Category Archives: outsourcing

Are you happy paying to help with problem Capita contract?

Posted on 01/05/2018 | 4 comments

By Tony Collins

This week, as Barnet residents go to the polls, how many will be influenced by the continuing national and local media coverage of the council’s mass outsourcing deal with Capita?

Barnet’s Capita contracts are a local election issue. The council’s conservatives and Capita say the outsourcing contracts have saved money and are performing as expected “in many areas”.

But a former local Tory councillor Sury Khatri , who has been deselected after criticising the Capita contract, described the deal as “disastrous”. Barnet has paid Capita £327m since the deals were signed in 2013. Capita runs council services that range from cemeteries to IT.

Councillor Khatri said,  “My time at the council has been overshadowed by the disastrous Capita contract that is falling apart at the seams. Four years on, issues still keep rolling out of the woodwork. This contract represents poor value for money, and the residents are being fleeced.”

Another critic of the Capita contracts is John Dix who blogs as “Mr Reasonable” and is one of several highly respected local bloggers. He has been studying the council’s accounts for some years. He runs a small business and is comfortable with accounts and balance sheets.

He writes,

“I have no problem with outsourcing so long as it is being done for the right reasons. Typically this is where it involves very specialist, non core activities where technical expertise may be difficult to secure and retain in house.

“In Barnet’s case this outsourcing programme covered so many services which were core to the running of the council and which in 2010 were rated as 4 star (good). Barnet has been an experiment in mass outsourcing and almost five years in, it appears to be a failure.

“Last night’s [19 April 2018] audit committee was a litany of service problems, system failures, lack of controls, under performance, a major fraud. Internal audit saying issues were a problem, Capita saying they weren’t.”

Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has entered the debate. He has applauded Barnet’s Unison branch for its enduring, close scrutiny of the Capita contracts. Unison this week published a report on the deal.

Capita’s share price rises

Earlier this month the national press reported extensively on concerns that Capita would follow Carillion into liquidation.

Since the bad publicity, the company’s announcement of a pre-tax loss of £535m, up from £90m the previous year, £1.2bn of debt and a rights issue to raise £662m after fees by selling new shares at a discount, Capita’s share price has risen steadily, from a low a month ago of about 130p to about 191 yesterday.

Could it be that investors sense that Capita’s long-term future is secure: the company has a wide range of complex and impenetrable public sector contracts where history shows that public sector clients – ruling politicians and officials – will defend Capita more enthusiastically than Capita itself, whatever the facts?

A list of some of Capita’s problem contracts is below the comment.

Comment

Carillion, a facilities management and construction company, collapsed in part because the effects of its failures were usually obvious: it was desperately short of money and new roads and hospitals were left unfinished.

When IT-based outsourcing deals go wrong, the effects are usually more nuanced. Losses can be hidden in balance sheets that can be interpreted in different ways; and when clients’ employees go unpaid, or the army’s Defence Recruiting System has glitches or medical records are lost, the problems will almost always be officially described as teething even if, as in Capita’s NHS contracts, they last for years.

It is spin that rules and protects IT outsourcing contracts in the public sector. Spin hides what’s really going on. It is as integral as projected savings and key performance indicators.

When Somerset County Council signed a mass outsourcing deal with IBM, its ruling councillors boasted of huge savings. When the deal went wrong and was ended early after a legal dispute with IBM the council announced that bringing the deal in-house would bring large savings: savings either way. Liverpool council said the same thing when it outsourced to BT – setting up a joint venture called Liverpool Direct – and brought services back-in house: savings each time.

Barnet Council is still claiming savings while the council’s auditors are struggling to find them.

Spinmeisters know there is rarely any such thing as a failed public sector IT contract: the worst failures are simply in transition from failure to success. Barnet’s council taxpayers will never know the full truth, whoever is in power.

Even when a council goes bust, the truth is disputed. Critics of spending at Northamptonshire County Council, which has gone bust, blame secretive and dysfunctional management. Officials, ruling councillors and even the National Audit Office blame underfunding.

In March The Times reported that Northamptonshire had paid almost £1m to a consultancy owned by its former chief executive. It also reported that the council’s former director of people, transformation and transactions for services, was re-hired on a one-year contract that made her company £185,000 within days of being made redundant in 2016.  Her firm was awarded a £650-a-day IT contract that was not advertised.

In the same month, the National Audit Office put Northamptonshire’s difficulties down to underfunding. It conceded that the “precise causes of Northamptonshire’s financial difficulties are not as yet clear”.

Perhaps it’s only investors in Capita who will really know the truth: that the full truth on complex public sector contracts in which IT is central will rarely, if ever, emerge; and although Capita has internal accountability for failures – bonuses, the share price and jobs can be affected – there is no reason for anyone in the public sector to fear failure. No jobs are ever affected. Why not sign a few more big outsourcing deals, for good or ill?

Thank you to FOI campaigners David Orr and Andrew Rowson for information that helped me write this post.

Some of Capita’s problem contracts

There is no definitive list of Capita’s problem contracts. Indeed the Institute for Government’s Associate Director Nick Davies says that poor quality of contract data means the government “doesn’t have a clear picture of who it is buying from and what it is buying”. Here, nevertheless, is a list of some of Capita’s problem contracts in the public sector:

Barnet Council

A Capita spokesperson said: “The partnership between Capita and Barnet Council is performing as expected in many areas. We continue to work closely with the council to make service enhancements as required.”

Birmingham City Council

“The new deal will deliver a mix of services currently provided under the joint venture, plus project based work aimed at providing extra savings, with forecasts of £10 million of savings in the current financial year and £43 million by 2020-21.”

West Sussex County Council

A spokesman said, “Whatever your concerns and small hiccups along the way, I believe this contract has been and will continue to be of great benefit to this county council.”

Hounslow Council

A Capita spokesperson said: “We are working closely with the London Borough of Hounslow to ensure a smooth transition of the pensions administration service to a new provider.”

Breckland Council

“They concluded that planning officers, working for outsourcing company Capita, had misinterpreted a policy, known as DC11, which dictates the amount of outdoor playing space required for a development..”

Army

Mark Francois, a Conservative former defence minister,  said Capita was known “universally in the army as Crapita”. But Capita said in a statement,

“Capita is trusted by multiple private and public clients to deliver technology-led customer and business process services, as demonstrated by recent wins and contract extensions from clients including British Gas, Royal Mail, BBC, TfL Networks, M&S and VW.”

Electronic tagging

(but it’s alright now)

A Ministry of Justice spokeswoman said: “As the National Audit Office makes clear, there were challenges in the delivery of the electronic monitoring programme between 2010 and 2015…

“As a direct result, we fundamentally changed our approach in 2015, expanding and strengthening our commercial teams and bringing responsibility for oversight of the programme in-house.

“We are now in a strong position to continue improving confidence in the new service and providing better value for money for the taxpayer.”

Disability benefits

A spokesperson for the Department for Work and Pensions said, “Assessments work for the majority of people, with 83 per cent of ESA claimants and 76 per cent of PIP claimants telling us that they’re happy with their overall experience…”

Miners

A Capita spokesperson said: “This issue has been resolved and all members affected will shortly receive letters to advise that they do not need to take any action. We sincerely apologise for any concern and inconvenience this has caused.”

NHS

Opticians

Dentists

BBC licence fee

Windrush

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Posted in Barnet Council, Birmingham City Council, Campaign4Change, Capita, DWP, excessive secrecy, Freedom of Information, Government IT, IBM, Institute for Government, local democracy, local government, managing outsourced services, National Audit Office, NHS, NHS England, operational issues, outsourcing, PCSE, Politics

Capita’s problems were “preventable” says Royal London

Posted on 06/02/2018 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

Royal London, a Capita investor, said yesterday it has been “raising concerns about Capita’s weak governance with the firm for a number of years, and voting against many resolutions on director re-elections and pay consistently since 2014.”

Royal London is the UK’s largest mutual life, pensions and investment company. It managed £113bn of funds as of 31 December 2017. It owns a 0.44% stake in Capita.

Ashley Hamilton Claxton, Royal London Asset Mananagement’s Head of Responsible Investment, said in a statement,

“We welcome the honesty and transparency with which Capita’s new CEO has accepted the company’s past failings, and put a plan in place to simplify and improve the business. However, we believe this was preventable and have been privately raising concerns about Capita’s weak governance with the firm for a number of years, and voting against many resolutions on director re-elections and pay consistently since 2014.

“Until recently, Capita’s board flouted one of the basic rules of the corporate governance code, with a small board primarily comprised of management insiders. The result was a board that lacked the independent spirit to rigorously assess whether the company was making the right long-term decisions.

“Our concerns about governance were compounded by the complexity of the underlying business and the company’s acquisition strategy. Capita’s approach to remuneration also left something to be desired, with major losses in 2013 being excluded from the profit figures used to assess the bonuses paid to executives at the firm.

“The sea change in the board over the past 18 months has been welcome and has addressed the key issue of independence. It will be up to the new Chairman and the Board to ensure that Capita does not repeat the mistakes of the past, and that its strategy is fit for purpose during a particularly turbulent time for the outsourcing sector.”

Last week Capita issued a profits warning and announced plans to raise £700m from investors to reduce debts.

With Capita seeking to raise money and cut costs, where will this leave local government customers that are reliant on the supplier to cut the costs of running local services?

Barnet Council has, controversially, contracted out a large chunk of its services to Capita – and also gives the company tens of millions in advance payments in return for a discount on the supplier’s fees.

By becoming a “commissioning council”, Barnet has made itself wholly reliant on Capita, say critics of the outsourcing deal. Among other responsibilities, Capita produced the council’s latest annual accounts – including a financial account of its own services to the council. The accounts were not produced on time which created extra chargeable work for the council’s auditors BDO.

Capita has run into problems on a number of its major outsourcing deals. The National Audit Office is investigating its work on GP support services.

Councillor Barry Rawlings, leader of the Labour group in Barnet, said the profits warning and Capita’s low share price raised questions about how it may respond to further troubles.

He told The Guardian that Capita may be looking to cut back services it supplies.

“Capita handles all of the back office, enforcement, planning, environmental health, trading standards, estates, payroll and so on. Will that be part of their core services? We might be one of the only places they do some things. If they narrow their scope, what is going to happen to these services?

Conservative leader of  Barnet council, Councillor Richard Cornelius, said,  “Capita currently runs approximately 10 per cent of our services by value. They do not run the entire council as some reports have suggested.

“The council regularly reviews the financial status of its major suppliers as part of its contract management and contingency planning arrangements. This is what any responsible local authority would do.”

Capita’s share price has more than halved in the last month – from about 400p to a low on 1 February 2018 of 158p – but today rose by about 10% to 196.

Comment

When an outsourcing giant is looking to cut its costs and raise money to cover debts, how does that square with local government customers that also want to cut costs – which is why they outsourced to Capita?

Outsourcing can make good sense – when for example a global company like BP wants to standardise IT services across the world. It doesn’t always make sense when an organisation wants a service transformation while also cutting costs. Something usually has to give which, perhaps, Barnet Council and its taxpayers are slowly finding out.

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Posted in Barnet Council, Campaign4Change, change management, consultants, local government, managing outsourced services, National Audit Office, outsourcing

Ministers told of major problem on Capita NHS contract more than a year later

Posted on 02/02/2018 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

Today’s Financial Times and other newspapers cover a National Audit Office report into GP clinical notes and correspondence, some of it urgent, that was not directed to the patient’s GP.

The correspondence was archived by Capita under its contract to provide GP support services. But patient notes were still “live”. They included patient invitation letters, treatment/diagnosis notes, test results and documents/referrals marked ‘urgent’.

What isn’t well reported is that ministers were left in the dark about the problems for more than a year. The National Audit Office does not blame anyone – its remit does not include questioning policy decisions – but its report is impressive in setting out of the facts.

Before NHS England outsourced GP support services to Capita in 2015, GPs practices sent correspondence for patients that were not registered at their practice to local primary care services centres, which would attempt to redirect the mail.

By the time Capita took over GP support services on 1 September 2015, GPs were supposed to “return to sender” any correspondence that was sent to them incorrectly – and not send it to primary care services centres that were now run, in part, by Capita.

But some GPs continued to send incorrectly-addressed correspondence to the primary care services centres. Capita’s contract did not require it to redirect clinical correspondence.

An unknown number of GP practices continued to send mail to the centres, expecting the centre’s staff to redirect it. A further complication was that Capita had “transformation” plans to cut costs by closing the primary care services support centres.

Capita made an inventory of all records at each site and shared this with NHS England. The inventories made reference to ‘clinical notes’ but at this point no one identified these notes as live clinical correspondence. Capita stored the correspondence in its archive.

In line with its contract, Capita did not forward the mail. It was not until May 2016 – eight months after Capita took over the primary care services centres – that Capita told a member of NHS England’s primary care support team that there was a problem with an unquantified accumulation of clinical notes.

It was a further five months before Capita formally reported the incident to NHS England. At that time Capita estimated that there was an accumulation of hundreds of thousands of clinical notes. When the National Audit Office questioned Capita on the matter, it replied that, with hindsight, it believes it could have reported the backlog sooner.

In November 2016, Capita and NHS England carried out initial checks on the reported backlog of 580,000 clinical notes. It wasn’t until December 2016 that ministers were informed of problems – more than a year after Capita took over the contract.

Even in December 2016 ministers were not fully informed. Information about a backlog of live clinical notes was within in a number of items in the quarterly ministerial reports. NHS England did not report the matter to the Department of Health until April 2017 – about two years after the problems began.

Even then, officials told ministers that clinical notes had been sampled and were considered “low clinical and patient risk”. But a later study by NHS England’s National Incident Team identified a backlog of 1,811 high priority patient notes such as documents deemed to be related to screening or urgent test results.

The National Audit Office says, “NHS England expects to know by March 2018 whether there has been any harm to patients as a result of the delay in redirecting correspondence. NHS England will investigate further where GPs have identified that there could be potential harm to patients. The review will be led by NHS England’s national clinical directors, with consultant level input where required.”

Last month Richard Vautrey, chairman of British Medical Association’s General Practitioners Committee, wrote to the NHS Chief Executive Simon Stevens criticising a lack of substantial improvement on Capita’s contract to run primary care service centres.

In December, the GP Committee surveyed practices and individual GPs on the Capita contract. The results showed a little improvement across all service lines, when compared to its previous survey in October 2016, but a “significant deterioration” in some services. Vautrey’s letter said,

“While any new organisation takes time to take over services effectively, the situation has gone from bad to worse since Capita took over the PCSE [Primary Care Support England] service almost two and a half years ago …

“This situation is completely unacceptable. As a result of the lack of improvement in the service delivery of PCSE we are now left with no option but to support practices and individual doctors in taking legal routes to seek resolution. While this is taking place, we believe it is imperative that NHS England conducts a transparent and comprehensive review of all policy, procedures and processes used by PCSE across each service line.”

Comment:

It’ll be clear to some who read the NAO report that the problems with urgent patient notes going astray or being put mistakenly into storage, stems from NHS England’s decision to outsource a complex range of GP support services without fully considering – or caring about – what could go wrong.

It’s not yet known if patients have come to harm. It’s clear, though, that patients have been caught in the middle of a major administrative blunder that has complex causes and for which nobody in particular can be held responsible.

That ministers learned of a major failure on a public sector outsourcing deal over a year after live patient notes began to be archived is not surprising.

About four million civil and public servants have strict rules governing confidentiality. There are no requirements for civil and public service openness except when it comes to the Freedom of Information Act which many officials can – and do – easily circumvent.

Even today, the fourth year of Capita’s contract to run GP support services, the implications for patients of what has gone wrong are not yet fully known or understood.

It’s a familiar story: a public sector blunder for which nobody will take responsibility, for which nobody in particular seems to care about, and for which the preoccupation of officialdom will be to continue playing down the implications or not say anything at all.

Why would they be open when there is no effective requirement for it? It’s a truism that serious problems cannot be fixed until they are admitted. In the public sector, serious problems on large IT-related contracts are not usually fixed until the seriousness of the problems can no longer be denied.

For hundreds of years UK governments have struggled to reconcile a theoretical desire for openness with an instinctive and institutional need to hide mistakes. Nothing is likely to change now.

National Audit Office report – Investigation into clinical correspondence handling in the NHS.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Capita, change management, culture, Department of Health, excessive secrecy, FOI, Freedom of Information, Government IT, health records, IT-related failures, managing outsourced services, National Audit Office, NHS, NHS England, openness and transparency, outsourcing, project management, supplier relationships

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Goodnewspeak and its Orwellian dark side

Posted on 08/11/2017 | 4 comments

By Tony Collins

Orwell made no mention of goodnewspeak. But maybe today it’s an increasingly popular descendant of  Newspeak – a language devised by Orwell to show how the State could use words and phrases to limit thought.

This week, as a statue of Orwell was unveiled outside the BBC, a local council in Sussex made an announcement that was a fine example of goodnewspeak.

This was Horsham District Council’s way of not saying that it was scrapping weekly rubbish collections.

This was the benign side of goodnewspeak. The dark side is a growing acceptance in Whitehall, local authorities and the wider public sector that nothing negative can be thought of let alone expressed at work.

This suppression of negative thoughts means that the rollout of Universal Credit can be said officially to be going well and can be speeded up  despite the clamour from outsiders, including a former Prime Minister (John Major), for a rethink to consider the problems and delays.

[Labour MP Frank Field said last month that the DWP was withholding bad news on Universal Credit.]

It means that the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy can continue to praise all aspects of its smart meters rollout while its officials keep silent on the fact that the obsolescent smart meters now being installed do not work properly when the householder switches supplier.

It means that council employees can think only good about their major IT suppliers – and trust them with the council’s finances as at Barnet council.

[Nobody at Barnet council has pointed out the potential for a conflict of interest in having outsourcing supplier Capita reporting on the council’s finances while having a financial interest in those finances. It took a local blogger Mr Reasonable to make the point.]

Goodnewspeak can also mean that public servants do their best, within the law, to avoid outside scrutiny that could otherwise lead to criticism, as at Lambeth council.

Last month Private Eye reported the results of a “People’s Audit” in which local residents asked questions and scrutinised the authority’s accounts. The audit found that:

 – The number of managers earning between £50,000 and £150,000 has increased by 88, at a cost of more than £5.5m year.
-Spending on Lambeth’s new town hall has gone from a projected £50m to £140m.
– The council “invested” a total of £57,000 on its public libraries last year – closing three of them – while spending £13m on corporate office accommodation.
-£10.3m was spent making people redundant.

These disclosures (and there are many more of them) raise the question of what Lambeth is doing to dispel the impression that it manages public money badly and that its decisions could be routine in the world of local authorities.

Lambeth council’s reaction to the audit was to denounce it and issue its own goodnewspeak statement; and it is considering a proposal to lobby the government to allow councils to ban such People’s Audits in future.

Lambeth’s website, incidentally, is entitled “Love Lambeth”. Which, perhaps, shows that its leaders have, at least, a deep sense of irony.

Whitehall

The following lists of announcements on the websites of the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department of Transport are examples of how goodnewspeak manifests itself in Whitehall:

And the Department of Transport’s website:

Ministry of Truth

Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four of the Ministry of Truth whose expertise was lying, the Ministry of Peace which organised wars and the Ministry of Plenty which rationed food.

Some of the Party’s slogans were:

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.

And Orwell, whose wife worked at the Ministry of Information at Senate House, London (Orwell’s model for the Ministry of Truth) said,

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

Comment

Of course goodnewspeak doesn’t exist as a policy anywhere. But its practice is all-pervasive in the public sector. And it seems to change the way people think when they’re at work.

It blocks out any view other than the official line.

In Nineteen Eight-four, Orwell created “Newspeak” as a language of the Party to coerce the public to shape their thoughts around the State’s beliefs. Its much-reduced vocabulary stopped people conceiving of any other point of view.

Not using Newspeak was a thoughtcrime. The Party advocated Duckspeak – to speak without thinking – literally quack like a duck.

Has this already happened in a minor way at Barnet? A council document on the benefits of its outsourcing policies was peppered with abstractions that could have been constructed by software-driven random-phrase generators:

“Ahead of the game”
“Top to bottom organisational restructure”
“Flexibility to meet future challenges whilst ensuring we provide excellent services to residents today.”
“Root of our success”
“New solutions to complex problems”
“Pioneering partnerships”
“Investing for the future”
“Protect what makes Barnet such a great place to live”
“Increasing resident satisfaction”
“Paying dividends”
“Prepared for the future”
“Great strides”
“A radical, ‘whole place’ approach to designing and providing services”
“We have not been backwards in coming forwards”
“Pursuing alternatives to the norm”
“Vision into reality”
“Frame our future strategic direction”
“Future Shape”
“Drivers for change”
“Genuine innovation in Local Government”
“Bold in its decision making”
“Forward looking change strategy”
“A new relationship with citizens”
“A one public sector approach”
“A relentless drive for efficiency”
“Focus on stimulating the market”
“Best in class’ range of tradable services to win and deliver work for other authorities.”
‘Form follows function’.
“Clear roles and responsibilities”
“An internal escalation model”
“Renewed focus on improving engagement”
“Increasing transparency, and developing trust”
“Connect with people and build relationships of trust”
“A steep demand line to climb”

Dark side

One worrying consequence is that Whitehall civil servants and public servants and ruling councillors at, say Barnet and Somerset councils (and even at Cornwall), made the assumption that their IT suppliers shared the public sector’s goodnewspeak philosophy.

But suppliers are commercially savvy. They don’t exist purely to serve the public. They have to make a profit or they risk insolvency.

For years, goodnewspeak at Somerset County Council led to officers and councillors regularly praising the successes of a joint venture with IBM while covering up the problems and losses, in part by routine refusals of FOI requests.

Goodnewspeak at Liverpool Council meant that its officials had nothing but praise for BT when they ended a joint venture in 2015. They said that ending the joint venture would save £30m. But the joint venture itself was supposed to have saved tens of millions.

Somerset County Council made a similar good news announcement when it terminated its joint venture Southwest One with IBM.

Such announcements are consistent with Newspeak’s “Doublethink” – the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct.

DWP

Outsiders can find goodnewspeak shocking. The Daily Mirror reported on how the DWP celebrated the rollout of Universal Credit at Hove, Sussex, with a cake. Were managers mindful of the fact that some failed UC claimants have been driven to the brink of suicide?

Disillusioned

Francis Maude, when minister for the Cabinet Office, was almost universally disliked in the civil service. He was an outsider who did not accept the Whitehall culture.  Even though he believed the UK had the best civil service in the world, he did not always show it.

He tried to reduce Whitehall spending on IT projects and programmes that could not be justified. He spoke an IT supplier oligopoly.

Now he has left government, most of his civil service reforms (apart from the Government Digital Service) have settled back to how they were before he arrived in 2010.

In a speech last month, Maude spoke of a “distressing” disillusionment with the civil service culture. He said:

“Based on my experience as a Minister in the eighties and early nineties my expectations (of the civil service) were high. And the disillusionment was steep and distressing.

“It remains my view that we have some of the  very best civil servants in the world … But the Civil Service as an institution is deeply flawed, and in urgent need of radical reform.

” And it is civil servants themselves, especially the younger ones, who are most frustrated by the Service and its culture and practices.”

World’s best civil service

He added that, as the new minister responsible for the civil service, every draft speech or article presented to him started: ‘The British Civil Service is the best in the world.’

But complaints by ministers in all parties about the lack of institutional capability, inefficiency and failed implementation were legion, he said.

“When we queried the evidential basis for this assertion, it turned out that the only relevant assessment was a World Bank ranking for ‘government effectiveness’, in which the UK ranked number 16.”

Speaking the unsaid

Perhaps more than any former minister, Maude has expertly summarised the civil service culture but in a way that suggests it’s unredeemable.

“I and others have observed that all too often the first reaction of the Civil Service when something wrong is discovered is either to cover it up or to find a scapegoat, often someone who is not a career civil servant and who is considered dispensable.
“There seems to be an absolute determination to avoid any evidence that the permanent Civil Service is capable of failure.
“Another indicator is that if a Minister decides that a Civil Service leader is not equipped for his or her task, this has to be dressed up as “a breakdown in the relationship”, with the unspoken suggestion that this is at least as much the fault of the Minister as of the civil servant.
“It can never be admitted that the mandarin was inadequate in any way.
“When I suggested that there might be room for improvement, the distinguished former Civil Service Head, Lord Butler, accused me of a failure of leadership. Actually the leadership failure is to pretend that all is well when no one, even civil servants themselves, really believes that.

The good news

All is not lost – thanks to a vibrant and investigative local press in some areas and resident auditors such as Mr Reasonable, Mrs Angry, David Orr, Andrew Rowson and the people’s auditors in Lambeth.

Along with the National Audit Office and some MPs, these resident auditors are the only effective check on goodnewspeak. They are reminder to complacent officialdom that it cannot always hide behind its barrier of unaccountability.

Long may these dogged protectors of the public interest continue to highlight financial mismanagement, excess and self-indulgent,wasteful decisions.

Earlier this year Nineteen Eight-Four hit the No 1 spot in Amazon’s book sales chart.

Perhaps copies were being scooped up by shortlisted candidates for top public sector jobs as vital homework before falling in with the culture at their interviews.

**

Outside the BBC, Orwell’s new statute is inscribed with a quotation from a proposed preface to Animal Farm that was never used:

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Thank you for David Orr, one of the dogged local resident auditors referred to above, for drawing my attention to some of the articles mentioned in this post.

DWP good news announcements

Newspeak

Whitewashing history in education

 

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Posted in Campaign4Change, DWP, excessive secrecy, FOI, Freedom of Information, GDS, Government IT, IBM, Infrastructure and Projects Authority, Institute for Government, IT-enabled projects and waste, managing outsourced services, National Audit Office, outsourcing, supplier relationships, Universal Credit

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Nine-year outsourcing deal caught on camera?

Posted on 14/09/2017 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

This photo is of a Southwest One board that was surplus to requirements.

Southwest One continues to provide outsourced services to Avon and Somerset Police. The 10-year contract expires next year.

But unless Southwest One continues to provide residual IT services to the police, the company – which is owned by IBM – will be left without its three original public partners.

Photo a metaphor?

IBM and Somerset County Council set up Southwest One in 2007  to propel council services “beyond excellence”.

Joining in the venture were Taunton Deane Borough Council and Avon and Somerset Police. The hope was that it would recruit other organisations,  bringing down costs for all.

It didn’t happen.

An outsourcing deal that was supposed to save Somerset residents about £180m over 10 years ended early, in 2016, with losses for the residents of about £70m. The council and Southwest One settled a High Court legal dispute in 2013.

Taunton Deane Borough Council also ended the deal early, in 2016.

Comment

Was it all the fault of Southwest One? Probably not. The success of the deal was always going to be judged, to some extent, on an assumption that other organisations would join Southwest One.

When that didn’t happen, two councils and a police force had to bear the main costs.

There was also the inherent problem that exists with most big council outsourcing deals: that it’s always difficult for a supplier to innovate, save money on the costs of running council services, invest significantly more in IT, spend less overall and still produce a healthy profit for the parent company.

It could be done if the council, police force or other public body was manifestly inefficient. But Somerset County Council outsourced what was, by its own admission, an excellent IT organisation.

Some at the time had no doubts about how the outsourcing deal would end up.

Southwest One – The complete story by Dave Orr

 

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Posted in Campaign4Change, IBM, legal disputes, local government, managing outsourced services, outsourcing, public sector, public services, public-private partnerships

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IT staff pay price of helping to solve BBC’s gender pay gap?

Posted on 27/07/2017 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

The Register reported yesterday that hundreds of IT roles at the BBC will be offshored to cheaper wage locations under a £560m contract renewal with its incumbent outsourcing supplier Atos.

Atos executives said in a conference call heard by The Register that a new “Aurora” IT contract model will involve a significant amount of offshoring and new tooling. The new contract is due to start in October.

Employees may go into an “availability pool” and some may be redeployed within Atos.

Only a few are expected to stay on the BBC account. Most of the roles may be exported to Atos centres in Poland and India. About 400 Atos staff are affected.

Last week James Purnell, BBC director of Radio and Education, told  Newsnight that the £75m expected to be saved from the IT programme with Atos could help address the gender pay gap.

Thank you to David Orr for alerting me to The Register’s article.

 

 

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Posted in Campaign4Change, outsourcing

Is Barnet Council up to the job of managing its suppliers – including Capita?

Posted on 27/07/2017 | 6 comments

By Tony Collins

Tonight (27 July 2017) Barnet Council’s audit committee meets to discuss the interim year-end findings of BDO, its external auditor.

BDO identifies a “significant risk” in relation to the council’s contract management and monitoring. There are “numerous issues”, says BDO.

Barnet is well known in the local government community for having adopted a “commissioning council” concept. This means it has outsourced the vast majority of its services, leaving officers and the ruling Conservative group to set policy and monitor suppliers.

Capita is a main supplier. Its responsibilities include cemeteries, ICT and collecting council tax.

BDO’s report for tonight’s council meeting says that, with the council’s services now being delivered through various outsourcing arrangements, “it is important to establish strong contract management and monitoring controls”.

It adds that such controls “allow the Council to ascertain whether or not it is receiving value for money from the use of its contractors, and to take remedial action where issues are identified”.

On this point – contract management and monitoring –  BDO says,

“During the course of 2016/17 we have noted a number of internal audit reports which have raised significant findings in this area.

“In addition, further concerns have been identified through our own audit work. As such, we have recognised a significant risk to our use of resources [value for money] opinion.”

BDO’s findings are interim. It cannot finalise its final statutory report until many questions are answered and errors, financial misstatements and lapses in disclosure are corrected in Barnet’s draft financial accounts.

The auditors comment in their report on the “number and value of errors found” and the “level of misstatement in the current year accounts”.

These are some of BDO’s findings so far:

  • Large advance payments (about £44m in prepayments) as part of the Customer Service Group contracts with Capita. Not all of the payments were set out in the payments profile of the original contract. Significant payments were made at the start of the contract (and in subsequent years) to cover capital investment and transformational expenditure. The financial profile of the contract anticipates the advance payments being used by 2023. One advance payment of £19.1m in December 2016 covers service charge payments relating to the first three quarters of 2017/18. The council receives a £0.5m discount for paying in advance. The council also paid for some projects in advance. BDO finds that there was proper council scrutiny of the decision to make the payments.
  • Barnet overspent on services in 2016/2017 by £8.3m.
  • There’s a budget gap prior to identified savings of £53.9m over the three years to 2020.
  • There’s a substantial depletion in the council’s financial reserves.
  • Will claimed savings materialise? “Savings targets remain significant and achievement of these will be inherently challenging, as evidenced by the overspend in 2016/17.”
  • Net spending on the Customer and Support Group contracts with Capita increased to £34.4m in 2016/17 from £26.9m the previous year.
  • More than 100 officials at Barnet receive at least £60,000 a year and twelve at least £100,000.
  • Some councillors have failed to make formal declarations. A “poor response rate as compared to other authorities” says BDO’s report.

Comment:

You’d think a “commissioning council” – one that outsources the delivery of most of its services – would, above all, have a firm grip on what its main suppliers are doing and what they’re charging for.

In fact BDO’s report for tonight council meeting rates the council’s contract management and monitoring at “red”. BDO has identified “numerous” issues.

It’s easy for Barnet Council to issue press releases on the tens of millions it claims to have saved on its contracts with Capita.

But BDO possesses the facts and figures; and it questions the council’s “use of resources” – in other words “value for money”.

At the outset of its joint venture with IBM, officials at Somerset County Council spoke of planned savings of £180m over 10 years. In fact the deal ended up losing at least £69m.

Barnet blogger “Mr Reasonable” who has long kept a close eye on payments made by Barnet to Capita doubts that the council is up to the job of properly scrutinising Capita. We agree.

It was clear to many in 2013 when Barnet signed contracts with Capita that the council was unlikely to find the money to acquire adequate contract monitoring expertise and resources, given that its suppliers were required to deliver such a wide range of complex services.

Barnet Council’s most adept scrutineers, rather than local councillors, have proved to be its dogged local bloggers who include Derek Dishman (Mr Mustard), John Dix (Mr Reasonable), Theresa Musgrove (Mrs Angry) and Roger Tichborne (The Barnet Eye).

Had ruling councillors taken local blogger warnings more seriously, would they have specifically avoided becoming a “commissioning council”?

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Capita, local democracy, local government, outsourcing, oversight, public sector, public services, public-private partnerships, supplier relationships

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Why are councils hiding exit costs of outsourcing deals – embarrassment perhaps?

Posted on 26/06/2017 | 4 comments

Tony Collins

Excerpt from Taunton Deane council’s confidential “pink pages”.
The last sentence contains a warning that IBM-owned SWO – Southwest One – may try to “maximise revenues” on exiting its joint venture with the council.

Somerset County Council has refused a Freedom of Information request for the costs of exiting its joint venture with IBM.

But a secret report written last year by officers at Taunton Deane Borough Council – which was a party to the IBM-owned joint venture company Southwest One  – warned that the supplier could attempt to “maximise revenues on exit”.

It said,

“… from experience anything slightly ambiguous within the contract is likely to be challenged by SWO [Southwest One] in order to push it into the chargeable category as they attempt to maximise revenues on exit”.

A separate section of the confidential report said,

“disaggregating from the SWO [Southwest One] contract will be complex and expensive …”

Taunton Deane Borough Council did not tell councillors what the exit turned out to be. The figures are also being kept secret by Somerset County Council which signed the “transformative” SWO joint venture deal with IBM in 2007.

Both councils have now brought back services in-house.

Secrecy over the exit costs is in contrast to Somerset’s willingness to talk in public about the potential savings when local television news covered the setting up of Southwest One in 2007.

The silence will fuel some local suspicions that exit costs have proved considerable and will have contributed to the justifications for Somerset’s large council tax rise this year.

£69m losses?

David Orr, a former Somerset County Council IT employee, has followed closely the costs of the joint venture, and particularly its SAP-based “transformation.

It was his FOI request for details of the exit costs that the council refused.

Orr says that Somerset has lost money as a result of the Southwest One deal. Instead of saving £180m, the joint venture has cost the council £69m, he says.

FOI

Under the Freedom of Information Act, Orr asked Somerset for the “total contract termination costs” including legal, consultancy, negotiation, asset valuations, audit and extra staffing.

He also asked whether IBM was paid compensation for early termination of the Southwest One contract. In replying, the council said,

“The Authority exited from a significant contract with Southwest One early, and the services delivered through this contract were brought back in-house in November 2016.

“The Authority expects the costs to fall significantly now it has regained control of those services.

“Somerset County Council made payment under the ‘Termination for Convenience’ provisions of the original contract. We do hold further information but will not be releasing it at this point as we believe to do so would damage the commercial interests of the County Council, in that it would prejudice the our negotiating position in future contract termination agreements in that it would give contractors details on what terms the Council was willing to settle …”

Orr will appeal. He says the Information Commissioner has already established a principle with Suffolk Coastal District Council that the termination costs of a contract with a third party should be disclosed. The commissioner told Suffolk Coastal council that, in opting out of FOI,

“there is no exemption for embarrassment”

Hidden costs

Taunton’s pink pages paper said that the Southwest One contract’s Exit Management Plan provided for a smooth transfer of services and data, and for access to staff to assess skills and do due diligence.

In practice, though, there were many exit-related complications and costs – potential and actual. The paper warned that Taunton would need to find the money for:

  • Exit programme and project management costs
  • Early termination fees
  • Contingency
  • ICT infrastructure disaggregation
  • Service transition and accommodation costs
  • Disaggregating SAP from Southwest One. Also the council would need to exit its SAP-based shared services with Somerset County Council because the estimated costs were lower when run on a non shared services basis. SAP covered finance, procurement, HR, payroll, website and customer relationship management.
  • Costs involved in a “soft” or “hard” (adversarial) exit.
  • Estimating council exit costs when IBM was keeping secret its own Southwest One running costs.
  • Staff transfer issues.

Comment

So much for open government. It tends to apply when disclosures will not embarrass local government officials.

In 2007 Somerset County Council enjoyed local TV, radio and newspaper coverage of the new joint venture with IBM. Officials spoke proudly on camera of the benefits for local taxpayers, particularly the huge savings.

Now, ten years later, the losses are stacking up. Former Somerset IT employee and FOI campaigner Dave Orr puts the losses at £69m. And local officials are keeping secret the further exit costs.

Suffolk Coastal District Council lost an FOI case to withhold details of how much it paid in compensation to a third party contractor to terminate a contract. But at least it had published its other exit costs.

Somerset is more secretive. It is withholding details of the sums it paid to IBM in compensation for ending the joint venture early; it also refuses to publish its other exit costs.

Trust?

Can anything said by councils such as Somerset or Barnet in support of major outsourcing/joint venture deals be trusted if the claimed savings figures are not audited and the other side of the story – the hidden costs – are, well, hidden?

In local elections, residents choose councillors but they have no say over the appointment of the permanent officials. It’s the officials who decide when to refuse FOI requests; and they usually decide whether the council will tell only one side of the story when public statements are made on outsourcing/joint ventures.

Across the UK, local councils employed 3,400 press and communications staff –  about double the total number in central government – in part to promote the authorities’ services and activities.

What’s the point if they publicise only one side of the story – the benefits and not the costs?

Somerset’s decision to refuse Orr’s reasonable FOI request makes, in its own small way, a mockery of open government.

It also gives just cause for Somerset residents to be sceptical about any council statement on the benefits of its services and activities.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, excessive secrecy, FOI, Freedom of Information, IBM, IT-related failures, joint ventures, local democracy, local government, managing outsourced services, outsourcing, public-private partnerships, SAP, shared services, supplier relationships

Will MPs’ report on Capita’s BBC contract make any difference?

Posted on 26/04/2017 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

At one level, Capita’s contract to handle most of the BBC’s TV licensing work is, in general, a success, at least according to statements made to the media.

Were it not for the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee, a fuller story would not have emerged.

Today in The Guardian, a BBC spokesperson speaks of the Capita TV licensing contract in glowing terms. Through the contract, the BBC has reduced collection costs by 25% and increased revenue for programmes and services.

A Capita spokesperson spoke in similar terms. Capita has helped the BBC to collect more TV licence fee revenue every year since 2010-2011.

The only blip in the contract had seemed to be the heavy-handed tactics of some Capita staff. The Daily Mail reported in February 2017 that vulnerable people were hounded as some Capita staff tried to catch 28 TV licence evaders a week for bonuses of £15,000 a year.

This blip aside, has anything else gone wrong? There’s no hint of any technological problems on Capita’s website – or the BBC’s.

The BBC reported in 2011 that Capita will transform the TV licensing service, “using advances in technology and analytics to increase revenue and reduce costs”.

Capita’s website has a case study on its work for the BBC that refers to cost savings of £220m over the life of the contract, organisation-wide efficiencies and “protected brand image” among other benefits.

In December 2016, Capita described the “partnership” with the BBC  as a “success”.

The bigger picture

Capita processes TV licence payments, collects arrears and enforces licence fee collection. Its current contract with the BBC began in July 2012 and, after a recent renegotiation, ends in 2022 with the option to extend by up to a further five years.The BBC paid Capita £59 million in 2015–16.

The BBC has had a long-standing ambition to improve its main TV licensing databases so that they are structured by individual customers rather than households.

This was one of the hopes for the contract with Capita but it hasn’t happened. Capita had partly subcontracted work on the BBC’s legacy databases to CSC Computer Sciences.

Manual workarounds

The BBC, in its contract with Capita, aimed to upgrade ICT as part of a wider transition programme. The BBC paid Capita £22.9m for parts of the programme that were delivered, including restructuring contact centres, updating the TV Licensing website and upgrading handheld units for field staff.

The Public Accounts Committee says in today’s report,

“However, improvements with a contract value of £27.9m, primarily related to replacing legacy ICT systems, were not delivered by Capita and its subcontractor (CSC), and were not paid for by the BBC.

“As a result of the transition programme being only partly completed and subsequently stopped, the BBC and Capita currently have to do resource-intensive manual workarounds between inefficient ICT systems.

“Capita informed us that it was bearing the additional costs associated with undelivered elements of the transition programme. However, the BBC has had to allocate £9m to Capita to support the ongoing use of legacy systems, costs which the BBC told us were compensated for elsewhere in the renegotiated contract.

“It is unclear to us why ICT database improvements have proved so difficult over the last 15 years, particularly when competitors and other organisations can make similar changes.

“The BBC acknowledges that its current database is not fit for purpose for the future but does not yet have a clear plan to replace it.”

Comment

All outsourcing contracts have their strengths and failures – including early promises that don’t come to anything.

But it’s unlikely councils and other public sector organisations that are seriously considering outsourcing will take into account the past failures and broken promises of their potential suppliers.

If officials and councillors want to outsource IT and other services they probably will, whatever the record of their favoured potential suppliers.

They will see reports of the National Audit Office and Public Accounts Committee as biased towards negative disclosures.

Indeed the BBC and Capita, in their responses to today’s TV licensing report of the Public Accounts Committee, have drawn attention to the positive aspects of the report and not mentioned the technological failures.

Where does this leave councils and other organisations that are considering IT-related outsourcing and are seeking reference sites as part of the bid process?

Will those reference sites give only the positive aspects and not mention, or successfully deprecate, any media, PAC or NAO reports on contract failures?

Negative findings by the National Audit Office and Public Accounts Committee are usually important. Were it not for their scrutiny would not know how public money is being spent and misspent.

But their reports will have little or no effect as warnings to organisations that want to outsource.

Public Accounts Committee – BBC Licence Fee – 26 April 2017

 

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Capita, IT-related failures, local government, managing outsourced services, National Audit Office, outsourcing

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Whitehall to auto-extend outsourcing deals using Brexit as excuse?

Posted on 13/04/2017 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

Type of government procurement spend 2014-2015. ICT is the top item.
Source: National Audit Office

Under a headline “UK outsourcing deals extended because of Brexit workload”, the Financial Times has reported that “hundreds of government contracts with the private sector that were due to expire are to be automatically extended because civil servants are too busy with Brexit to focus on new and better-value tenders”.

The FT says the decision to roll over the contracts could prove expensive for taxpayers because it limits competition and undermines government efforts to improve procurement.

A “procurement adviser to the government” whom the FT doesn’t name, said more than 250 contracts were either close to expiring or had already expired in 2016-17. The adviser told the FT,

“Brexit has pushed them down the list of priorities so there are lots of extensions and re-extensions of existing deals.”

The adviser added that this was the only way civil servants could prioritise the huge increase in Brexit-related work since the referendum.

Extensions

The FT provides no evidence of automatic contract extensions or the claim that deals will be extended because of the civil service’s Brexit workload.

There is evidence, however, that Whitehall officials tend to extend contracts beyond their original expiry date.

In a report published this year on the Cabinet Office’s Crown Commercial Service, the National Audit Office identified 22 framework contracts that were due to expire in 2016-17. Half of them (eleven) were extended beyond their original expiry date.

[The Crown Commercial Service was set up in 2014 to improve state procurement.]

The NAO also found that Whitehall departments – and the Crown Commercial Service – have been awarding contracts using expired framework deals, even though this contravenes public contracting regulations.

In 2015-16, 21 of the 39 frameworks that were due to expire were extended without competition or market testing, according to the NAO.

One example of an extended contract is a deal between Capita and the Department for Work and Pensions which started in 2010. Capita provides eligibility assessments for the personal independent payment allowance, which supports for people with long-term ill health or disability.

The five-year deal was extended by two years until July 2019.

Capita has also won a three-year extension to a contract with the Pensions Regulator and the BBC has extended a deal with Capita that was signed originally in 2002 to June 2022 – a total of at least 20 years.

Open competition?

The NAO has found that extending ICT contracts may not always be good for taxpayers. In the later years of their government contracts, suppliers tend to make higher margins (though not always).

There are also suggestions that civil servants will sometimes sign contract extensions when the performance of the supplier does not meet expected standards.

On ICT, the Cabinet Office asks central departments to complete a return every six months for each business process outsourcing and facilities management contract above £20m with strategic suppliers.

The survey asks whether the contract is being delivered on time, to scope, to budget, to the appropriate standards, and whether there have been any disputes.

In one study of government contracts with ICT suppliers, the NAO found that, of 259 returns from departments, 42 highlighted problems that included,

  • failure to achieve milestones
  • dissatisfaction with quality of outputs
  • errors and other issues with delivery
  • poor customer engagement and end user dissatisfaction and
  • failure to meet key performance indicators.

Comment

For taxpayers there is some good news.

A break-up of “Aspire”, the biggest IT outsourcing long-term deal of all, between HMRC and Capgemini (and to a lesser extent Fujitsu) – worth about £9bn – is going ahead this June. An HMRC spokesman says,

“HMRC is on track to complete the phased exit from Aspire, as planned, by June 2017.”

And according to Government Computing, Defra’s IT outsourcing contracts with IBM and Capgemini under a £1.6bn contract called “Unity” are due to expire in 2018 and there are no signs the deals will be extended.

But the Department for Work and Pensions’ huge IT outsourcing contracts with the same major suppliers are renewed routinely and not always with open competition. The DWP says on its website,

“DWP contracts are awarded by competition between potential suppliers, unless there are compelling reasons why competition cannot be used.”

The DWP doesn’t define “compelling”. Nor is it clear whether its auditors look at whether the DWP has put up a compelling case for not putting a large IT contract out to open competition.

In 2014 the Public Accounts Committee, after investigating major suppliers to government, concluded,

“Government is clearly failing to manage performance across the board, and to achieve the best for citizens out of the contracts into which they have entered.

“Government needs a far more professional and skilled approach to managing contracts and contractors, and contractors need to demonstrate the high standards of ethics expected in the conduct of public business, and be more transparent about their performance and costs”.

Breaking up is hard to do

The break up of the huge Aspire IT outsourcing contract at HMRC is an exception, not the rule. The NAO has found that civil servants regard their major incumbent suppliers as safe and less risky than hiring a smaller company (that’s not steeped in Whitehall’s culture).

The NAO has also found that in some cases officials don’t know whether their suppliers are performing well or not. On many ICT contracts there is “open book” accounting, but not all departments have the staff or expertise to check regularly on whether their suppliers’ profits are excessive.

If Whitehall, with exceptions, is continuing to roll over contracts whether it’s legal to do so or not, what incentive exists to stick to the rules?

Brexit?

The FT story suggests Brexit is the reason hundreds of contracts are to be extended automatically. There’s probably truth in the automatic extension of some contracts – but it’s unlikely to be because of Brexit.

It’s unlikely that the civil servants involved in Brexit will be the same ones who are handling ICT contract extensions. That said, Brexit will inevitably put a higher workload on lawyers working for government.

If contracts are being extended automatically, it’s probably because that’s the way it has always been, at least within living memory.

While Sir Humphrey and his senior officials remain only nominally accountable to Parliament for how they spend taxpayers’ money, the easiest option of renewing or extending existing contracts will usually be seen as the best option.

It can be justified with “compelling” arguments such as a need to make an urgent decision in difficult circumstances, or the absence of alternative suppliers who have the necessary skills or the financial strength to accept the risks of failure.

Will anything change?

Until departments have to publish contemporaneously their intentions to award contracts without open competition or there is effective accountability within the civil service for major decisions, little is likely to change.

It hasn’t happened yet and there’s no reason to believe it will.  Many politicians including prime ministers have tried to reform the civil service and they haven’t ruffled a single carpet in the corridors of Whitehall.

As Antony Jay, co-writer of Yes Minister,  said in January 2013,

“The central anomaly is that civil servants have years of experience, jobs for life, and a budget of hundreds of billions of pounds, while ministers have, usually, little or no experience of the job and could be kicked out tomorrow.

” After researching and writing 44 episodes and a play, I find government much easier to understand by looking at ministers as public relations consultants to the real government – which is, of course, the Civil Service.”

In short, Brexit is likely to be officialdom’s up-to-date excuse for carrying on much as before.

Thank you to @TimMorton2 for alerting me to the FT article.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Capgemini, DEFRA, DWP, EU procurement, excessive secrecy, Fujitsu, Government IT, HMRC, HP, IBM, managing outsourced services, National Audit Office, outsourcing, private sector lessons for the public sector, supplier relationships

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