Tag Archives: Cabinet Office

DWP tells Universal Credit trainees: just keep rebooting

Posted on 10/03/2015 | 5 comments

By Tony Collins

IDS says Universal Credit IT is working – but C4 Dispatches asks: is it?

In a documentary broadcast yesterday [9 March 2015] undercover reporter Karl Eriksson got a job working for the Department for Work and Pensions, training as a Universal Credit call centre adviser.

While filming secretly for several weeks he heard several loudspeaker announcements about parts of the main IT systems going down – on one occasion for a whole day. An example:

“The only thing we can suggest at the moment is keep rebooting and try again. There is nothing official out there at all.”

The Dispatches documentary contrasted the statements by Iain Duncan Smith that the IT is working with the reality in a DWP office.

The programme raises the question of whether a national broadcaster should have to film undercover to establish whether UC systems are working well.

When Channel 4 put it to the DWP that its IT is struggling to cope with 35,000 claimants let alone the 2 million the systems are supposed to be handling by now, the spokesman said:

“None of the examples of IT issues [in the Dispatches broadcast] related specifically to Universal Credit and on the rare occasion a problem occurs it is fixed as a matter of urgency.”

Does it matter, though, which systems are failing if the DWP’s IT infrastructure cannot cope with even a low level of Universal Credit claims?

Everyone expects teething problems with a new system, especially as Universal Credit has the enormous challenge of rolling six benefits into one.

But Dispatches raises the question of whether UC will ever be able to handle 7 million claimants which ultimately it will need to do – for such numbers cannot be managed with the amount of manual intervention that is currently needed, according to a National Audit Office report.

More importantly the Dispatches programmme raises a question of how open government can survive when a major government department says, with impunity, one thing  – that its IT is working well – while staff and claimants are apparently experiencing the opposite.

These are some of the announcements and staff comments the uncover reporter recorded while working at the DWP:

– Loudspeaker: “This is an IT announcement. We are currently aware of issues with all FMO icons that go through your published desktop via the cloud. There seem to be issues all down the country about it. The only thing we can suggest at the moment is keep rebooting and try again. There is nothing official out there at all. So if you can just try that and if it doesn’t work we’ll take it further. Thank you.”

– Staff comment: “Sometimes the Universal Credit portal just blocks, stops running… it is clogging up for some reason. So somebody centrally now has to try and unclog it all…It can happen when you’re on the phone. You have to tell the customer to phone you back if that happens.” [It can cost up to 40p a minute to dial the UC 0345 helpline and one claimant told C4 he’d spent £25 that month alone on ringing the helpline.]

– Loudspeaker: “This is an IT announcement. Just to let you that there is a major incident out at the moment with Universal Jobmatch and with access issues and it is affecting the Benefits Directorate and the Local Services Directorate. The current update at the moment is that it is affecting the telephony agents and other staff who use UJ at the moment.”

– Staff comment: “I will have to load my screen again. It has crashed again.”

– Loudspeaker: “Attention please. Attention please. Camlite is being taken offline so the system can be rebooted. This will take approximately 50 minutes. Please can all users log out of Camlite and stay out until further notice.” Trainee: “How do you take a call then?” Answer: “You can’t. You have to say phone back in 50 minutes on that one.”

[CAMLite is an enquiry and work management system for Universal Credit which pulls information from other DWP computer systems.]

– Staff comment to a claimant who has received a DWP letter wrongly stopping a Universal Credit claim: “It’s a letter that has been sent out because it has been closed down wrongly and the system has done it. Sometimes they do shut themselves down and we have to rebuild it. In the meantime it is done manually.”

The undercover reporter witnessed 9 separate system failures. Dispatches quoted a PCS union survey which said that 9 out of 10 members questioned had said the IT was not up to the job. The DWP’s reply was that only 13% of the 2,700 people working on UC responded to the union survey.

The DWP spokesman said:

“At the beginning of February 2015 we deployed a planned upgrade which impacted the service for 3 days and has since had no issues. This upgrade resulted in an improved performance, up to 37 times faster.

“None of the examples of IT issues related specifically to UC and on the rare occasion a problem occurs it is fixed as a matter of urgency. We have robust checks in place to ensure payments are made correctly and on time.”

Channel 4 Dispatches

Universal Credit staff say IT systems inadequate

 

 

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Posted in Campaign4Change, DWP, excessive secrecy, Universal Credit

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Number of successful Universal Credit claims remains low – will IT be properly tested?

Posted on 19/02/2015 | 4 comments

By Tony Collins

Figures published yesterday on gov.uk show that the number of successful Universal Credit claims remains low.

It means the IT that is being designed to handle millions of claims has had only a relatively small number of actual claims to test it. The small number is because eligibility to claim is being kept narrow. Most successful claimants are single people with no children, are not on other benefits, and have straightforward claims.

Yesterday’s figures show that 35,620 of the people who have made a claim have, up to 8th January 2015, attended an initial interview and gone on to start Universal Credit.

This compares with 30,850 the previous month.

The figures were collected at a time Universal Credit was available within 96 Jobcentre Plus offices – about one in eight.

Universal Credit was rolled out to the whole of the North West of England on 15th December 2014. It is being rolled out to all Jobcentre Plus offices and local authorities across the country from 16th February 2015.

Robust?

The signs are that the IT being used to roll out Universal Credit is not as robust as claimed by the DWP.

One claimant who featured in a Government film about Universal Credit said later it is riddled with computer problems. In the DWP film, Daniel Pacey said Universal Credit helped him find work and was far better than jobseeker’s allowance.

Now Pacey, aged 24,  says his jobcentre struggled with failing computer systems, according to BBC Inside Out North West. A DWP spokesman told the BBC:

“The IT system adapts smoothly to claims as they become more complex, which we have already seen across the North West.

“Computer problems in offices are separate issues and are resolved quickly but these do not impact the operating system, or have an impact on claims.”

Comment

The DWP is right to be going slowly and cautiously with the Universal Credit roll out, especially as the IT seems to be less than robust.

What’s less understandable is that the DWP and IDS have trumpeted this week the start of a national roll out of Universal Credit – including more complex cases – as if this will prove that the system works.

How can anyone know whether the system works when so few people are being allowed to claim?

The DWP is refusing to publish its internal reports on the progress or otherwise of the Universal Credit IT programme.

Can IDS really expect his announcements on Universal Credit’s success to be credible when his department is keeping one side of the story hidden from public view?

Universal Credit’s latest statistics – gov.uk

Beyond the Universal Credit headlines: what IDS isn’t saying

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Posted in Accenture, BT, Campaign4Change, DWP, excessive secrecy, Government IT, HP, IBM, Major Projects Authority, Universal Credit

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Beyond the Universal Credit headlines: what IDS doesn’t say

Posted on 16/02/2015 | 4 comments

By Tony Collins

The “good news” headlines over the weekend suggest that Universal Credit is finally rolling out nationally, the implementation problems having been ironed out.

But do senior officials at the Department for Work and Pensions know themselves whether the IT will ever work at scale, handling millions of UC claims?

The national roll out begins today (16 February 2015) says a brochure on the success of the programme “Universal Credit at Work – Spring 2015“.  It’s issued by the Department for Work and Pensions and has a foreword signed by Iain Duncan Smith and his welfare minister Lord Freud.

“Throughout the report, robust evidence shows that Universal Credit is working,” says the brochure, which adds:

“Over the last four months, the roll-out of Universal Credit has continued and from 16 February, it will be available to:
• single claimants in 112 jobcentres
• couples without children in 96 jobcentres
• families in 32 jobcentres
• all claimant types in a limited postcode area in London (Sutton) to test the enhanced Digital Service.”

Ahead of national roll out, DWP officials have been briefing the media on the success of the UC programme. Hence the headlines yesterday.

BBC Online’s headline: Universal Credit roll-out £600m under budget”

Even the Guardian was positive. The reinvention of Iain Duncan Smith – is he the man to save the Tories?

The Sunday Times declared that Universal Credit “will be operating in every jobcentre across the country by this time next year if the Conservatives remain in power, Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, has vowed”.

The Telegraph’s headline was supportive of IDS: Coalition’s welfare shake-up is working

When Andrew Marr asked IDS about Universal Credit’s IT, IDS suggested that the computer systems to handle complicated claims are already in place.

Marr: “This roll-out across the country is only for single claimants, not for families, so it’s nothing like universal at this point.  Do you think you have a computer system able to cope with much more complicated claims?

IDS:  “Yes we have. In fact we rolled it out first in the North West where we rolled it out to singles, to couples and to families so it is now complete pretty much across the North West …

“What we are doing now is exactly what we did in the North West – roll it out stage-by-stage, so singles first, to every jobcentre by early Spring next year,  and then you’ll do couples and then you’ll do families.

“And then you’ll do the final development which is digital which will allow much more things like apps on your phone.”

The reality

Is the UC programme really on track for a national roll-out? Are the concerns of the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee about the slow and troubled UC programme unfounded?

The reality can be gleaned from the DWP’s plans for the roll-out, as inspected by the National Audit Office, and by documents on the gov.uk website on who is entitled – or rather who is not entitled – to claim UC during the roll-out.

It’s true that UC is being gradually extended from single claimants to couples and families, but the DWP has issued such a long list of exemptions on eligibility that numbers of claimants will continue to be tiny at least until the middle of this year (election time).

The small number of claimants will allow the DWP to continue handling more complicated claims using, in part, manual processes. This means that a fully-automated UC system to calculate benefits need not be in place for the time being.

The small number of claimants also means that the risk of implementation problems coming to public attention in the next few months is minimal.

In two days time – Wednesday 18 February 2015 – gov.uk is due to reveal the latest figures on UC take-up. As of today, the latest figures available show the total number of successful UC claimants at 30, 850 on 11 December 2014 – whereas the system needs to be able to cope with around 7-8 million claimants.

Comment

It’s good news that UC is rolling out nationally and that it’s being gradually extended to couples and families as well as single people. But the IT has not been tested properly because the numbers of eligible claimants is so small. The DWP has narrowed the band of eligibility for UC by a long list of exemptions.

You cannot claim, as a single person or a couple, if, say, you receive Jobseeker’s Allowance, Employment and Support Allowance, Income Support, Incapacity Benefit, Severe Disablement Allowance, Disability Living Allowance or Personal Independence Payment. You cannot claim if you own, or partly own, your home, or are homeless, or in supported or temporary accommodation.  Many other exclusions apply.

The result is that nobody knows yet whether the main UC IT systems, and its dependent business processes and systems, will work at scale. Shouldn’t the DWP come clean on the technical and business change challenges it still faces?

UC will not be an economic proposition on the basis of the partly automated processes that exist at present. It’s possible, though, that the cheap-to-build digital systems – which are on trial in Sutton, South London – will work and will eventually take over from the mixture of legacy, new and manual systems and processes that are now in place.   Nobody knows whether they will work at scale.

The reality is that the UC programme, despite years of IT coding and a spend of hundreds of millions of pounds, is still at an early stage of development. It could be at an early stage of development for several more years, even though the positive headlines at the weekend give a different impression.

It may also be worth mentioning that the UC programme has yet to gain Treasury approval for the full business case – or indeed the outline business case. There is therefore no Treasury approval for the scheme long-term funding. There are still questions to be answered over its economic feasibility.

None of this has been said by the DWP or IDS. We’ll have to wait for another National Audit Office update to know the facts.

Thank you to Dave Orr for his emails to me on Universal Credit

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HMRC seeks smaller IT contracts – a big risk, but worth taking?

Posted on 27/01/2015 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

Public Accounts Committee MPs today criticise HM Revenue and Customs for not preparing well or quickly enough for a planned switch from one main long-term IT contract to a new model of many short-duration contracts with multiple suppliers.

It’s a big and risky change in IT strategy for HMRC that could put the safe collection of the nation’s taxes at risk, say the MPs in a report “Managing and replacing the Aspire contract”.

But the Committee doesn’t much consider the benefits of switching from one large contract to smaller ones, potentially with SMEs.

Is the risk of breaking up the huge “Aspire” contract with Capgemini, and its subcontractors Fujitsu and Accenture, worth taking?

Suppliers “outmanoeuvre” HMRC

The PAC’s report makes some important points. It says that HMRC has been “outmanoeuvred by suppliers at key moments in the Aspire contract, hindering its ability to get long term value for money”.

The costs of the Aspire deal have soared, in part because of extra work. Before it merged with Customs and Excise, Inland Revenue spent about £200m a year on its IT outsourcing contract with EDS, now HP.  Customs and Excise’s contract with Fujitsu cost about £100m a year.

After the Revenue and Customs merged, and a new deal was signed with Capgemini, the money spent on IT services soared to about £800m a year – arguably out of control.

HM Revenue and Customs spent £7.9bn on the Aspire contract from July 2004 to March 2014, giving a combined profit to Capgemini and Fujitsu of £1.2bn, equal to 16% of the contract value paid to these suppliers.

HMRC considers the contract to have been expensive,  and pressure to find cost savings in the short-term led it to trade away important value for money controls, says the PAC report.

“For example, in a series of disastrous concessions, HMRC  conceded its rights to withdraw activities from Aspire, to benchmark the contract prices against the market to determine whether they were reasonable,” says the report.

“It also gave up  its right to share in any excess profits. In 2007, HMRC negotiated a three-year  extension to the Aspire contract just three years after the contract was let, extending the end of the contract from 2014 to 2017.

“The Department has still not renegotiated the terms of the contract in line with a memorandum of agreement it signed in 2012 designed to separate Capgemini’s role in service provision from its role as service integrator and introduce more competition.”

Big or small IT suppliers?

The Aspire contract between HMRC and Capgemini is the government’s largest
technology contract.  It accounts for for 84% of HMRC’s total spend on ICT.

Today’s report says that Aspire has delivered certainty and continuity over the past decade but HMRC now plans a change in IT strategy in line with the Cabinet Office’s plan to break up monopolistic contracts.

In 2010, the Cabinet Office announced that long-term contracts with one main supplier do not deliver optimal levels of innovation, value for money or pace of change.

In 2014, it announced new rules to limit the value, length and structure of ICT contracts. No contract should exceed £100m and no single supplier should provide both services and systems integration to the same area of government. Existing contracts should not be extended without a compelling case.

The Cabinet Office says that smaller contracts should allow many more companies to bid, including SMEs, and provide an increase in competition.

HMRC agrees. So it doesn’t plan to appoint a single main supplier when Aspire expires in 2017.  But PAC members are worried that the switch to smaller contracts could jeopardize the collection of taxes. Says the PAC report:

“HMRC has made little progress in defining its needs and has still not presented a business case to government. Once funding is agreed, it will have only two years to recruit the skills and procure the services it will need.

“Moreover, HMRC’s record in managing the Aspire contract and other IT contractors gives us little confidence that HMRC can successfully achieve this transition or that it can manage the proposed model effectively to maximise value for money.

“HMRC also demonstrates little appreciation of the scale of the challenge it faces or the substantial risks to tax collection if the transition fails. Failure to collect taxes efficiently would create havoc with the public finances.”

The PAC recommends that HMRC “move quickly to develop a coherent business case, setting out the commercial and operational model it intends to put in place to replace the Aspire contract. This should include a robust transition plan and budget”.

Richard Bacon, a long-standing member of the PAC, said HMRC has yet to produce a detailed business case for the change in IT strategy.

“HMRC faces an enormous challenge in moving to a new contracting model by 2017, with many short-duration contracts with multiple suppliers, and appears complacent given the scale of the transformation required.

“Moreover, HMRC’s record in managing IT contractors gives us little confidence that HMRC can successfully achieve this transition or that it can manage the proposed model effectively to maximise value for money.”

Comment

The PAC has a duty to express its concerns. HMRC needs stable and proven systems to do its main job of collecting taxes. A switch from a single, safe contract with a big supplier to multiple, smaller contracts could be destablizing.

But it needn’t be. The Department for Work and Pensions is making huge IT – and organisational – changes in bringing in Universal Credit. That is a high-risk programme. And at one time it was badly managed, according to the National Audit Office. But the gradual introduction of new systems hasn’t hit the stability of payments to existing DWP claimants.

This is, perhaps,  because the DWP is doing 4 things at once: running existing benefit systems, building something entirely new (the so-called digital service), introducing hybrid legacy/new systems to pay some new claimants Universal Credit, and is asking its staff to do some things manually to calculate UC payments. Expensive – but safe.

The DWP’s mostly vulnerable claimants should continue to be paid whatever happens with the new IT. So the risks of major change within the department are financial. The DWP has written off tens of millions of pounds on the UC programme so far, says the NAO. Many more tens of millions may yet be wasted.

But many regard the risks as worth taking to simplify the benefits system. It could work out a lot cheaper in the end.

At HMRC the potential benefits of a major change in IT strategy are enormous too. Billions more than expected has already been spent on having one main supplier tied into the long-term Aspire contract (13 years).  Isn’t it worth spending a few tens of millions extra running parallel processes and systems during the transition from Aspire to smaller multiple contracts?

It could end up costing much less in the end. And running parallel new and existing systems and processes should ensure the safe collection of taxes.

If government departments are not prepared to take risks they’ll never change – and monolithic contracts and out-of-control costs will continue. Is there anything more risky than for HMRC to stay as it is, locked into Aspire, or a similar long-term commitment?

HMRC not ready to replace £10bn Aspire contract, MPs warn – Computerworld

Taxpayers face havoc from HMRC computer changes – Telegraph

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Posted in Accenture, Campaign4Change, Capgemini, change management, consultants, cost reduction, DWP, Fujitsu, Government IT, HMRC, HP, IT projects, Legacy ICT, Major Projects Authority, National Audit Office, risk, Universal Credit

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Universal Credit full business case “a long way from Treasury approval”

Posted on 26/11/2014 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

Yesterday in Parliament Iain Duncan Smith gave a statement on Universal Credit – then MPs asked him questions.  Conservative MP Nigel Mills asked IDS a straightforward question:

“Can the secretary of state confirm that the Treasury has now signed off the whole business case and laid to rest that fear that they were not going to do that?”

IDS gave a clear reply: “That is exactly what was being asked before the summer break and the answer is they have …”

But the UC programme has not received Treasury approval for the full business case, nor even the outline business case. Today’s National Audit Office report “Universal Credit: progress update” says that the UC programme received approval in September 2014 for the “strategic outline business case” only.

An NAO official says this is a “long way from Treasury approval” of the full business case.

Until the full business case is approved, UC has no formal funding beyond the current spending review. Meanwhile the Treasury has been funding UC in “small increments” according to the NAO.

The Department of Work and Pensions is due to produce the outline business case next summer, before the next government’s spending review.

The “outline” business case is supposed to set out how the programme is affordable and will be successfully delivered. It summarises the results so far and sets out the case for proceeding to a formal procurement phase.

The “full” business case documents the contractual arrangements,
confirms funding and affordability and sets out the detailed management
arrangements and plans for successful delivery and post evaluation.

The absence of approval for the outline or full business case underlines the uncertainties still in the UC programme. Indeed the latest NAO report says it’s too early to tell whether UC will prove value for money.

But the DWP has reduced risks by extending the roll-out. The programme is now not expected to be completed before 2020. The original completion date was 2017.

The DWP has a twin-track approach to the UC IT programme. It is paying its existing main IT suppliers to support the introduction of UC – the so-called “live” service – while an agile team develops a fully-automated “digital” service that is designed to do all that the “live” service cannot do without manual intervention.

The agile system has yet to be tested – but it has cost only about £8m compared with more than £90m spent on the “live service”.

Porkies?

Labour MP Glenda Jackson, who is a member of the Work and Pensions committee, suggested to IDS yesterday that his promises to MPs on Universal Credit’s roll-out have all been broken and that he has told the House of Commons “porky pies”.

IDS replied that his intention is to ensure that UC is rolled out in a safe and secure way.

Comment:

You’d never know from IDS’s replies to MPs yesterday that the Universal Credit programme doesn’t yet have either outline business case approval or full business case approval.

In other words, the Treasury has yet to be convinced the UC programme is feasible or affordable. It is paying for the programme in increments.

IDS told MPs the programme has business case approval. He did not make it  clear that the programme has the early-stage strategic outline business case approval.

His comments reinforce the need for the National Audit Office to scrutinise the Universal Credit programme. Left to the Department for Work and Pensions, the facts about the programme’s progress, problems and challenges would probably not emerge, not in the House of Commons at least.

Some MPs have said for years that Parliament is the last place to look for the truth.

IDS also said yesterday that the original deadline for completion of UC by 2017 was “artificial” – though he has quoted the 2017 date to MPs on several occasions.

Will UC succeed?

UC as an IT-based programme is not doing too badly, to judge from today’s NAO report.

Indeed it seems that the Department for Work and Pensions, when under intense scrutiny, can start to get things right.

Though existing systems from major suppliers look increasingly unlikely to be able to handle the predicted volumes without a large and expensive amount of manual intervention, the agile digital system, though delayed by 6 months, looks promising, at a fraction of the cost of the conventional “live” system.

Scrutiny

The NAO is scrutinising the programme. The DWP’s own auditors seem to be doing a good job. The Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority is making useful recommendations. And the programme has an independently-chaired board. [The NAO says the programme board has been hampered by limited information and suggests this is because the DWP gives the board “good news” statements rather than facts.]

All this scrutiny is powering the programme in the right direction, though the uncertainties remain massive. As Campaign4Change predicted, the programme will not be complete before 2020. But who cares, if it works well in the end and losses are minimised?

DWP officials are learning lessons – and UC could end up as a template for big government IT-enabled programmes  The twin-track approach of using existing suppliers to deliver support for major business changes that yield problems and lessons  that then feed into an entirely new agile-based system is not a cheap way to develop government IT –  but it may work.

What DWP officials have yet to learn is how to be open and truthful to Parliament, the media – and even its own programme board.

Universal Credit: progress update

Some highlights of today’s NAO report

NAO warns over costs of further Universal Credit digital delay

Universal Credit: watchdog warns of costs of further delays

Government may have to write off more than £200m invested in IT on Universal Credit

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Posted in Accenture, Agile, BT, Campaign4Change, Cloud, DWP, excessive secrecy, G-Cloud, Government digital Service, HMRC, HP, IBM, Legacy ICT, Major Projects Authority, National Audit Office, project management, public sector, public services, Real-Time Information, Universal Credit

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Universal Credit project costs reach £36,222 per claimant (excluding the claim)

Posted on 17/11/2014 | 4 comments

By Tony Collins

Iain Duncan Smith has told MPs that the costs of the Universal Credit project are £652m to March 2014 – which is about £36,222 per successful claimant.

The figure includes the money paid to the DWP’s Universal Credit IT suppliers which was £303m by the end of 2012/13.  An updated figure will be published in a UC report by the National Audit Office due to be published near the end of this month.

The costs of Universal Credit per successful claimant are disproportionately high for an IT-enabled programme that has been running for more than three years because numbers on the system are small.

If the UC programme were complete, at a forecast cost of £1.8bn, and the predicted 7.7 million people were receiving the benefit, the scheme’s delivery costs per claimant would be only about £234.

As at October 2014 17,850 people were on the Universal Credit caseload.  IDS told the Work and Pensions Committee on 5 November, in a hearing that lasted more than 2 hours,  that the costs of UC were £652m by March 2014.

That works out at about £36, 222 per successful UC claimant.

Total delivery costs for the programme are expected to be £1.8bn, down from an original prediction of £2.4bn, IDS told the committee.

IDS and the DWP hope many more successful claimants will be added to the systems next year when Universal Credit is rolled out to all jobcentres and local authorities across the country. But the scheme is subject to growing uncertainties, as the DWP’s permanent secretary Robert Devereux and IDS made clear to the committee.

DWP drops firm end date for UC

When an MP put it to IDS that he no longer has a concrete end date for when  7.7 million people will be on UC, he paused. Then he said the plan was for UC to be complete “by the end of 2018”. He gave no commitment and did not deny that there is no concrete end date.

“Er yes, yeah,” replied IDS. “We do envisage UC being complete by the end of 2018. That’s our plan.”  He said that UC would handle singles, couples, then families. In the meantime the DWP is developing an “end-state digital process” that will deliver benefits for claimants and the departments.

“The roll-out gives us phenomenal understanding of what we need to do to make sure the digital service ultimately comes in and completes that process properly. There is a de-risking of the process.”

UC may never be fully automated

Another uncertainty for UC is its ability to handle an estimated 1.6 million changes per month to people’s claims.

Changes in circumstances are handled manually at present.

Robert Devereux, permanent secretary at the DWP, told the committee that the UC systems are, for some claimants,  part manual, part automated. Devereux said:

“The peculiar nooks and crannies with individual circumstances  – we have deliberately not tried to code every permutation as we go along. We are trying to make sure it can be safely delivered within costs in a sensible fashion.

“It would not be sensible to code every possible permutation back at the start while you are still learning.  There are different elements of the system, some of which will be [digital] all the way through, some which are not.”

The committee chair Dame Anne Begg questioned whether UC will ever work effectively if manual processing is applied to some of the 7.7 million claimants. She received no clear answer.

Comment

It’s a good thing that the DWP is going slowly and cautiously but a spend of £652m to March 2014 per UC recipient does not seem cautious at all. If the project is being run on agile principles of fail early and fail cheaply, can this sum be justified?

On a more positive note IDS has stopped quoting a firm end date for UC. At first the DWP was saying UC would be completed by the end of 2017, then IDS said the programme would be “essentially complete” by the end of 2017.  Now he is saying it may be complete by the end of 2018 but is giving no commitment. His caution is probably because the NAO’s update on UC later this month will suggest that the programme is unlikely to be delivered in any certain time period. Nobody can say with authority or credibility when UC’s implementation will be complete.

It’s also a good thing that the DWP is conceding that UC can never be fully automated. It doesn’t make sense spending disproportionate sums on automating calculations that can be done more cheaply by hand.  But if the exceptions prove the rule UC could prove much more expensive to implement than planned.

UC is a good idea in theory but the next government needs to do a full review of its financial and practical feasibility, which the present government is unlikely to do.

Universal Credit could be complete by 2018 – Government Computing

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Universal Credit and its IT – an inside track?

Posted on 28/10/2014 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

An excellent BBC Radio 4 “Inside Welfare Reform” Analysis broadcast yesterday evening gave an insider’s view of the IT-based Universal Credit programme from its beginnings to today.

It depicted Iain Duncan Smith as a courageous reformer who’s kept faith with important welfare changes that all parties support. If they work, the reforms will benefit taxpayers and claimants. The broadcast concludes with an apparent endorsement of IDS’s very slow introduction of UC.

“When real lives and real money are at stake, being cautious is not the worst mistake you can make.”

So says the BBC R4 “Analysis” guest presenter Jonathan Portes who worked on welfare spending at the Treasury in the 1980s and became Chief Economist at the Department for Work and Pensions in 2002. He left the DWP in 2011 and is now director at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.

The BBC broadcast left me with the impression that UC would today be perceived as meeting expectations if DWP officials and ministers had, in the early days:

– been open and honest about the complexities of IT-related and business change

– outlined the potential problems of implementing UC as set out in internal reports and the minutes of programme team meetings

– explained the likelihood of the UC programme taking more time and money than initially envisaged

– urged the need for extreme caution

– made a decision at the outset to protect – at all costs – those most in genuine need of disability benefits

– not sold UC to a sceptical Treasury on the basis it would save billions in disability claims  – for today thousands of disability claimants are in genuine need of state help, some of whom are desperately sick, and are not receiving money because of delays.

Instead UC is perceived as a disaster, as set out in Channel 4’s Dispatches documentary last night.

A £500m write-off on IT?

Other noteworthy parts of the BBC R4 Analysis broadcast:

– The Department for Work and Pensions gave selective responses to the BBC’s questions. Portes: “We did ask the Department for Work and Pensions for an interview for this programme but neither Iain Duncan  Smith nor any minister was available. We sent a detailed list of questions and have had answers to some.”

– Margaret Hodge, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, gave her view that the next government will have to write off £500m on IT investment on Universal Credit – about £360m more than the Department for Work and Pensions has stated publicly.

Hodge told the BBC: “We are now on our fourth or official in charge of the project and the project has only been going four or five years. Anyone who knows about project management will tell you that consistency of leadership is vital. I don’t think there has been ownership of the project by a senior official within DWP.  I think they and ministers have only wanted to hear the good news. Management of the IT companies has been abysmal.

“I still believe, though I haven’t t got officials to admit to this, that after the general election we will probably be writing off in excess of half a billion  pounds on investment in IT that had failed to deliver… The investment in IT that they are presently saying they can re-use in other ways is not fit for purpose. The system simply cannot cope.”

The BBC asked the DWP for its comment on the scale of the write-offs. “No answer,” said Portes.

Parliament told the truth?

Stephen Brien, who has been dubbed the architect of Universal Credit, gave his first broadcast interview to Analysis. He worked with IDS at the Centre for Social Justice, a think tank set up by IDS in 2004. Brien saw IDS on a nearly daily basis.

Portes asked Brien when IDS first realised things were going off track. “The challenge became very stark in the summer of 2012,” said Brien.

Portes: What was your relationship with IDS?

“My office was across the corridor from his.  I would join him for all the senior meetings about the programme. I would keep him updated as a result of the other meetings I was addressing within the programme team. When it became materially obvious we had to change plans it was over that summer [2012].

Portes: But that was not the public line. In September 2012 this is what IDS said (in the House of Commons):

“We will deliver Universal Credit on time, as it is, on budget, right now.”

IDS appears to have given that assurance while being aware of the change to UC plans.

UC oversold to Treasury?

Portes: “The really big savings were supposed to come from disability benefit. And here trouble was brewing. The problem was the deal IDS had done with the Treasury. The Treasury never liked UC. It thought it was both risky and expensive. And the Treasury, faced with a huge budget deficit, wanted to save not spend.

“With pensions protected disability benefits were really the only place savings could be made.  The previous government had contracted ATOS to administer a new medical test – the Work Capability Assessment – to all 2.5 million people on Incapacity Benefit but only a few pilots had started.

“IDS and the Treasury agreed to press ahead.  Some claimants would be moved to new Employment and Support Allowance but the plan was that several hundred thousand would lose the benefit entirely – saving about £3bn a year.

“Disability living allowance which helps with the extra cost of disability would also be replaced with the new, saving another £2bn…

But …

“By now the new work capability assessment was supposed to have got more than 500,000 people off incapacity benefits. Instead they are stuck in limbo waiting for an assessment.

“By now the new Personal Independence Payment should have replaced disability living allowance saving billions of pounds more. Instead it too has been dogged by delay.

“Just a few days ago the Office for Budget Responsibility said delays in these benefits are costing taxpayers close to £5bn a year. This dwarfs any savings made elsewhere and leaves a potential black hole in the next government budget.”

How many people left stuck in the system?

The BBC asked the Department of Work and Pensions’ press office how many claimants, and for how long, they have been waiting for claims to be resolved. Portes: “They didn’t answer. But their own published statistics suggest it is at least half a million.

“One aim of the reforms was to cut incapacity benefit and the numbers had been on a long slow decline between 2003 and 2012 but now it is rising again. So much for the Treasury saving.”

Who is at fault?

Publicly IDS talks about a lack of professionalism among civil servants and that he has lost faith with their ability to manage the UC-related problems. Rumours in the corridors of Westminster are that behind the scenes IDS has attempted to blame his permanent secretary Robert Devereux.  On this point, again, the DWP refused the BBC’s request for a comment.

Gus O’Donnell, former head of the civil service, who appointed Devereux, told the BBC that tensions between IDS and Francis Maude at the Cabinet Office did not help. “Robert [Devereux] was in a very difficult position. He was in a world where Francis Maude was trying to deliver, efficiently, programmes for government and on the other hand IDS was seeing the centre as interfering and criticising whereas he knew best: it was his project; he was living it every day. There was a lot of tension there. Really what we need to do is get everyone sitting round a table trying to work out how we can deliver outcomes that matter.”

Was Devereux set up to fail?

O’Donnell: “With hindsight one can say this is a project that could not be delivered to time and cost.”

Were DWP officials to blame?

Stephen Brien said: “There was a real desire from the very beginning to get this done. I think there was a desire within DWP to demonstrate that it could again do big programmes. The DWP had not been involved in very large transformation programmes over the previous decade. There was a great enthusiasm to get back in the saddle,  a sense that it [UC] had to get underway and it had to be well entrenched through Parliament.

“These forces – each of them – contributed to a sense of ‘we have got to get this done and therefore we will get this done.’”

Too ambitious?

Richard Bacon, a member of the Public Accounts Committee, told the BBC: “If you know what it is you want to do and you understand what is required to get there, then what’s wrong with being ambitious?

“The trouble is that when you get into the detail you find you are bruising people, damaging people, people who genuinely will always need our help. Taxpayers, our constituents, expect us to implement things so that they work, rather than see project after project go wrong and money squandered.

“There may come a point where we say: ‘we have spent so much money on this and achieved so little, is the game worth the candle?’”

Thank you to Dave Orr for drawing my attention to the Dispatches documentary. 

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DWP appoints 180k DG Technology

Posted on 04/09/2014 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

Mayank Prakash is the new Director General for Technology at the Department for Work and Pensions. He’ll be responsible for the DWP’s IT services and ensuring that its technology supports current and new digital services. He is the permanent replacement for DWP Chief Information Officer Andy Nelson who was in the role less than a year.

Prakash was previously Managing Director of Wealth and Asset Management Technology delivery centres at Morgan Stanley. Before that he led IT, security and digital business transformation at Sage UK.

He said: “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to simplify welfare by transforming one of the UK’s largest IT estates to deliver easy to use digital services. It is a professional privilege to improve how the government delivers services to 22 million citizens.”

He’ll start in November.

His early career was in leading technology and eBusiness teams for Lucent and then Avaya where he was the International IT Director. He has an MBA from Manchester Business School.

He will be partly responsible for Universal Credit.

DWP’s advert for a £180k IT head – what it doesn’t say

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IDS not quite as bullish on Universal Credit programme?

Posted on 02/09/2014 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

Iain Duncan Smith told the House of Commons in January 2013:

“Universal Credit is on track and on budget. The systems are not new or complex. After all, more than 60% of the total developed system is based on reusing existing IT. New developments will use tried and tested technology.

“The key difference between how this Government are doing things and how they were done before is that we have adopted commercial “agile” design principles to build the IT service for universal credit in four stages, each four months long.”

No longer does IDS say the Universal Credit programme is on time or on budget. Indeed in the House of Commons yesterday he was asked by Labour if the Treasury has approved the full business case for Universal Credit. His replies to MPs were not quite as bullish as they sometimes have been.

He spoke about the programme almost entirely in the future tense, and when he mentioned the present state of the programme he quoted someone else –  John Manzoni, the chief executive of the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority.

Labour’s Nicholas Brown asked IDS when he expects the business case for Universal Credit to be fully signed off.

IDS: “I announced in December that Her Majesty’s Treasury has approved funding for the universal credit programme in 2013-14 and 2014-15. The final stage in Treasury approvals is sign-off of the full business case, which covers the full lifetime of the programme. We expect to agree that very shortly.”

Brown: The answer to a similar question two months ago was “very shortly”, but it is taking rather longer than the Secretary of State intended. What are the major outstanding issues between his Department and the Treasury, and where does universal credit now stand in the Cabinet Office’s traffic light system?

IDS: “… the reality is that we have agreed all the spending that is relevant to the plan that we set out at the end of last year. The final point relates to the full lifetime of that programme, which will take it all the way through, probably beyond all the years that anybody present will be in government. [MPs: ‘Certainly you!’] …  That is now being agreed and the reality is that it has to be done very carefully. I genuinely believe, from my discussions, that it will be signed off very shortly. The result will be that the programme will be seen for what it is: a programme that will deliver hugely to those who have the toughest lives and need the most support and help.”

Labour’s Andrew Gwynne asked when the government is going to get a grip on a “chaotic shambles”.

IDS: “It is always nice to live in the past, but the reality is that if the hon. Gentleman waits he will see that this programme is running well and will be delivering, that this programme of universal credit will benefit everybody who needs the support they most need, and all the nonsense he is talking about will all go away.

Chris Bryant, Labour, said that IDS keeps telling MPs that the UC business case will be approved very shortly.  “What has gone wrong?” he asked IDS.

IDS: “There are no sticking points, but these matters need to be agreed carefully. This test-first-and-then-implement process is the way all future programmes will be implemented.

“I just want to quote Mr Manzoni, the new chief executive of the Major Projects Authority, who made it clear to the Public Accounts Committee in June that universal credit is stable and on track with the reset plan.”

Comment

The National Audit Office is re-investigating the UC programme and is expected to publish its second “progress” report on the state of the programme by December.

If IDS says anything unjustifiably positive about the programme now, MPs and the media will compare his comments today with what the NAO says in its new report. Is that why he refers to the programme only in the future tense? And who can say with certainty what will or will not happen in the future?

It may be worth mentioning that ministers and officials, some years into the NPfIT, referred to the state of the programme almost entirely in the future tense.

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DWP wastes money on another Universal Credit FOI appeal

Posted on 02/09/2014 | 5 comments

By Tony Collins

Officials at the Department for Work and Pensions are to pay external lawyers to attend another FOI hearing as part of the department’s efforts to stop four old reports on the Universal Credit programme being published.

A hearing will take place in London on 3 December for the DWP to put its case for a third time that it should be allowed to appeal a ruling of the first tier information tribunal that the four reports be published.

Although the DWP’s lawyers have lost every tribunal decision they have contested in the case, there is no sign the department’s officials will restrict the amount of public money they allocate to stopping publication of the reports.

If lawyers for the DWP continue to lose every judicial decision, officials will always have the option of a ministerial veto.

The DWP’s multiple appeals are arguably a pointless plundering of the public purse for legal costs, because officials have known from the initial FOI requests in 2012 that they would never publish the reports in question.

Despite the efforts of Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude to introduce open government, no central department has agreed to issue reports on the progress or otherwise of its big IT-dependent projects and programmes.

This is the chronology so far in the DWP’s attempts to stop the four Universal Credit reports being published:

March 2012 – I make a freedom of information request for a Project Assessment Review of the Universal Credit programme, as carried out by the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority.  The PAR would have given early indications of the problems the IT teams faced while the DWP’s ministers and press office were issuing public statements that the programme was on time and on budget.

April 2012 – John Slater, a programme and project management professional, makes an FOI request for the Universal Credit programme Risk Register, which gives a traffic light status of the risks most likely to occur and who should take ownership of them. He also requests an Issues Register which details the problems and failures that have occurred and why, how they can be managed, and how their effect on the programme can be minimised or eliminated. The Milestone Schedule he requests would show whether milestones have been met or changed.

May 2012 – DWP minister Lord Freud personally signs refusals to release any of the four reports. John Slater and I request internal reviews of the refusals. The DWP rejects our appeals so we complain to the Information Commissioner.

June 2013 – The Information Commissioner orders that the DWP publish three of the reports but not the Risk Register. The DWP appeals the ruling.  John Slater appeals the Commissioner’s decision to keep the Risk Register confidential.

Jan 2014 – A two-day appeal hearing is held in Leicester, before the First-Tier Information Tribunal. Slater appears at the hearing, as do representatives of the Information Commissioner and the DWP.

March 2014 –  Judge David Farrer and his First-Tier tribunal members rule that the DWP publish all four reports.  The DWP discovers that the version of the PAR [Project Assessment Review] it supplied to the Tribunal is not the final version that has been requested. It is evidently a draft. “How the mistake occurred is not entirely clear to us,” says Judge Farrer. He suggests that the DWP might not have read the PAR closely and has refused to publish it on principle. Under the FOI every request is supposed to be considered on its merits.

“Whilst the differences [between the draft and final versions] related almost entirely to the format, it did raise questions as to how far the DWP had scrutinised the particular PAR requested, as distinct from forming a generic judgement as to whether PARs should be disclosed,” says the judge.

He also comes close to saying the DWP had not been telling the truth about the state of Universal Credit programme. He and his tribunal members have read the four reports in question. He says the Tribunal had been “struck by the sharp contrast” between “the unfailing confidence and optimism of a series of press releases by the DWP or ministerial statements as to the progress of the Universal Credit programme” and some of the criticisms and controversy the programme was attracting at the time of the public statements.

April 2014 – The DWP seeks Judge’s Farrer’s permission to appeal his ruling. Unexpectedly the judge refuses the DWP permission.  The DWP’s lawyers had argued that the Tribunal had “wholly misunderstood the nature and/or manifestation of any chilling effect”. [The chilling effect suggests that public servants will not tell the whole truth in project reviews if they know the reports will be published.] The DWP said the Tribunal’s misunderstanding about the chilling effect “amounted to an error in law” and was “perverse”. Judge Farrer said he had not misunderstood the DWP’s claims of a chilling effect.

May 2014 –  The DWP’s lawyers ask the Upper Tribunal for permission to appeal the ruling of the First Tier Tribunal that the four reports be published. The DWP’s arguments are long and complex – but they are, arguably, useful only to the bank account of lawyers because the DWP will not publish the four reports whatever the outcome of its appeals.

June 2014 – The judge of the Upper Tribunal (Nicholas Wikeley)  refuses to give the DWP permission to appeal the ruling of the First-Tier Tribunal.  On the DWP’s claim that the First-Tier Tribunal has misunderstood the chilling effect, the Upper Tribunal’s ruling says,

“This [the chilling effect] is a well known concept, and I can see no support for the argument that the Tribunal misunderstood its meaning …”

Having lost the case, the DWP requests permission from the Upper Tribunal for another appeal hearing so it can put its arguments in person, not just in writing. The Tribunal agrees.

August 2014 – The Upper Tribunal sets a date of 3 December 2014 in London for a hearing to decide whether the DWP can appeal the First-Tier Tribunal’s ruling that the four reports be published. The DWP’s lawyers have had the case open now for more than a year.

Comment

If the DWP’s ministers and officials were spending their own money on legal costs, doubtless the four reports would have been published within days of our FOI requests; and their publication would have made no difference except to make officials a little less confident that they could, in future, cover up serious problems on their big IT-dependent projects and programmes.

The irony of the whole case is that the DWP argues that it needs to keep the reports confidential because candid assessments of a programme’s problems are essential tools for good project management. But the DWP has presided over a succession of failed IT-dependent programmes.

Clearly the routine suppression of reports on its problems has not helped the DWP’s project management. The National Audit Office’s report on Universal Credit could hardly have been more negative about the DWP’s management of the Universal Credit programme.

Isn’t it time the DWP did things differently and published reports on the progress or otherwise of its biggest programmes? With improved public scrutiny the department may then start to have a succession of successes. What a surprise that would be, to the department’s officials at least.

 

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