Hospitals accuse Capita of failings

Posted on 12/07/2013 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

A nine-page letter written on behalf of eight health trusts is said to criticise Capita for “persistent minor failings” in managing payroll and other work formerly carried out by their human resources departments, says the Liverpool Post which has a copy of the letter.

The failings listed in the letter are said to include:

– overpaying staff, with trusts having problems recovering the monies paid out;

– breaching data protection by sending staff personal details to other employees;

– paying someone due to start work two months’ salary, despite their dropping out of the recruitment process;

 – delays in pre- employment checks, leading to highly valuable candidates withdrawing their application for a job;

– losing sensitive and confidential information

The Post says the letter threatens terminating the contract. “Health trusts stressed, unless they sort the problems out, they will not only deduct the cost incurred to them out of Capita’s payment but continued failure will result in them terminating its contract,” said the paper.

The letter was said to have been written by Debbie Fryer, director of human resources at Aintree UniversityHospitals, Fazakerley, on behalf of several trusts within the North Mersey Framework that have contracted out their payroll and human resources work to Capita.

It represents Fazakerley Hospital, Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, the mental health trust Mersey Care NHS Trust, Liverpool Community Health NHS Trust, Liverpool Women’s Hospital, Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen hospitals, Wirral’s specialist Clatterbridge Cancer Centre and the specialist brain hospital The Walton Centre.

In 2011 the Capita Group announced  that it had been appointed as preferred supplier by a NHS North Mersey collaboration to deliver HR, payroll and recruitment services for up to 12 NHS trusts in Mersey.

The seven-year contract was worth up to £27m, with an option to extend for a further three years.  The contract was  expected to involve the TUPE transfer of up to 150 employees to Capita and the set up of new shared service centre based in Liverpool.

Capita said at the time it was first time NHS trusts had come together in the way they did to collectively outsource their HR, payroll and recruitment functions. 

The Liverpool Post says the letter expresses concern that Capita displayed a “laissez faire” attitude to personal data which had the potential to be “extremely damaging” to the trusts’ reputations and employee morale.

Trusts were said to have had difficulties recovering sums overpaid to employees, particularly former employees. Examples of lost documentation were said to be “almost too numerous to mention”, with documents seemingly disappearing into a “black hole”.

Ms Fryer is said to have been alarmed at some of the content of a report on Capita by auditors Grant Thornton in May. The letter sought concrete proposals on how Capita was going to resolve the situation.

A spokesman for Capita told the Post: “Capita is under contract with 10 trusts in the north west of England as a part of a framework agreement to deliver transactional HR services, including payroll and recruitment.

“As a part of this contract, Capita has been consolidating each trust’s individual HR and recruitment processes moving these to one common process applicable to all trusts under the framework.

“The simpler, improved process will make HR services easier and quicker for staff to use, lightening the administrative burden so trusts can focus on patient care.

“In order to implement these valuable changes, Capita and the trusts are currently undergoing a period of transformation as individual, often paper-based, services move to this common process.

“During this period, some challenges have arisen for both the trusts and Capita. However, Capita is working closely with the trusts involved to overcome those issues identified in order to deliver an enhanced service for trusts and their staff.”

Liverpool Post article

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Capita, change management, IT projects, managing change, managing outsourced services, NHS, operational issues, outsourcing, public sector, shared services, supplier relationships

Defra’s agile plan with multiple suppliers risky says NAO

Posted on 11/07/2013 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

The National Audit Office says in a report published today that Defra’s agile plan which involves outsourcing to multiple IT suppliers has “significant” risks.

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs plans to implement a single integrated £80m Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) system built on agile methodologies.

Defra has been working with the Government Digital Service (GDS) to plan an agile implementation and learn from the lessons of the past, the department’s chief operating officer Ian Trenholm told Computer Weekly in January 2013.

Today’s NAO report on Defra’s 2012/13 accounts says that the department is planning the procurement, development and implementation of new systems in line with changes to the way the common agricultural policy operates.

“Development and implementation of these [new systems] will present a number of challenges, including the requirement that data cleansing is completed on time, in order to ensure that accurate and complete data is transferred to the new systems,” says the NAO.

It adds that the IT element of the change programme “will be delivered through an agile approach which involves outsourcing to multiple IT providers”. The NAO says that Defra has recognised a number of significant risks relating to the Programme. “It will need a strong relationship between the Programme team and other important stakeholders, and appropriate governance arrangements, to ensure that these risks are adequately managed and that the Department learns the lessons from the implementation of CAP 2005.”

NAO report on Defra’s 2012/13 accounts.

Comment

Defra and its Rural Payments Agency had a disaster with the Single Payment Scheme which was built on conventional lines through one main supplier. If there are risks with the new agile approach involving multiple suppliers they cannot be as great as spending hundreds of millions of pounds with one company; and working through those new agile-related risks may help other departments find a different and much cheaper way of buying IT, and implementing important policy-related business change.

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Posted in Accenture, Agile, Campaign4Change, change management, DEFRA, EU procurement, GDS, Government IT, IT projects, reducing cost strategically, supplier relationships

Universal Credit – good for its IT suppliers?

Posted on 11/07/2013 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

The DWP is conceding in its own tangential way that the IT for Universal Credit is not up to scratch; and an article in the Daily Telegraph suggests that Universal Credit this year (and perhaps well beyond) will handle so few claimants that the calculations for the time being could be done by hand, or on a spreadsheet, and not automatically by IT systems. The Register, through anonymous sources, has confirmation of this.

The FT says there will be a progressive national rollout of the coalition’s welfare reform in just six additional jobcentres which it said was the “latest sign the project is falling behind schedule”. It added that a significant shake-up of the IT underpinning universal credit is under way. 

The DWP said David Pitchford, the Whitehall troubleshooter who took over the running of Universal Credit for three months, had been asked to “review” the IT and ministers had “accepted his recommendation that they should explore enhancing the IT for universal credit working with the government digital service”.

“Advancements in technology since the current system was developed have meant that a more responsive system that is more flexible and secure could potentially be built,” said the DWP.

The FT quoted Howard Shiplee, who has led the Universal Credit  project since May, as denying claims from MPs that the original IT had been dumped because it had not delivered. “The existing systems that we have are working, and working effectively,” he said.

He added that he had set aside 100 days not to stop the programme, but to reflect on where it has got to and start to look at the entire total plan.

Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, doesn’t concede that the  timetable for the implementation of Universal Credit has changed. He told the work and pensions committee on Wednesday that numbers of claimants would ramp up during 2014 and he insisted that all claimants would be on the system by 2017, as originally planned.

“We get fixated on things like IT; the reality is it’s about a cultural shift,” Duncan Smith told MPs.

Comment

Iain Duncan Smith makes it clear that his DWP staff and suppliers, with the help of HMRC, are implementing Universal Credit with extreme care. Labour’s  work and pensions spokesman Liam Byrne says the Universal Credit project is a shambles. The truth is hard to fathom.

For years the DWP has rejected press reports that the IT for Universal Credit was in trouble. It is able to do without fear of authoritative contradiction because it keeps secret all its consultancy reports on the state of the Universal Credit project, despite FOI requests.

The Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude and his officials talk much about the need for openness and transparency. Isn’t it time they persuaded DWP officials to release their internal and external reports on the detailed challenges faced by suppliers and civil servants on Universal Credit and other major government IT projects?

All big government IT projects are characterised by secrecy and defensiveness, although a little information about them is in the vague and subjectively-worded Major Projects Authority annual report.

One by-product of departmental defensiveness and secrecy is that the IT suppliers – in Universal Credit’s case HP, IBM and Accenture – are likely to continue to be paid even if the project is halted and redesigned. It’s probable the suppliers would argue that they have successfully done what they were asked to do in the contract. Who knows what the truth is?

The DWP is in effect protecting its suppliers from public and parliamentary scrutiny. It has been this way for decades and nothing has changed.

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Posted in Accenture, Agile, Campaign4Change, excessive secrecy, FOI, Freedom of Information, Government IT, IBM, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, managing change, managing outsourced services, openness and transparency, operational issues, outsourcing, oversight, project management, public sector, public services, software quality, supplier relationships

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Is HMRC’s RTI project really a success?

Posted on 10/07/2013 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

On  Eddie Mair’s “PM” programme on R4, I suggested that HMRC’s real-time information project was not the failure many had expected it to be.

“Even some hawk-eyed critics of government IT projects like journalist Tony Collins think that HMRC may have something of a success on its hands,” said BBC reporter Chris Vallance who produced the RTI item.

I was quoted as saying that many had expected RTI to become another government IT disaster. “But given that there are millions of PAYE employees who are on the system at the moment, if there were any major difficulties we’d expect to have seen them by now.”

Now an HMRC expert has questioned whether my comments were justified. He says parts of RTI are in chaos. He doesn’t want to be named. He writes:

“The RTI system was intended to report on a weekly or monthly basis the same information as had previously been reported by employers on an annual basis. Although details of pay and tax would be forwarded to HMRC far more frequently the same core logic applied. Details of the statutory deductions by the employer would have to be reconciled with payments made, and details of the income and tax paid recorded against the employee’s PAYE record.

“What appears to have happened is that HMRC has designed a system that takes details of employees’ earned or pension income, and statutory PAYE deductions, and then makes various illogical assumptions.

“For instance it would appear that where an employee receives no earnings in a particular pay period, the RTI system assumes that no information is “transmitted” for this employee, indicating that the employee has “left the employment”.

“Similarly where an employer undertakes a re-order of the pay identities (codes on the payroll system called Works Numbers that identify employees), the fact that payroll information is transmitted to HMRC with a Works Number different to that used previously triggers an assumption that the employee has two employments, with the same employer.

“This has the consequence of allowing the NPS (New PAYE Computer System – costing in excess of £400 million) to assume that the employee’s estimated income for the tax year has doubled. The NPS then looks to see if the employee has any part-time or other employment, and in many cases it changes the PAYE code number of these part-time employments from Basic Rate, which deducts tax at 20%, to Code D0, which deducts tax at 40%. All because of an incorrect and invalid assumption.

“Similarly, this failure to understand how PAYE and payroll interact has lead to the situation where an employee who leaves an employment that has attracted a PAYE coding deduction for Car Benefit in Kind and starts another Employment, has the PAYE Coding Deduction removed. The fact that the new employment may well involve a company car is completely ignored, with the result that the employee is more than likely to have a large underpayment of income tax at the year end, despite being on PAYE.

“This failure to understand the basic operation and logic of PAYE would appear to be due to that fact that HMRC has been influenced by those who have an understanding of data flows and cash transfers. The rush to modernise PAYE and move away from “a 1940’s system” has completely omitted the fact that basic operations for employments, tax and NI deductions and the accountability of these remains exactly the same, even if the calculations are undertaken electronically rather than with a quill pen and large ledger book.

“The old PAYE system had as part of its reporting system two components: the forms P14 detailing each individual’s pay, tax etc. and a summary of all employees information, the form P35. The P14 passed information to the NPS system and the P35 information was passed to the accounts computer systems. This allowed HMRC to determine the income of the employee and calculate if sufficient income tax etc had been paid. It also allowed HMRC to match the figure of tax / NIC due and payable on the P35 with the amount actually received from the employer. RTI has failed to comply with this basic logic and chaos is ensuing, to the extent that the National Audit Office recently commented

 ‘The financial and accounting systems supporting RTI are not yet fully accredited. Financial accreditation is a formal requirement of HMRC’s Change Programme and provides assurance that any new systems are acceptable for accounting and financial control purposes. The RTI systems went live on the basis that action would be taken to resolve identified financial design issues by 31 October 2013.

‘These issues do not affect an employer’s ability to submit data to HMRC but do weaken HMRC’s ability to produce and report financial information on PAYE. HMRC is currently undertaking work to understand the impact of these issues and how best to address them.’

“Why the RTI system was not designed in the same logical manner is of great concern.

“The system failures that are occurring are not due to computer components or programs not being fit for purpose. Indeed the processing of the PAYE data streamed to HMRC as a result of the RTI system could reasonably be compared to any other large commercial organisation, albeit that the NAO has concerns over the fall-back planning HMRC has in place should there be any hardware failures and commented

‘The resilience needed to maintain the RTI service if there is a major technical failure is not in place. Online and time-sensitive system implementations are usually developed with formal technical resilience and disaster recovery capability.

‘HMRC chose not to pay for full resilience because of the cost implications and because PAYE could be operated in an emergency without RTI. However, although RTI has the potential to be used by other government departments, the lack of full resilience may inhibit its use in areas of activity where a temporary disruption to service cannot be tolerated.

‘Data submissions can be held temporarily in a queue but this would not provide continuity of service in the event of a catastrophic failure. The RTI service failing at a critical processing time could increase the volume of customer communications and lead to more effort for employers.’

“The RTI system is a very clear example of basic failures to properly prepare a Business Analysis Requirement for a system which in essence does no more that increase the number of times payroll information is passed to HMRC. Claims for the reinvention of PAYE for the 21st Century are as invalid as the claim that the ability to write has been done away with due to email and electronic communication. There has been a flawed reliance on the thoughts and views of those who have little or no experience in PAYE or payroll.”

On the PM programme, Ruth Owen, Director General of PersonalTax at HMRC, accepted that all was not perfect. She said

“We have had over 1.4 million PAYE schemes come into Real-Time Information [each PAYE scheme may have many employees on it] and that exceeds our expectations at this point in the year. But there’s still more to do. We have got to get everybody on and there are still people who need our help to get on.”

She added: “We have had a small number of difficult issues… We have had issues where people have got the wrong tax codes.”

Owen said the links between RTI and Universal Credit were “going well” but conceded that there have been only a tiny number of UC claimants so far.

“We have had around 100 claimants who we have helped DWP identify income stream data for. So it’s going to plan at the moment.”

Chris Vallance concluded the item by saying that some of the largest employers have yet to be added to RTI. “It’s only when it works at scale that we will really know how good real-time information really is,” he said.

Update: Chartered accountant Baker Tilly says on its website  that thousands of people have been issued wrong tax codes as a result of RTI-related problems. 

Audio of PM programme item on RTI – 4 July 2013 (approx 5 mins)

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Posted in change management, Disaster recovery, Government IT, HMRC, IT projects, procurement, Real-Time Information, Universal Credit

EC probes IBM CIO secondment at the Met Office

Posted on 08/07/2013 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

A part of the European Commission is investigating a decision by the Met Office to appoint an IBM executive as CIO while he worked at the same time for IBM, the organisation’s main IT supplier.

The investigation was prompted by concerns of campaigner Dave Orr who wrote to the EC about the Met Office’s appointment of an IBM secondee David Young as CIO for two years between 2010 and December 2012.

Now Michel Barnier, the EC Commissioner responsible for internal market and services, says in a letter to Orr’s MEP Sir Graham Watson that the EC’s Directorate-General for Internal Market and Financial Services has been carrying out “an in-depth analysis” of the facts presented by Orr.

As part of this, the EC has written to the UK government seeking clarification on a number of points.

Some of Orr’s concerns arise from the Met Office’s responses – and non-responses – to his freedom of information requests. One of his concerns is of a potentially cosy relationship between the Met Office as a publicly-funded organisation and its principal IT supplier IBM; and he has wanted to know why the job of Met Office CIO was not openly advertised in a competitive recruitment process and whether its appointment of an IBM secondee had the potential for a possible conflict of interest.

Orr said that the secondment had the potential to confer a unique and significant intelligence and relationship advantage for IBM that other supercomputer suppliers could not hope to match. “In my view, that is anti-competitive and may in spirit at least, fail the EU procurement rules,” said Orr.

Barnier said that the existence of a conflict of interest would “depend on a number of factors such as the precise role and responsibilities the position entails, in particular whether it includes formulating and preparing technical specifications or tender documents for future IT contracts that the Met Office may put out to tender”.

It is also relevant, said Barnier, whether the terms and conditions of the secondment “impose any obligations or restrictions on the head of the department to prevent conflicts of interest, both during the secondment and afterwards”. He also wanted to know if internal rules were in place to prevent conflicts of interest in the course of tendering procedures.

The Met Office and ministers said that Young was not involved in procurement decisions relating to existing supercomputer facilities. Norman Lamb, then minister at the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, said last year:

“Any potential conflicts of interest regarding David Young’s appointment were fully considered prior to his appointment and his terms of engagement specifically cover these …

“David Young had no involvement in the procurement process for existing supercomputing facilities, either for IBM or the Met Office, and he will have completed his secondment and left the Met Office prior to the selection of replacement supercomputer facilities.”

A wise decision?

The decision to second an IBM employee to run the 300-strong IT department, which is based at the Met Office’s supercomputer site in Exeter, raises questions that may go beyond the potential for a conflict of interest.

As Young was unable to be involved in some buying decisions and was unable to attend the technology strategy board to avoid any potential for a conflict of interest, did the Met Office restrict itself unnecessarily in hiring a CIO who faced these constraints?

Did the Met Office waste money – and a precious two years – hiring a lifeguard whose terms of employment required him to wear handcuffs?

The secondment of Young came at a difficult time for the Met Office – and some of the main difficulties it faced in 2010 are largely the same today.

Responses to Orr’s FOI requests and a report by the House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee highlight some of the Met Office’s challenges:

– A need for modernised software that will take advantage of next-generation supercomputers.

– A need for a replacement supercomputer that has twice the power of the existing one which operates close to one petaflop (one thousand million million floating point operations per second).

– Funding a new supercomputer (with optimised software) at a time of cut-backs in government spending.

A Met Office Executive Board paper said that its executives have had “soft” negotiations with various suppliers about next generation supercomputer technology. They spoke to Bull, Cray, Microsoft, NEC and SGI.

“Vendor presentations indicate that performance increases will come from increasing the number of processors and/or adding co processors designed to process arrays of data efficiently, rather than increasing the speed of individual processors,” said the Met Office paper.

The Met Office says that “significant optimisation work will be needed [on the code] and, if this is not completed around 2014, a delay in the launch of the procurement may be unavoidable.” It has been seeking software engineers with experience of Fortran (which was originally developed by IBM) or C, Unix or Linux and Perl.

A House of Commons report in 2012 emphasised the need for new technology at the Met Office. The report of the Science and Technology Committee “Met Office Science” said in February 2012:

“It is of great concern to us that these scientific advances in weather forecasting and the associated public benefits (particularly in regard to severe weather warnings) are ready and waiting but are being held back by insufficient supercomputing capacity. We consider that a step-change in supercomputing capacity is required in the UK.”

MPs acknowledged that “affordability is an issue.”

The Met Office declined to answer Orr’s FOI requests about the cost to the taxpayer of employing Young.

Since Young’s  secondment ended in December 2012 the Met Office has hired one of its own employees as CIO. Charles Ewen has worked for the Met Office since 2008. He works with science teams to operate the Met Office’s high performance computing facilities. He is responsible for the development and implementation of the Met Office’s ICT Strategy and for the internal technical teams within the Technology Information Services Directorate.

Comment:

The Met Office hired Young for the best of reasons: after a succession of internal management changes it wanted a highly professional, stabilising CIO. But did it need a CIO from IBM, its principal IT supplier?

That the Met Office was sheepish about the appointment of an IBM secondee was, perhaps, revealed by its website which, in giving a profile of Young, did not mention – at first – that he was seconded from IBM. After Dave Orr’s FOI requests the Met Office corrected its website omission, making clear that Young was on secondment from IBM.

The Met Office has been in existence nearly 16o years. It was founded by Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy in 1854 as the Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade. It is highly regarded internationally. A testament to the quality of its computer models  – which are used for daily forecasts – is that its “Unified Model” is licensed in Norway, Australia, South Korea, South Africa, India, New Zealand and the US Air Force.

Scientists say that a three-day forecast today is as accurate as a one-day forecast was 20 years ago. But in the UK the Met Office gets a bad press – not always unjustifiably.  There is a perception that the accuracy of forecasting is not improving. Sometimes it seems poor.

The algorithms that form the basis of weather and climate models place huge demands on supercomputing architectures. The models produce exceptionally large volumes of data. Although the Met Office had a new IBM supercomputer in 2008 it soon needed more powerful hardware and modernised software.

So was it a good idea, with all the challenges the Met Office faced in 2010 – including the need to persuade the government of the need to fund  new supercomputer facilities – to appoint a CIO for two years who, because he was an IBM secondee, had understandable restrictions on his freedom to do his job, restrictions the Met Office has been reluctant to reveal, despite Dave Orr’s FOI requests?

Hole in the head

The Met Office may regard an EC inquiry into its appointment of an IBM secondee as the last thing it needs now. But accountability should not be left to the occasional scrutiny by a Commons committee – or to Dave Orr’s FOI requests.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, capacity building, EU procurement, excessive secrecy, FOI, Freedom of Information, Government IT, IBM, innovation, managing outsourced services, Met Office, outsourcing, procurement, technology

Whitehall to lose its best troubleshooter

Posted on 05/07/2013 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

David Pitchford, who is arguably the civil service’s most able troubleshooter, is to quit the civil service in September and return to his native Australia for undisclosed family reasons. The FT broke the story yesterday.

Pitchford is Executive Director at the understaffed Major Projects Authority. It aims to work in partnership with permanent secretaries and senior civil servants to improve the success rate of major departmental IT and other large projects. 

In practice some senior civil servants in central departments resent the intrusion of the Cabinet Office. They do not like having to present their big schemes to the Major Projects Authority, particularly as it has David Cameron’s mandate to stop or re-scope failing projects.

Fighting intransigence? 

One unanswered question about Pitchford’s quitting is: has his morale been beaten down by departmental intransigence and even ill-will? Has the system defeated Pitchford and the taxpayer – the same system that confronted other Cabinet Office reformers John Suffolk, Chris Chant and Andy Tait?

It is possible that Pitchford feels his work is done now that the Major Projects Authority has finally, and after some departmental resistance, produced its first annual report.

The report’s key feature is its “traffic light” status on the projects it is keeping an eye on. In a foreword to the report, Pitchford wrote:

“April 2013 marks two years of the Major Projects Authority… For the first time, the country’s biggest and most high-risk projects are scrutinised so problems are exposed before they spiral out of control. Over two-thirds of major projects are predicted to deliver their promises on time and on budget, more than double the historic success rate. However, the MPA has studied carefully what goes on in every department, and we have uncovered some weaknesses which we are continuing to address.

“The MPA was established following a landmark report by the National Audit Office in 2010, which recommended a wholesale shift in the administration of major projects. It works closely with individual departments’ project teams and Permanent Secretaries to monitor and improve the management of major projects…the MPA’s Government Major Projects Portfolio has improved the rate of successful project delivery from under 30% to over 70%.

“Our success has been achieved by focusing intensively on the three core elements of successful project management: improving leadership; improving the operating environment; and looking closely at the past lessons.”

Pitchford is a much-valued executive in part because he can see why projects are failing and is straight-talking. He joined the Cabinet Office in November 2009 and in 2010 told a conference what he had discovered so far about the reasons for the failure of UK government projects:

– Political pressure

– No business case

– No agreed budget

– 80% of projects launched before 1,2 & 3 have been resolved

– Sole solution approach (options not considered)

– Lack of Commercial capability – (contract / administration)

– No plan

– No timescale

– No defined benefits

Since then Pitchford has been a little more guarded now about what he says in public. Campaign4Change said in February 2013 that the longer he stays in the innately secretive civil service the more guarded he seems to become but he is still one the best assets the Cabinet Office has. His main advantage is his independence from government departments.

Francis Maude, Cabinet Office minister, said he would “much miss David’s sharp wit and impressive leadership”.

Is Pitchford’s departure a sign that the non-reformers in Whitehall departments are winning the battle against major change?

 

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Posted in Campaign4Change, capacity building, change management, cost reduction, G-Cloud, Government IT, IT projects, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, private sector lessons for the public sector, procurement, project management, public sector

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When Whitehall shuns statutory scrutiny

Posted on 25/06/2013 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

In some ways central departments are deeply accountable.

They provide volumes of statistics and reports to the centre of government (Cabinet Office and Treasury) – as far as their limited management information systems will let them – and senior officers will sometimes answer questions from MPs on Parliamentary committees. Their permanent secretaries will meet colleagues in other departments every week.

At the same time, on things that really matter, some central departments – and councils – can be infinitely unaccountable. 

A report by the National Audit Office – which it says was researched and written unusually quickly, partly in response to parliamentary concern – gives a glimpse of how unaccountable central departments (and councils) can be.

When they don’t want to provide information they simply don’t – and nothing it seems can be done to force disclosure.

Power to ignore

With explicit and written approval from David Cameron the Cabinet Office has the power to mandate change in central departments. But senior officials can, if they wish, when faced with central requests for information, ignore, reject, deliberately misunderstand, confuse or minimise answers, or delay until the request no longer need be answered.

This ability of central departments to evade democratic and even statutory scrutiny surfaces in the NAO report Confidentiality clauses and special severance payments.

The report is into the gagging of public servants when they receive payments for ending their employments early. Rightly, the media’s coverage of the report focuses on the NAO’s concerns over gagging clauses that stop officials becoming whistleblowers. The FT said on Friday (21 June 2013)

“More than a thousand civil servants have signed gagging clauses that could stop them speaking out about problems, a system the [NAO] condemned as “unacceptable”.

What the national media apparently did not notice was that the NAO was unable to obtain all the information it had requested of departments.

“Despite the NAO’s statutory access rights, it received only 60 per cent of the compromise agreements requested from departments,” says the NAO.

The NAO has statutory rights of access to information held by departments. Indeed its Comptroller and Auditor General Amyas Morse certifies the accounts of all government departments and many other public sector bodies. The NAO says he has “statutory authority to examine and report to Parliament on whether departments and the bodies they fund have used their resources efficiently, effectively, and with economy”.

Avoiding NAO scrutiny

But some departments have not complied with the NAO’s requests, and one, the Department of Culture, Media & Sport, formally requested not to be involved in the NAO’s investigation.

Says the NAO report

“Unfortunately, some departments did not respond promptly to our requests, and were delayed by their legal teams’ questioning of our access rights.

The NAO adds

“The Department for Culture, Media & Sport requested not to be involved in this piece of work, a position which could not be resolved until after our fieldwork window had closed.

“We found it challenging to gain a complete picture of the use of confidentiality clauses as, by their nature, they are not openly discussed. Our work was also hampered by incomplete records, and access to data as outlined above.

“It took several attempts to identify the appropriate individuals within departments responsible for compromise agreements and the associated payments. We experienced delays in receiving data, and what departments provided was frequently incomplete or in a format that was difficult to collate and analyse.”

So what can the NAO do now it has been snubbed or, to put it in Whitehall-speak, has encountered departmental non-compliance with statutory access requests?

Little or nothing. The NAO has no power to punish. Through MPs on the Public Accounts Committee it can admonish. That is all.

Says the NAO:

“Given the innovative nature of this work, some initial difficulties were anticipated. We will continue to work with departments, the Treasury and Cabinet Office to explore ways in which we can obtain the evidence on a timelier basis. It is important that departments are able to respond more quickly to these investigations in the future.”

Councils too can evade democratic accountability. The NAO has no access rights to local authorities but councils are, in theory, subject to the Freedom of Information Act. In practice they can all but ignore the FOI legislation if they wish.

In March 2010, the Audit Commission published a report on severance payments to council chief executives. The study found that:

• agreed severance packages for 37 council chief executives totalled £9.5 million, 40 per cent of which were in pension benefits;

• three in every ten outgoing council chief executives received a pay-off;

• the average cost to councils of each severance package was almost double the annual basic salary, but in four cases was more than triple; and

• 79 per cent of mutually-agreed severance payments had a confidentiality clause.

But the NAO found that, in a recent survey of councils by a member of the public under the FoI Act, 52 councils refused to disclose information on their use of compromise agreements.

The good news

The NAO says: “Some organisations have chosen to be transparent about severance packages, such as NHS National Services Scotland, who agreed to the disclosure of a director’s remuneration package, despite a confidentiality agreement being in place, following consultation with legal advisers.”

Comment:

How is Francis Maude to reform central government, particularly IT, if officials in central departments can apparently do what they wish?

The NAO found cases of payments that were higher than contractual entitlement, where there was the apparent reward for failure, and no attempt to seek Treasury’s approval.  Is all this lawful? 

On top of this there are departmental officials who avoided the NAO’s statutory requests for information.

If they can circumvent the law they can probably resist any central demands for change. Resistance seems to be regarded within departments as honourable.

One irony is that bureaucrats in Russia probably have little choice but to respond to central demands – whereas officials in Whitehall departments don’t have to.

Radical reform to change Whitehall’s outdated and costly ways is unlikely to happen while senior officers in departments run the system and have the final say.

NAO report “Confidentiality clauses and special severance payments“

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Posted in Campaign4Change, change management, cost reduction, Freedom of Information, governance, government, Government IT, local democracy, local government, managing change, oversight, Politics, private sector lessons for the public sector, public sector

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IT official had paid outside help to prepare for Public Accounts hearing

Posted on 14/06/2013 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

On Wednesday (12 June 2013) MPs on the Public Accounts Committee questioned officials on the National Programme for IT.

One of the officials was Sir David Nicholson,  Chief executive of NHS in England. Another was Tim Donohoe, senior responsible owner, local service provider programmes.

Donohoe has worked for NHS Connecting for Health since 2003, initially for a few months as a contractor. He answered most of the questions on the NPfIT.

Near the end of the hearing Conservative Steve Barclay asked Sir David:  “Did you or anyone else employ any third parties on short-term contracts to support you in preparing for today’s hearing?”

Sir David looked surprised. “Did I?” he asked.

Barclay: “Were any people outside the NHS hired – contractors or consultants – to help you prepare with today’s hearing?”

“Yes,” said Donohoe. “I had someone to assist me who has assisted on previous hearings.”

Barclay: “So could we get a note with a breakdown? What sort of daily rate are they on?”

Donohoe: “I can’t recall the figure but I will write to you.”

Barclay: “Ball park?”

Donohoe: “I am sorry I cannot recall.”

Barclay: “If you hired them it seems a bit strange you wouldn’t know how much you are paying them. So you hired some people to come in and help coach you?”

Donohoe: “One person – no, not to coach, just to assist with the preparation.”

Barclay: “Can we have a detailed note of any payments made to people outside the NHS as part of preparing, coaching or whatever it may have been ahead of today’s hearing?”

Comment:

Does it matter if taxpayers paid for Donohoe to have outside help to prepare for Wednesday’s Public Accounts Committee hearing on the NPfIT? Perhaps this assistance for an important hearing was wisely sought and bought. After all the programme is the world’s largest non-military IT scheme and has many complex strands.

Or does the hiring of outside help for a Parliamentary hearing suggest a mindset within the Department of Health that, when it comes to the NPfIT, there are few real limits on spending?

The PAC hearing on the NPfIT – Parliament TV 

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Did officials exaggerate death of the NPfIT?

Posted on 14/06/2013 | Leave a comment

By T0ny Collins

In 2011 the Department of Health made a major announcement that implied the NHS IT programme, the NPfIT, was dead when it wasn’t.

The DH’s press release announced an “acceleration of the dismantling of the National Programme for IT, following the conclusions of a new review by the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority”.

It said the Authority had concluded that the NPfIT was “not fit to provide the modern IT services that the NHS needs…” The National media took the press release to mean that the NPfIT was dead.

What the announcement didn’t mention was that at least £1.1bn had still to be spent, largely with CSC, provided that the company successfully completed all the work set out in its revised contracts, and that the projected end-of-life of some centrally-chosen NHS IT systems was 2024.

Some will say: who cares if the DH issues a press release that is misleading. Others may say that in a democracy one should be able to trust institutions of state. If the DH issues an official notice that has the effect of manipulating public perceptions – gives a false impression – can citizens trust the Department’s other official notices?

The press release in question did not say the NPfIT was closing but gave that impression. The announcement distanced the government and the Department of Health from an IT scheme, perhaps the world’s largest non-military IT programme, that was failing. This was the press release:

The government today announced an acceleration of the dismantling of the National Programme for IT.

“The government today announced an acceleration of the dismantling of the National Programme for IT, following the conclusions of a new review by the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority (MPA). The programme was created in 2002 under the last government and the MPA has concluded that it is not fit to provide the modern IT services that the NHS needs…”

The press release was given added weight by those quoted in it. They included the Department of Health, Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office and Sir David Nicholson, Chief Executive of the NHS.

But the truth about the press release emerged this week at a hearing of the Public Accounts Committee.

Margaret Hodge, chair of the Public Accounts Committee, began a hearing on the NPfIT on Wednesday by asking Sir David Nicholson, the NHS chief, a canny question.

Hodge:  “There was a big announcement back in 2011 that you were closing the NPfIT programme.”

“Yes,” replied Sir David.

“That’s not true,” said Hodge. “It was a PR exercise to say you closed it.”

Nicholson: “It certainly was not a PR exercise.”

Hodge: “What changed?”

Nicholson: “The governance arrangements changed.  So there are separate senior responsible officers for each of the individual programmes [within the NPfIT].”

Hodge: “With the greatest respect, changing governance arrangements is not closing the programme.. .I think the impression you were trying to give was that you were closing the programme. All you were doing was shifting the deckchairs on the Titanic. You were shifting the way you were running it but you were keeping all that expenditure running… The impression given to the public was that you were going to get out of some of these contracts.”

On the basis of the press release the Daily Mail published a front page lead story with this headline:

£12bn NHS computer system is scrapped… and it’s all YOUR money that Labour poured down the drain

On the day of the press release the Daily Telegraph reported that the £11.4bn NHS IT programme was “to be abandoned”.  Similar reports appeared in the trade press.

But this week’s Public Accounts Committee heard that the NPfIT is very much alive:

– the estimated worth of CSC’s contracts under the NPfIT has risen from £3.1bn to £3.8bn at today’s prices.

–  officials expected to pay CSC a further £1.1bn on top of the £1.1bn it has already received, and this payment may include up to £600m for Lorenzo deployments at only 22 trusts. Hodge said: “You are going to spend another half a billion with this rotten company providing a hopeless system” – to which the DH argues that CSC has delivered thousands of (non-Lorenzo) working systems to the NHS which trusts and community health services rely on.

– About £500m of the £1.1bn still set aside for CSC will go on GP systems supplied by CSC’s subcontractor TPP Systmone.

– Further spending on the NPfIT may come as a result of Fujitsu’s legal action against the DH after it left the NPfIT in 2008, which leaves the taxpayer with a potential pay-out of £700m or more. The outcome of a formal arbitration is expected in about six months. The closing arguments are due at the end of this month.

– £31.5m has so far been spent on the DH’s legal costs in the Fujitsu case, mostly with the .law firm DLA Piper.

– DH has agreed a compensation payment to CSC of £100m. In return CSC has released the Department of Health from a contractual commitment for 160 NHS trusts to take the Lorenzo system. The DH has made a further payment to CSC of £10m in recognition of changes to its software which had been requested by the NHS but not formally agreed with CSC.

Comment

It appears there has been no deliberate deception and no deliberate manipulation of public perceptions of the NPfIT. But the fact remains that the DH made a major announcement in 2011 which gave the impression the NPfIT was dead when this was not true.

When a BBC Radio 4 journalist called me this week and we spoke briefly about the NPfIT he said: “I thought it was dead”.

Perhaps the mindset of officials was that the NPfIT was dead because everyone except the suppliers wanted it to be. But because local service provider contracts had to stay in place – the suppliers being much better equipped than the DH to handle any disputes over early termination – large payments to CSC and BT had to continue.

It’s a little like the political row over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It’s unlikely Blair lied over the existence of WMD. He probably convinced himself they existed. In a similar act of self-delusion officials appear to have convinced themselves the NPfIT was dead although it wasn’t.

But if we cannot believe a major DH announcement one starts to ask whether any of the department’s major announcements can be believed.

Uncoloured information on the NPfIT has always been hard to come by. So credit is due to the Public Accounts Committee and particularly its MP Richard Bacon for finding out so much about the NPfIT.  All credit to Margaret Hodge for picking up on Bacon’s concerns. Were it not for the committee, with indispensable support from the National Audit Office, the DH would have been a sieve allowing only bits of information it wanted to release to pass through.

The fall-out from the NPfIT will continue for years. We still don’t know, for example, what all the trusts with BT and CSC systems will do when the NPfIT contracts expire in the next three years. The hope is for transparency – and not of the sort characterised by the DH’s announcement in 2011 of the NPfIT’s dismantling.

This post also appears on ComputerworldUK

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Posted in BT, Campaign4Change, CSC, governance, health, health records, IT-related failures, legal disputes, Major Projects Authority, NHS, npfit, project management

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How to cost-justify the NPfIT disaster – forecast benefits a decade away

Posted on 07/06/2013 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

To Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, the NPfIT was a failure. In an interview with the FT, reported on 2 June 2013, Hunt said of the NPfIT

“It was a huge disaster . . . It was a project that was so huge in its conception but it got more and more specified and over-specified and in the end became impossible to deliver … But we musn’t let that blind us to the opportunities of technology and I think one of my jobs as health secretary is to say, look, we must learn from that and move on but we must not be scared of technology as a result.”

Now Hunt has a different approach.  “I’m not signing any big contracts from behind [my] desk; I am encouraging hospitals and clinical commissioning groups and GP practices to make their own investments in technology at the grassroots level.”

Hunt’s indictment of the NPfIT has never been accepted by some senior officials at the DH, particularly the outgoing chief executive of the NHS Sir David Nicholson. Indeed the DH is now making strenuous attempts to cost justify the NPfIT, in part by forecasting benefits for aspects of the programme to 2024.

The DH has not published its statement which attempts to cost justify the NPfIT. But the National Audit Office yesterday published its analysis of the unpublished DH statement. The NAO’s analysis “Review of the final benefits statement for programmes previously managed under the National Programme for IT in the NHS” is written for the Public Accounts Committee which meets next week to question officials on the NPfIT. 

A 22 year programme?

When Tony Blair gave the NPfIT a provisional go-ahead at a meeting in Downing Street in 2002, the programme was due to last less than three years. It was due to finish by the time of the general election of 2005. Now the NPfIT  turns out to be a programme lasting up to 22 years.

Yesterday’s NAO report says the end-of-life of the North, Midlands and East of England part of the NPfIT is 2024. Says the NAO

“There is, however, very considerable uncertainty around whether the forecast benefits will be realised, not least because the end-of-life dates for the various systems extend many years into the future, to 2024 in the case of the North, Midlands and East Programme for IT.”

The DH puts the benefits of the NPfIT at £3.7bn to March 2012 – against costs of £7.3bn to March 2012.

Never mind: the DH has estimated the forecast benefits to the end-of-life of the systems at £10.7bn. This is against forecast costs of £9.8bn to the end-of-life of the systems.

The forecast end-of-life dates are between 2016 and 2024. The estimated costs of the NPfIT do not include any settlement with Fujitsu over its £700m claim against NHS Connecting for Health. The forecast costs (and potential benefits) also exclude the patient administration system Lorenzo because of uncertainties over the CSC contract.

The NAO’s auditors raise their eyebrows at forecasting of benefits so far into the future. Says the NAO report

“It is clear there is very considerable uncertainty around the benefits figures reported in the benefits statement. This arises largely because most of the benefits relate to future periods and have not yet been realised. Overall £7bn (65 per cent) of the total estimated benefits are forecast to arise after March 2012, and the proportion varies considerably across the individual programmes depending on their maturity.

“For three programmes, nearly all (98 per cent) of the total estimated benefits were still to be realised at March 2012, and for a fourth programme 86 per cent of benefits remained to be realised.

There are considerable potential risks to the realisation of future benefits, for example systems may not be deployed as planned, meaning that benefits may be realised later than expected or may not be realised at all…”

NPfIT is not dead

The report also reveals that the DH considers the NPfIT to be far from dead. Says the NAO

“From April 2013, the Department [of Health] appointed a full-time senior responsible owner accountable for the delivery of the [the NPfIT] local service provider contracts for care records systems in London, the South and the North, Midlands and East, and for planning and managing the major change programme that will result from these contracts ending.

“The senior responsible owner is supported by a local service provider programme director in the Health and Social Care Information Centre.

“In addition, from April 2013, chief executives of NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts became responsible for the realisation and reporting of benefits on the ground. They will also be responsible for developing local business cases for the procurement of replacement systems ready for when the local service provider contracts end.”

The NAO has allowed the DH to include as a benefit of the NPfIT parts of the programme that were not included in the original programme such as PACS x-ray systems.

Officials have also assumed as a benefit quicker diagnosis from the Summary Care Record and text reminders using NHSmail which the DH says reduces the number of people who did not attend their appointment by between 30 and 50 per cent.

Comment

One of the most remarkable things about the NPfIT is the way benefits have always been – and still are – referred to in the future tense. Since the NPfIT was announced in 2002, numerous ministerial statements, DH press releases and conference announcements have all referred to what will happen with the NPfIT.

Back in June 2002, the document that launched the NPfIT, Delivering 21st Century IT for the NHS, said:

“We will quickly develop the infrastructure …”

“In 2002/03 we will seek to accelerate the pace of development …

“Phase 1 – April 2003 to December 2005 …Full National Health Record Service implemented, and accessible nationally for out of hours reference.”

In terms of the language used little has changed. Yesterday’s NAO report is evidence that the DH is still saying that the bulk of the benefits will come in future.

Next week (12 June) NHS chief Sir David Nicholson is due to appear before the Public Accounts Committee to answer questions on the NPfIT. One thing is not in doubt: he will not concede that the programme has been a failure.

Neither will he concede that a fraction of the £7.3bn spent on the programme up to March 2012 would have been needed to join up existing health records for the untold benefit of patients, especially those with complex and long-term conditions.

Isn’t it time MPs called the DH to account for living in cloud cuckoo land? Perhaps those at the DH who are still predicting the benefits of the NPfIT into the distant future should be named.

They might just as well have predicted, with no less credibility, that in 2022 the bulk of the NPfIT’s benefits would be delivered by the Flower Fairies.

It is a nonsense that the DH is permitted to waste time on this latest cost justification of the NPfIT. Indeed it is a continued waste of money for chief executives of NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts to have been made responsible, as of April 2013, for reporting the benefits of the NPfIT.

Jeremy Hunt sums up the NPfIT when he says it has been a huge disaster. It is the UK’s biggest-ever IT disaster. Why does officialdom not accept this?

Instead of wasting more money on delving into the haystack for benefits of the NPfIT, it would be more sensible to allocate money and people to spreading the word within Whitehall and to the wider public sector on the losses of the NPfIT and the lessons that must be learnt to discourage any future administrations from embarking on a multi-billion pound folly.

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Posted in Atos, BT, BT Health, Campaign4Change, change, change management, CSC, e-health, excessive secrecy, Fujitsu, health records, IT projects, IT-related failures, legal disputes, Major Projects Authority, managing change, managing outsourced services, NHS, npfit, public sector, public services, Summary Care Record

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