By David Bicknell
Four companies have been identified as potential partners for new mutual venture, My Civil Service Pension.
The four – Xafinity, JLT, Wipro and Capita – have been chosen from an initial tender list of 50 potential partners.
There is an article on the shortlist on the Guardian Public Leaders Network.
Posted in Campaign4Change, mutuals, public sector, public services, Uncategorized
Tagged Capita, JLT, My Civil Service Pension, Wipro, Xafinity
By David Bicknell
For those with an interest in IT Service Management in the public sector, one of the highlights of the forthcoming week will be the update of the ITIL best practice books available on Friday 29th July. In the meantime, here is a post detailing some recommendations for the ITIL updates.
The itSMF has some more details on its website here which includes a link to some FAQs. Incidentally, itSMF UK, the UK’s largest service management user group, last week formally launched its own professional service management credentials programme, priSM (Professional Recognition for IT Service Management).
Available exclusively to itSMF members, the programme provides a structured path for professional growth and is expected to help ITSM professionals better define their career and enhance their earning potential. There are more details about priSM here
Meanwhile back to ITIL. There is a link here to 7 must-see websites on ITIL
Posted in Campaign4Change, ITIL, Uncategorized
Tagged ITIL, ITIL 2011, itSMF, priSM, service management
By David Bicknell
Chris Brophy from law firm Capsticks has put together some useful thoughts on the Open Public Services White Paper
His conclusions make interesting reading. He says:
“It might be said that there are a lot of aspirational aspects to the White Paper but the crucial point for those that are open to inspiration, to changing their own public organisation or to developing a business from the public body, is that the mutual or social enterprise pathway is still being encouraged and people should really be reaching for the stars on it. The time is right to leave behind old, comfortable ways because they are simply not going to survive in the new financial era – even if you want them to. It is time to explore the potential in your own colleagues and the desire at Board level of your own organisation to fundamentally change the way in which you are operating. It is not quite now or never but the early bird catches the worm. And the worm is important for sustaining you through the winter. It is time to put into practice all you have learned about how to improve services from an intimate knowledge of the difficulties of doing it within the public sector. Applying that knowledge to latent, innovatory tendencies and grabbing on to all the help and support you can from around you might just well lead you to another place. If things get tough and people are having a go at you but you are enjoying doing things that you want to what you do, keep doing them; it is the only way to get where you want to be.
A listening period will now follow the publication of the White Paper until September, when a programme of work will be set out, followed by the government’s establishment of the priorities of the departments in November. Then, the proposals for legislation. Plenty of opportunity to gear up in the meantime.”
There are some further thoughts here too
Posted in Campaign4Change, mutualisation, mutuals
Comment
By David Bicknell and Tony Collins
It would be a pity if David Cameron were forced to stand down over the phone hacking affair. Cameron is the force behind Francis Maude’s reform plans for central government, in particular the plans for finding and implementing innovative ways of cutting costs, mutualisation, simplifying and standardising ways of working and breaking the stranglehold of the few big IT suppliers to government. Cameron and Maude are trying genuinely to find ways of giving creative SMEs more government work.
Were Cameron to go, Maude would probably be much more isolated. As it is permanent secretaries would be more than happy to see Maude’s reforms melting away, though they would continue to express support for radical change. As the Cabinet Secretary Sir Arnold says in the first episode of “Yes Minister” on Open Government: “The less you intend to do about something, the more you have to keep talking about it.”
The signs we have seen are that Maude and his team are full of good ideas that some senior civil servants in departments would rather talk about than implement. We’ll shortly be publishing a piece on how officials at the Department for Work and Pensions still default to secrecy despite Maude’s attempts to change the mindset of the civil service.
Cameron will make some mistakes. Nobody is perfect. And prime ministers are always at the mercy of a previous Conservative prime minister, Harold Macmillan’s warning of “events, dear boy”.
Even Churchill made mistakes such as the Dardanelles landings. The media loves scalps and Cameron’s opponents will make the most of Murdoch’s woes. We hope for the sake of the reforms of central government – and the huge savings to be made – that Cameron stays.
David Cameron is an asset. His would be a resignation too far.
Posted in Campaign4Change, mutualisation, reforms
Tagged Churchill, David Cameron, DWP, Francis Maude, hacking, reforms
By David Bicknell
In the aftermath of the Open Public Services White Paper, Stephen Kelly, who is in charge of the Coalition’s plan to mutualise the public sector, has been interviewed in the Daily Telegraph here.
Meanwhile, in this clip from a Policy Exchange debate on mutuals, Julian Legrand has been quoted as saying managers are the biggest barrier to employee ownership
By Tony Collins
Thank you to James Arbuthnot MP, who is chair of the Defence Committee, for recognising in the House of Commons the work, which had my byline on it, to clear a stain on the reputations of Flight Lieutenants Jonathan Tapper and Richard Cook, the pilots of Chinook ZD576 that crashed in the Mull of Kintyre on 2 June 1994.
The crash killed all 29 on board, including 25 VIPs of the Northern Ireland intelligence community. Two air marshals found Cook and Tapper grossly negligent. After a 16-year campaign by the families of Cook and Tapper, the government last week set aside the finding of gross negligence. In the House of Commons on 13 July Defence Secretary Liam Fox apologised to the Cook and Tapper families.
After his announcement in the Commons, several MPs and former defence ministers who had campaigned alongside the families of Cook and Tapper, stood up and made short speeches that congratulated Fox for his decisive action in clearing the names of the pilots.
Among them was James Arbuthnot who persuaded the Conservative Party to commit to setting up the independent review of the evidence arising from the crash, prior to the 2010 general election.
Arbuthnot spent more than 10 years seeking to clear the pilots’ names. For some years he led the Parliamentary cross-party group of MPs and peers, the Mull of Kintyre Group.
Arbuthnot told the Commons on 13 July:
“Will my right honorable friend [Liam Fox] acknowledge that a massive contribution to this famous victory was made by people such as Brian Dixon [who ran campaign-justice.org] and Tony Collins of Computer Weekly and David Harrison of Channel 4, the noble Lord O’Neill, and people from both sides of this House and of another place in contributing to the notion that justice should finally be done and closure should arrive?”
Replying, Fox said that “there are many beyond this House who have sought resolution in this case for a very long time”. He added: “They played an important part in keeping the issue alive for long enough for justice to be done. It does not matter how long it takes; it matters that it is done in the end.”
Arbuthnot’s mention of Computer Weekly is a tribute to all those at the magazine who did so much to help the campaign, or made possible our many articles on the poor development and deployment of the Chinook MK2’s safety-critical “Fadec” software. They included Karl Schneider, Hooman Bassirian, Mike Simons, Ian Mitchell, Stuart Nissen, Bill Goodwin, Lindsay Clark, Julia Hoare, John Riley, Alison Noble, Beverley de Valmency, Paul Mason, Toby Poston, Christian Annesley, Numa Kelleher, Mark Lewis, and later Georgina Tucker, Brian McKenna, Rebecca Froley and James Garner. Thank you to all – and apologies to anyone whose names I have missed.
Posted in Uncategorized
The quashing of the findings of gross negligence against the pilots of Chinook ZD576 shows, among other things, that independently-minded ministers can make decisions that countermand the wishes of their senior officials.
Chinook ZD576 crashed on the Mull of Kintyre on 2 June 1994 killing all 29 on board including 25 senior police and intelligence officials. RAF air marshals blamed the two pilots but the Government set aside the finding last week after an independent review by Lord Philip said the air marshals were wrong.
Nobody knows the cause of the crash but it transpired that the helicopter type that crashed had unreliable safety-critical software which had hundreds of bugs. The MoD’s purchase of the Chinook Mk2’s Full Authority Digital Control [Fadec] proved to be one of the worst IT-related procurements in Whitehall: the RAF’s software engineers had little control or say over the developing or final Fadec product. In the end the RAF could not verify the software as safe.
Separately a senior RAF engineer categorised the Fadec system as “positively dangerous” nine months before the crash on the Mull of Kintyre.
Successive defence secretaries in the last administration, including government spokespeople in the House of Lords, were unwilling to upset officials and air marshals. They rejected all well-argued calls for a review of the decision of two air marshals to find the pilots of ZD576, Flight Lieutenants Jonathan Tapper and Rick Cook, grossly negligent.
But the coalition’s defence secretary Liam Fox has proved to be much less susceptible to the influence of his officials.
The quashing of a decision by the air marshals could not be set aside by the defence secretary or even a prime minister acting alone. It required a decision of the Defence Council which is the MoD’s most senior departmental committee.
The Defence Council is chaired by the defence secretary, and includes other ministers, the Chief of Defence Staff, senior officers and officials who head the armed services and the department’s major corporate functions. It has a range of powers vested in it by statute.
At a specially-convened meeting of the Defence Council on Monday last week, Liam Fox drove its decision not simply to accept the report of the Lord Philip panel, which said that the MoD should consider apologising to the families of Cook and Tapper, but to quash the finding of a properly-constituted RAF Board of Inquiry.
The Defence Council decided that the finding of two air marshals that Tapper and Cook were grossly negligent was “no longer sustainable and must therefore be set aside”, said Fox in the House of Commons on Wednesday this week. The Council ordered that “those findings shall be set aside”.
And to his further credit Fox, after his announcement to Parliament, had the grace to meet the families of Cook and Tapper in a room near the main debating chamber of the Commons.
“It shows the House of Commons at its best when pressure from the House of Commons can cause an injustice to be overturned.”
If a minister can achieve what Fox has achieved – a fundamental change of thinking within a major department of state – coalition ministers can achieve anything within reason.
Labour MP Frank Field, in congratulating Fox for driving the decision to clear the pilots’ names, put it succinctly in his short speech in the House of Commons on 13 July 2011:
“May I congratulate the Secretary of State on showing the guts to get his Department’s public stance to where justice demanded it should have been for many a year?”
All the defence ministers in the last administration will soon be forgotten. If for nothing else Liam Fox will be long remembered for overturning a miscarriage of justice, one of the most grievous in the past 100 years.
Posted in Campaign4Change, Chinook campaign
By Tony Collins
C
onservative MP Richard Bacon wrote to the NHS Chief Executive Sir David Nicholson yesterday warning that a failure to disclose information to the Public Accounts Committee was a “very serious matter”.
Bacon, a long-standing member of the Public Accounts Committee, wrote to Nicholson about advance payments to CSC under the NHS National Programme for IT.
The MP is concerned that the Department of Health did not mention a £200m advance payment to CSC at a hearing of the Public Accounts Committee on the NPfIT detailed care records systems on 23 May 2011; and the payment wasn’t mentioned in the Department’s subsequent memo to the committee.
Said Bacon in his letter:
“I understand that the advance payment of £200m to CSC was made in April 2011 but the Department of Health’s memo of 7 June 2011 doesn’t mention it.
“The failure to disclose to the PAC an advance payment of £200m is a very serious matter. The fact that the payment appears to have happened after 31 March 2011 is scarcely the point.
“What is going on? …
CSC declared the £200m advance payment in regulatory announcement
CSC has told regulatory authorities in the US that on 1 April 2011, pursuant to the NPfIT contract, the “NHS made an advance payment to the Company of £200 million ($320 million) related to the forecasted charges expected by the Company during fiscal year 2012”.
The payment was reported by E-health Insider last month.
It appears that the Department decided to give the committee details of advance payments to CSC up until 31 March 2011. The undisclosed £200m payment to CSC was made the next day, 1 April.
As the Department of Health wrote to the committee on 7 June there is no clear reason for its choice of 31 March as the cut-off date for informing MPs of advance payments to CSC.
It would not be the first time the Department has withheld the latest information on the NPfIT from what it regards as outsiders, such as Parliament and the media.
When the National Audit Office was investigating the NPfIT several years ago it was not told of the latest Ipsos MORI survey on NHS perceptions of the National Programme.
The Department instead gave the NAO an older and more positive Ipsos MORI survey. The NAO confirmed to me it had not seen the latest survey [which had some negative findings on the NPfIT].
Today some in the Cabinet Office are exasperated at the disdain with which some officials at the Department of Health – not all – treat outside supervisory organisations such as the NAO, the Public Accounts Committee and the Cabinet Office.
It appears that some in the Department regard these organisations as necessary by-products of democracy that must be tolerated but not encouraged.
Comment:
Major change is unlikely to happen in Whitehall or at least within the Department of Health and NHS Connecting for Health if officials are allowed, with ease, to dismiss their scrutineers with a wave of their hand.
The culture of allowing the DH to withhold the truth about the NPfIT needs tackling. All credit to Bacon and the Cabinet Office for trying to do just that. It’s likely that Katie Davis, the interim health CIO, will also seek to make the DH less introspective and defensive, at least in terms of the NPfIT and health informatics generally.
**
Bacon’s letter to Sir David Nicholson
This is Bacon’s letter dated 14 July2011 to Nicholson, copied to the head of the National Audit Office Amyas Morse, the chair of the Public Accounts Committee Margaret Hodge, and the Cabinet Office.
Dear Sir David
NATIONAL PROGRAMME FOR IT IN THE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE
I do not seem to have received a reply to my email of 27 June below.
Making advance payments of any kind at all is wholly at variance with the Department of Health’s long-stated boast that the NPfIT contracts “only pay for delivery”, but let us leave aside this basic point for the moment.
I understand that the advance payment of £200 million to CSC was made in April 2011 but the Department of Health’s memo of 7 June 2011 doesn’t mention it. The failure to disclose to the PAC an advanced payment of £200 million is a very serious matter. The fact that the payment appears to have happened after 31 March 2011 is scarcely the point.
What is going on? Please reply to my email below with its various questions without further delay.
Yours sincerely
Richard Bacon MP for South Norfolk, Member of the Public Accounts Committee
Bacon’s earlier letter to Nicholson, dated 27 June 2011
Dear Sir David
NATIONAL PROGRAMME FOR IT IN THE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE
I am writing following the hearing of the Public Accounts Committee on Monday 23 May 2011, to follow up on two important issues that were raised during your evidence:
1. ADVANCE PAYMENTS TO SUPPLIERS
In your supplementary memorandum to the PAC following the hearing you gave a total of advance payments made up to 31 March 2011, in respect of all contracts over the whole period of the Programme, of £2,532m of which suppliers have retained £1,328m. You also identified a further £119 million of advance payments to be earned or refunded. Since the memorandum was received by the PAC, it has been reported that the NHS made an advance payment of £200 million to CSC in April 2011. http://www.ehi.co.uk/news/acute-care/6971/nhs-made-£200m-april-advance-to-csc
I should be most grateful if you would let me know the answers to the following questions:
1. Is this report accurate?
2. Why was this payment was not reported to the PAC, either during the hearing or in the subsequent memorandum?
3. What was the justification for this payment and what value does it represent to the NHS?
4. What will happen in respect of this payment if a new memorandum of understanding is not in fact signed with CSC?
5. I would also be grateful if you would comment on the CSC filing with the US Security and Exchange Commission, which states that in the opinion of the company, if the NHS were to terminate the current contract “for convenience” it would owe fees totalling less than the $1 billion asset value CSC now has on its books for the contract. How is this consistent with the claim at the PAC hearing by Ms Connelly that the cost of terminating the CSC deal could “potentially leave us exposed to a higher cost than if we completed as it stands today”?
2. THE COST OF DEPLOYING CERNER MILLENNIUM AT NORTH BRISTOL
Second, I would be grateful if you could comment on the cost of deploying Cerner Millennium at North Bristol, reported in your memorandum as £21 million, including service for 56 months, and on the current expected go-live date. Specifically:
6. Can you explain why the delivery date agreed with BT at the contract “reset” was 4th June 2011?
7. Why it was then revised to 2nd July 2011?
8. And why it now appears that there is no agreed delivery date at all?
9. Can you also give your best comparison of the cost of deploying the Cerner Millennium system at North Bristol, with the cost to University Hospitals Bristol of deploying the System C Healthcare Medway system outside the National Programme? It would appear from media reports that this latter contract includes deployment of functionality including PAS, Accident and Emergency, maternity, theatres, clinical data collection, and a data warehouse and reporting system, as well as integration of third party and current Trust applications. According to the National Audit Office, the average cost for each new site under the BT South contract is £28.3 million, but the cost of the Medway system to UHB has been reported as £8.2 million over seven years. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/healthcare-network/2011/may/19/university-hospitals-bristol-foundation-trust-awards-e-patient-contract) What is the justification for this apparent difference?
10. As the Senior Responsible Owner for the National Programme, can you give your explicit undertaking that the North Bristol contract represents value for money for taxpayers?
I look forward to receiving your reply.
With many thanks
Yours sincerely
Richard Bacon
By David Bicknell
Responding to the Government’s Open Public Services White Paper launched by David Cameron this week, the Institute for Government says the agenda is a radical one, but failure to deliver will come at a cost.
Commenting on the launch, the Institute’s Programme Director, Tom Gash said:
“There’s not much that is new in this white paper but it is still a radical agenda for change. Other governments have tried and failed to remodel public services. The difference this time is that the stakes are higher. With massive cuts to public spending, if these measures don’t work, the state will not be in a position to shore up services.
“A white paper by itself doesn’t change anything. To make this vision a reality, a lot of work lies ahead. Failure to take these next steps in any of the policy areas covered by the paper will lead to the risk of future u-turns, uncertainty and failure”.
The Institute argues that several key issues need to be addressed going forward. These include:
The Institute argues that policies in the white paper are at different stages of their development. Ministers, central and local government and practitioners will all have work to do if they are to ensure that they are implemented in a way that genuinely improves public services and the lives of citizens. Drawing on its publication Making Policy Better, the Institute recommends that departments will need to:
Gash added:
“In order to avoid repeating the experience of the beleaguered NHS reforms, the coalition will need to invest a good deal of time and resources in delivering its radical programme for reforming public services. To publish a white paper and then walk away will not be enough but today’s announcement, with its emphasis on consultation and analysis seems to show that government has learnt from its mistakes and is ready to take the time to deliver something which could change forever the way citizens choose and receive their services”.
By David Bicknell
Some commentators believe that the Government could and should have gone further with the publication of the Open Public Services White Paper.
Writing in the Guardian, Colin Cram, the former chief executive of the North West Centre of Excellence, makes some constructive suggestions. He argues that publishing the white paper is “a bold step. It is an attempt to create a coherent and different approach to providing public services. My feeling is that the consultation will be genuine, which will provide an opportunity for criticisms to be addressed and the government to back off from impracticable ideas or change its approach. The risks for the government are that the rhetoric looks likely to exceed the scale of delivery and it could be easy for the parliamentary opposition and the electorate to hold it to account.
Under the sub-heading ‘Making a Change’, Cram makes the following points:
“The white paper places much emphasis on consultation and facilitating change rather than directing. A weakness is that many proposals are projects or programmes and should be subject to the established public sector controls such as “starting gate” and “gateway”. These are not bureaucratic, help identify what should not go ahead, whether the necessary success factors are in place at each stage of the project and whether there need to be changes. These robust approaches save time and money and greatly increase chances of success. The white paper should have provided assurance about applying these disciplines.
“The paper argues that the public sector should be a commissioner of services rather than a provider, yet appears to run out of ideas on where this might operate, focusing mainly on social care and to a lesser degree the hackneyed “back office services”. The government is attracted by employee-led mutuals, but suggests that these will be created voluntarily.
“The potential contribution of the private sector to the diversity of service providers is scarcely mentioned. Lib Dems 3, Conservatives 0? However, local government will increasingly outsource front and back-office services, and we can expect the NHS to continue to do so.”
“Critics might argue that the white paper represents little more than bringing together government policy announcements in a coherent form: health and wellbeing boards, strengthening the powers of local government over the NHS, removing excessive monitoring and oversight by central government, community budgets and retention of business rates. However, it does provide a narrative and context.”
“Absent from the paper is how one might manage the anticipated increasing diversity of service providers. The wider public sector has not been good at this, hence the Southern Cross debacle. Integrated commercial management of markets and suppliers throughout the public sector is vital.
“New commercial models include incentivising suppliers to deliver successful outcomes and assigning the risk to them, though I would question whether payments to suppliers under the work programme will be “based primarily on the results they achieve” unless the bar is set very low. Risk sharing would rule out many social enterprises.”
Posted in Campaign4Change, mutuals, NHS, outsourcing, public sector, public services
Campaign4Change 