign4Change, Capita, change management, Defence, DWP, excessive secrecy, GDS, Government digital Service, Government IT, HP, IBM, IT projects, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, MoD, npfit, openness and transparency, public sector, public services, Universal Credit

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Big 4 Universal Credit IT suppliers punished?

Posted on 09/01/2014 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

The  latest draft business case for Universal Credit suggests existing IT suppliers will have little to do with the “end-state digital solution” that is  due eventually to support the roll-out of UC.

The Department for Work and Pensions will use a mixture of its own and external people for the end-state digital solution.

Computer Weekly quotes part of the draft business case as saying:

“To extend the current IT solution we will be using a standard waterfall delivery approach largely using existing suppliers and commercial frameworks, in order to de-risk delivery and ensure UC continues to have a safe and secure introduction.

“The end-state digital solution will be delivered using an agile, and therefore iterative, approach as advocated by the Cabinet Office with significantly less reliance on the large IT suppliers delivering the current UC IT service.”

Politicalscrapbook.net picks up Computer Weekly’s report and says that Iain Duncan Smith “punishes Universal Credit IT suppliers“. 

Costs

Computer Weekly quotes the draft business case as putting the cost of the end-state solution at £106m – comprising external IT costs of £69m and in-house “Design and Build” team costs of £37m.

The total cost of UC IT is now put at £535m – down substantially on the £673m estimate in the DWP’s December 2012 UC business case.

UC project at “red” 

Yesterday the Guardian reported that Francis Maude and his team at the government digital service have objected to the twin-track approach to UC but were outflanked by “a majority” of other government ministers and project advisers, leaked minutes say.

The twin-track approach to UC IT means that the DWP and its main suppliers – HP, Accenture, IBM and BT – continue to develop existing systems (a blend of legacy and new technology) while a separate team develops a new “end-state” system for use by the end of 2017. It’s unclear how the two systems will differ. 

Computer Weekly quotes the latest draft business case as saying it is “unclear what the digital service will deliver and to what timescales”.

Due to the multitude of problems facing universal credit, the project has been coded “red” overall, according to the Guardian.

Comment

Computer Weekly has done well to gain sight of the latest draft business case for UC.

Whoever wrote the draft appears to accept the Cabinet Office’s case for departments to “move away from large ICT projects” and thus “reduce waste, provide a more flexible approach to complex business requirements that are likely to change over time and reduce the risk of project failures”. (National Audit Office, Universal Credit: early progress). 

But is the DWP simply telling the Cabinet Office what it wants to hear?  All the signs are that the big money at the DWP will continue to go to its main IT suppliers. 

The £106m agile “end-state digital solution” is a bonus system which may or may not materialise.  It is in essence a big, agile research project and the DWP is having trouble finding IT professionals to work on it.

If ever it’s a success it could start to replace existing UC IT in 2017 or beyond. But that may never happen. The DWP has already spent more than £300m on existing UC technology and is set to spend a lot more: around £90m. The DWP is unlikely to scrap it.

So HP, IBM, Accenture and BT are all but guaranteed a large income stream from the non end-state UC technology.

Even without the UC project the big 4 are guaranteed a large income from the DWP’s other work which includes:

– Personal Independence Implementation – 2.8bn 2011–2016
– Fraud and error programme – £770m  2012–2015
– Child maintenance group change 1.2bn 2009–2014
– Pensions reform Enabling Retirement Savings programme 1.04bn 2007–2018
– State Pension reform – single tier £114m 2012–2017
– Specialist Disability Employment programme – £203m 2012–2014

The big 4 will also continue to receive a large chunk of the DWP’s IT budget for maintaining and upgrading the existing software, hardware and networks.

Business cases are written by experts in the writing of Whitehall business cases.  Their main purpose is to provide a case for the Treasury to release funds for a project. They give current thinking on costs and benefits. The documents are revised when these change significantly.

So the statement in the UC draft business case that the new end-state digital solution will rely “significantly less” on existing UC IT suppliers means little: it is subject to change.

And the words “significantly less” are  unexplained. They may have no scientific basis. 

Worrying

The big 4 suppliers continue to be all-important to the DWP – and are so enmeshed that they decide at times how much they should be paid, suggests the NAO.

From its latest report on the UC project, the NAO comments on the DWP’s lack of control of suppliers :

– “In February 2013, the Major Projects Authority reported there was no evidence of the Department actively managing its supplier contracts and recommended that the Department needed to urgently get a grip of its supplier management.”

– “[The DWP has] limited IT capability and ‘intelligent client’ function leading to a risk of supplier self-review.”

– “[The DWP has] inadequate controls over what would be supplied, when and at what cost because deliverables were not always defined before contracts were signed.”

– “[The DWP has an] over-reliance on performance information that was provided by suppliers without Department validation.”

– ” … the Department did not enforce all the key terms and conditions of its standard contract management framework, inhibiting its ability to hold suppliers to account.”

So it would be naively optimistic to suppose that if the big 4 were to be frozen out of the end-state solution for UC that it would make much difference to their income from the DWP.      

UC in chaos or not?

A generous interpretation of all the available evidence on the UC project so far is that the DWP is working through, and understanding, the difficulties on an immensely complicated IT-enabled project.

And supporters of the twin-track approach could argue that two completely independent sets of teams are working in parallel and in discreet competition to produce the most successful system. One team comprises the big 4 using waterfall and the other a largely in-house team using agile.  Eventually one system will prevail, even if it’s 2020 or beyond that it handles securely online all types of claims. On completion the system will simplify benefit claims and cut the costs of administration.

A less generous interpretation of the available facts is that the UC IT project  is in chaos and that vast sums continue to be poured into a poorly formed strategy that nobody in government will concede is failing;  all parties are preoccupied with resolving problems as they arise and expecting irrationally that things will come good in the end.  Nobody should expect the full truth to emerge from those who have a deep interest in the project’s success including IDS and his permanent secretary Robert Devereux.

Howard Shiplee, head of the UC project, may still be getting his head around how chaotic things are. The highly capable David Pitchford, who headed UC  for a few months before he quit the civil service last year, came close to saying the project was in chaos. His Major Projects Authority said in February 2013 that the DWP needed to “rethink the delivery approach”, said the NAO.

Indeed the UC project shows many of the usual signs of a government IT-based project failure:

– major changes in the basic assumptions between the business case of December 2012 and the latest draft business case
– excessive secrecy (keeping secret a succession of internal and external reports on the project).
– defensiveness (continued DWP claims that problems are historic)
– a high turnover of leaders
– a culture of good news that “limited open discussion and stifled challenge”, said the NAO
– a lack of control of suppliers (NAO)
– repeated delays
– suppliers that get paid regardless of whether their systems are contributing to a  successful project.

To me things look chaotic but I hope I’m wrong. I’d like UC IT to work. IDS and Shiplee will probably know the whole truth – and they are still in post, to date.  If Shiplee leaves the project before the general election that could be an indication of how bad things really are.   

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Posted in Accenture, Agile, BT, Campaign4Change, change management, DWP, excessive secrecy, Government IT, HP, IBM, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, project management, supplier relationships, Universal Credit

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Top 5 posts on this site in last 12 months

Posted on 02/01/2014 | 1 comment

Below are the top 5 most viewed posts of 2013.  Of other posts the most viewed includes “What exactly is HMRC paying Capgemini billions for?” and “Somerset County Council settles IBM dispute – who wins?“.

1) Big IT suppliers and their Whitehall “hostages”

Mark Thompson is a senior lecturer in information systems at Cambridge Judge Business School, ICT futures advisor to the Cabinet Office and strategy director at consultancy Methods.

Last month he said in a Guardian comment that central government departments are “increasingly being held hostage by a handful of huge, often overseas, suppliers of customised all-or-nothing IT systems”.

Some senior officials are happy to be held captive.

“Unfortunately, hostage and hostage taker have become closely aligned in Stockholm-syndrome fashion.

“Many people in the public sector now design, procure, manage and evaluate these IT systems and ignore the exploitative nature of the relationship,” said Thompson.

The Stockholm syndrome is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages bond with their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them.

This month the Foreign and Commonwealth Office issued  a pre-tender notice for Oracle ERP systems. Worth between £250m and £750m, the framework will be open to all central government departments, arms length bodies and agencies and will replace the current “Prism” contract with Capgemini.

It’s an old-style centralised framework that, says Chris Chant, former Executive Director at the Cabinet Office who was its head of G-Cloud, will have Oracle popping champagne corks.

2) Natwest/RBS – what went wrong?

Outsourcing to India and losing IBM mainframe skills in the process? The failure of CA-7 batch scheduling software which had a knock-on effect on multiple feeder systems?

As RBS continues to try and clear the backlog from last week’s crash during a software upgrade, many in the IT industry are asking how it could have happened.

3) Another Universal Credit leader stands down

Universal Credit’s Programme Director, Hilary Reynolds, has stood down after only four months in post. The Department for Work and Pensions says she has been replaced by the interim head of Universal Credit David Pitchford.

Last month the DWP said Pitchford was temporarily leading Universal Credit following the death of Philip Langsdale at Christmas. In November 2012 the DWP confirmed that the then Programme Director for UC, Malcolm Whitehouse, was stepping down – to be replaced by Hilary Reynolds. Steve Dover,  the DWP’s Corporate Director, Universal Credit Programme Business, has also been replaced.

4) The “best implementation of Cerner Millennium yet”?

Edward Donald, the chief executive of Reading-based Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, is reported in the trust’s latest published board papers as saying that a Cerner go-live has been relatively successful.

“The Chief Executive emphasised that, despite these challenges, the ‘go-live’ at the Trust had been more successful than in other Cerner Millennium sites.”

A similar, stronger message appeared was in a separate board paper which was released under FOI.  Royal Berkshire’s EPR [electronic patient record] Executive Governance Committee minutes said:

“… the Committee noted that the Trust’s launch had been considered to be the best implementation of Cerner Millennium yet and that despite staff misgivings, the project was progressing well. This positive message should also be disseminated…”

Royal Berkshire went live in June 2012 with an implementation of Cerner outside the NPfIT.  In mid-2009, the trust signed with University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre to deliver Millennium.

Not everything has gone well – which raises questions, if this was the best Cerner implementation yet,  of what others were like.

5) Universal Credit – the ace up Duncan Smith’s sleeve?

Some people, including those in the know, suspect  Universal Credit will be a failed IT-based project, among them Francis Maude. As Cabinet Office minister Maude is ultimately responsible for the Major Projects Authority which has the job, among other things, of averting major project failures.

But Iain Duncan Smith, the DWP secretary of state, has an ace up his sleeve: the initial go-live of Universal Credit is so limited in scope that claims could be managed by hand, at least in part.

The DWP’s FAQs suggest that Universal Credit will handle, in its first phase due to start in October 2013, only new claims  – and only those from the unemployed.  Under such a light load the system is unlikely to fail, as any particularly complicated claims could managed clerically.

 

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Posted in Accenture, Agile, BT, Campaign4Change, Capgemini, Cerner, Cloud, Cloud Computing, CSC, DWP, excessive secrecy, FOI, Freedom of Information, G-Cloud, Government IT, health records, HP, IBM, IT projects, IT-related failures, legal disputes, local democracy, local government, LPfIT, Major Projects Authority, NHS, npfit, outsourcing, public-private partnerships, Real-Time Information, SAP, Universal Credit

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Will Universal Credit be complete by 2020?

Posted on 10/12/2013 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

Comment

Much of what Iain Duncan Smith said at the Work and Pensions Committee yesterday made sense. In essence the DWP’s plan is to delay putting most of the  claimants onto the Universal Credit system until the technology is proven to work.

But there is little evidence it will work at scale, handling reliably and accurately millions of claimants and complex cases. It emerged yesterday that the DWP has still not yet agreed with suppliers a specification for the UC systems, and the latest business case has yet to be approved. How can anyone say on the basis of the limited work so far that the technology will work?

And Howard Shiplee,  Director General of Universal Credit, made the point yesterday that the technology is only part of the story. For UC to work there have to be changes in culture, operational procedures within the DWP and the retraining of tens of thousands of staff.

IDS is doing what various sets of ministers and officials did during the distended failure of the NHS’s £11bn computer programme, the National Programme for IT [NPfIT]: in assuring Parliament all was well they always used the future tense. The programme “will” give everyone in England an electronic patient record. But nothing was delivered that provided evidence the promises would be fulfilled. It took a new government to admit the NPfIT was a failure.

UC differs from the NPfIT in a crucial way. The NPfIT did not need to work. It was conceived at the top without support from the NHS. Many hospitals didn’t want centrally-bought IT foisted on them. The NPfIT was wanted, in the main, by a small number of politicians, officials and big suppliers. UC is needed and wanted. Simplifying the horrifying complex benefit systems has all-party support. Shiplee is right when he says UC has to work. But he didn’t yesterday commit himself to a timeframe.

The last major benefits computerisation project – called “Operational Strategy” – took about 10 years to finish. It did not achieve the promised financial benefits and benefit systems were not combined as originally intended but, in the end, the technology worked well for its time.

If UC does work there’s every reason to believe it will be in a similar timeframe to Operational Strategy: about 10 years. But could IDS keep his job while saying UC will be fully delivered in 2020 or beyond? I doubt it.

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Posted in Accenture, Agile, Campaign4Change, change management, DWP, excessive secrecy, HP, IBM, Major Projects Authority, managing change, managing outsourced services, open source, open standards, openness and transparency, Real-Time Information, Universal Credit

MP calls for candour after Cerner NPfIT go-live at Croydon

Posted on 10/12/2013 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

Richard Bacon, a long-standing member of the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee, has called on Croydon Health Services NHS Trust to be more open about problems it faces after deploying a Cerner Millennium patient records system at the end of September.

The installation was carried out by BT under the London Programme for IT – a branch of the NPfIT.  The Health and Social Care Information Centre, which has taken on BT and CSC contracts under the NPfIT, was the trust’s partner for the Cerner deployment.

Bacon has closely followed the NPfIT and written a chapter on it in his book, “Conundrum: Why every government gets things wrong and what we can do about it” which he co-wrote with Christopher Hope, the Telegraph’s senior political correspondent.

According to fragments of information in Croydon Health Services’ latest board papers, dated 25 November 2013, the trust has faced a series of problems after the NPfIT Cerner go-live.

They included:

–  N3 Network downtime and waiting time breaches.

– Excessive waits for patients in A&E. 

– Going over budget.

– Significant loss of income.

– A bid to recover Cerner costs.

– A need for HSCIC support for delays. 

-A need for extra investment in Cerner to “stabilise the operational position”

The trust has not published any specific report on the implementation’s problems. Now Bacon says it is “unacceptable for any trust not to disclose the problems it faces – and possibly patients face – after a major IT implementation such as Cerner”.

He adds:

“If these implementations go wrong they can affect the safety of patients.  We know this from some NPfIT deployments at other  trusts. For Croydon to say that board members have been kept informed of the potential risks of the Cerner implementation through the “Corporate Risk and Board Assurance Framework”  is not reassuring.

“This is putting a matter of importance in the small print. Indeed, for officials to brief board members on the potential risks, rather than actual events, is also of concern.

“Patients need to know that Croydon takes a duty of candour seriously. If the Trust cannot be open about its IT-related problems, how can we be sure it will be open about anything else to do with patient safety?”

Patient records go-live “success” – or a new NPfIT failure 

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Posted in BT, BT Health, Campaign4Change, CSC, e-health, excessive secrecy, health, health records, IT-related failures, LPfIT, NHS, npfit

DWP’s Universal Credit PR line – all is now well

Posted on 09/12/2013 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

The Department for Work and Pensions has submitted a statement to the Work and Pensions Committee, ahead of its hearing this afternoon on Universal Credit, that indicates all is now well with the scheme.

At the hearing today MPs will put questions to Work and Pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith, Lord Freud, Minister for Welfare Reform, Howard Shiplee, Universal Credit Director General, and Mike Driver, Finance Director General.

MPs on the committee tend to ask gentle questions of Duncan Smith who is expected to say little or nothing negative about the current state of the scheme. His department’s statement to the committee says that the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts produced reports on Universal Credit that were“entirely historical”. 

Under the  new leadership of Shiplee, the Department had “already taken comprehensive action to address issues subsequently cited in both the NAO and PAC reports, including strengthening governance, improving supplier management and tightening financial controls”.

About 6,000 “new” computers in Jobcentres are being installed so that claimants can look and apply for jobs online, as well as make online claims.

“From October we started implementing Digital Jobcentres, beginning in Hammersmith. The Department will continue to roll this out across the whole Jobcentre Plus network, with all sites converted by October 2014.”

The DWP says that in the trials so far 90% of claims were being made online, “with the majority of these completing their application at the first attempt”.

The DWP will “further develop the work started by the Government
Digital Services to test and implement an enhanced online digital service”.

It adds: “The current planning assumption is that the Universal Credit service will be fully available in each part of Great Britain during 2016, having closed down new claims to the legacy benefits it replaced; with the majority of the remaining legacy caseload moving to Universal Credit during 2016 and 2017.

“Final decisions on these elements of the programme will be informed by the
development of the enhanced digital solution.”

Comment:

The DWP and particularly IDS appear locked into the “good news” culture that the health secretary Jeremy Hunt warned about  in the light of the Francis report’s criticism of a “lack of candour” in the NHS.

Before most of the big IT-related disasters in central government, the NPfIT for instance, sets of ministers and senior civil servants praised progress of the projects and dismissed Parliamentary reports as historical.

It’s to IDS’s credit that he has conceded that the 2017 deadline for all claimants to be on Universal Credit will not be met. He didn’t have to admit this. By 2017 IDS may have retired from politics for all we know. But still his optimism may be grossly misplaced.

The signs are that all claimants will not on UC before 2019 at the earliest – and that is subject to the resolution of numerous IT and business practice issues. The NAO report “Universal Credit: early progress” hinted at some of them.

Indeed the NAO revealed that:

“The Department does not yet know to what extent its new IT systems will
support national roll-out.” The signs are the DWP still doesn’t know – and may not know for several years.

The last big benefits computerisation project – Operational Strategy – took about 10 years to complete. It did not achieve the promised financial benefits and benefit systems were not integrated as originally intended but the technology worked well in the end.

There is every reason to believe that the UC  project will have a similar roll-out timeframe. But will IDS ever discuss all the current uncertainties and shortcomings with UC technology?

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Posted in Accenture, Campaign4Change, DWP, excessive secrecy, Government IT, HP, IBM, openness and transparency, Real-Time Information, Universal Credit