When people think of a government IT project, the first thing that comes to mind is a kitchen sink with millions of pounds pouring out of it (just to clarify, that the money goes straight down the drain). And while many would be excused for thinking that government IT projects are a relatively new phenomenon, this isn't quite the case.
The first - or at least one of the first, government IT projects was picked up by Charles Babbage back in 1822. He proposed the idea of using J.H. Muller's concept of ‘a difference machine' to the Royal Astronomical Society. The UK government took interest in this in order to make processes more efficient.
In 1823, the government gave Babbage £1700 to start work on the project. But the engine proved to be much more expensive than anticipated, and by the time the government killed off the project in 1842, they had given Babbage over £17,000, without receiving a working engine. Babbage then went to work on an ‘analytical' engine, rendering the difference engine useless to government chiefs.
It was suggested that Babbage was unwilling to recognise that the government was interested in producing economically produced tables; instead of thinking about the actual use of the product, he thought too much about the product itself.
Nearly 200 years later, and erm, things haven't changed. Just swap Babbage for any government IT supplier*, and the £17,000 for a figure that is more likely to be in the millions (if not billions), and hey presto, that's what we've got.
So here are Computing's top 10 government IT disasters of all time (note: there were plenty more, and there are likely to be several in the future too [NB: smart-metering], so this is by no means an exhaustive list).
10. The Department for Transport mistakes "saving money" with "spending money"
It is a challenge to save money, and many projects require millions of pounds to be spent in order to make long-term savings. But what is not expected is a department spending money, and not saving anything.
The plan for the Department for Transport was to increase efficiency and effectiveness of services such as HR, payroll and finance. But the National Audit Office found in 2008 that the project would cost about £81m rather than saving £57m as originally expected.
The project had issues with suppliers and there was inadequate testing of the system, which led to an unstable system being used.
"It is disappointing to see a programme which aimed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of a department leaving it on current projections some £80 million worse off," said Tim Burr, head of the NAO in 2008.
"Departments need to be realistic about the challenges of implementing shared services and to manage suppliers effectively," he added.
9. And the prize for taking four years to realise a project was overambitious and find something that costs less to implement and is actually fit for purpose goes to.... Surrey Police.
A project to build a system to log crime information was launched in 2009, at a cost of £15m. Four years later, the Surrey Integrated Reporting Enterprise Network (SIREN) system was abandoned.
Why? Because, according to a report by auditors Grant Thornton, the project was "not fit for purpose".
It was an "ambitious project that was beyond the in-house capabilities and experience" of the organisation, the auditors said.
The system was used from 31 March 2013, and the money was spent on staff costs, training, software, technology, and consultancy.
To make matters worse, the system was replaced with a less costly solution which is now used by 13 other forces. Last year, Surrey's chief constable Kevin Hurley called for former chief constable Mark Rowley to take responsibility for the failure.
8. Child Support Agency IT a "turkey from day one"
The Child Support Agency's CS2 system was built by EDS (which is now known as HP Enterprise Services) in 2003 under a PFI contract worth £456m. But the project has been seen as a complete disaster, with the Public Accounts Committee labelling it "a turkey from day one".
The system was launched late, and with 14 critical faults. This led to 250,000 non-compliance issues not being dealt with, meaning £3.5bn in child support never got paid.
In 2007, the government decided it would spend a further £300m in an attempt to improve the system, but this didn't stop problems from creeping up again. In 2010, staff were unable to access case files because the system was running at a snail's pace. The Work and Pensions Committee, in February 2010, said that progress had been made but that there remained a very large number of IT problems which had "no workaround and are causing cases to get stuck2.
7. Home Office spends £350m on an immigration system that doesn't work
The Home Office wasted about £350m on a computer system that was meant to deal with immigration and asylum applications. The system was initially the focus of the UK Border Agency (which closed in 2013), and its system had always been riddled with problems.
In 2012, the National Audit Office (NAO) said that the Immigration Case Work IT system was a year behind schedule and had exceeded its original 2011-12 budget by £28m. It said that the project has "suffered from a loss of focus, poor governance structures and optimism bias in planning and reporting" at the time. The NAO made a number of recommendations to the agency, but by August 2013, the system was ditched, and staff were forced to revert to using an old system that regularly freezes.
The Home Office has since commissioned another computer system that is due to cost a further £209m by 2016-17.
Margaret Hodge, who was chairwoman of the Public Accounts Committee at the time, said that she had "little confidence that the further £209m it is spending on another IT system will be money well spent".
6. Eight fire & rescue services centres were empty "white elephants" in £469m wasted project
In 2004, the Labour government launched the FiREControl scheme (yes, the use of capital letters within the word are meant to be there). The project was aimed at switching 46 current control rooms into nine regional control centres for fire and rescue services in England, so that the services could respond better to emergencies such as terrorist attacks, floods and rail crashes. But in December 2010, the plan was formally scrapped.
In 2011, the public accounts committee said the scheme did not achieve any of its objectives and that eight of the centres were empty "white elephants", which cost the taxpayer £4m every month to maintain.
Margaret Hodge, the chair of the MPs' committee, said the project had been "flawed from the outset" and was one of the worst wastes of public money for many years with "a minimum of £469m being wasted".
In fact, the Communities and Local Government Committee found that the cost of the project had been reported differently to parliament every few years. In 2004, it was said to cost £120m, in 2007 a comprehensive assessment said it would cost £340m, and in 2008 this changed to £380m. The department then predicted the project would cost £423m - with the annual national savings once the network went live to be £6m.
But, with none of the objectives achieved, the committee said those involved with FiReControl showed "an extraordinary failure of leadership".
Since then, the government has attempted to improve local fire control room services, and dispose of the regional control centre buildings. But it hasn't explained why it used capital letters in the name ‘FiReControl'. Unnecessary.
5. Ministry of Justice back-office project cancelled... because er, the Cabinet Office had a solution that did the same thing
It's one thing to write off an IT project because it just hasn't worked out, but another to ditch a project because it had been duplicated by another department.
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) did just this, writing off a £56m shared services programme (SSP) that was designed to save money on back-office functions.
A spokesperson for the MoJ told the Guardian in 2014: "We wrote off the money because we discovered in 2012 that the Cabinet Office was planning to implement a similar scheme. We could not recoup some of the costs, such as staffing."
The MoJ's project had run into a number of issues, was delayed and over-budget, official accounts disclose.
Three companies including Steria won the SSP contract back in 2011, and the project aimed to create savings of £28m a year by 2014. SSP was designed specifically for the MoJ but the department realised that the Cabinet Office already had a shared services programme, in a joint venture, also with Steria, dubbed Shared Services Connected Limited (SSCL). D'oh.
4. BBC completely messes up a £100m project - blames CTO
Okay so it's not strictly public sector, but it's still mostly funded by the public we've counted it as part of our list...
In May 2013, the BBC decided to abandon a £98m digital production system and suspend its chief technology officer (CTO), John Linwood, after the organisation's chief executive Tony Hall said it had "wasted a huge amount of licence fee payers' money".
Whether it was Linwood's fault or not is up for debate, but one thing is for sure - the BBC spent a huge amount of money on a project that was embarrassingly scrapped. The project was intended to provide a completely digital platform for BBC programming and archiving, enabling video tape to be consigned to history. It would also enable clips and complete programmes to be uploaded, downloaded, edited or archived as necessary.
The Public Accounts Committee labelled the initiative a "complete failure" in which licence fee payers got nothing in return for the near £100m that was spent.
Hodge labelled DMI as "slower and more cumbersome than the 40-year-old system it was designed to replace" and noted how it only had 163 regular users despite a running cost of £3m a year, a figure almost four times as high as the previous system.
Linwood was sacked by the BBC in July 2013, but he claimed he was made the "fall guy" in an employment tribunal. He said that the project shouldn't have ever been axed.
The BBC claimed that Linwood was responsible for a "massive waste of public funds" and a "quite shameful flight from responsibility" over the failed initiative.
The tribunal's "unanimous verdict" was that Linwood's claim of unfair dismissal was well founded and succeeds. It said Linwood had contributed "to the extent of 15 per cent" to his own dismissal.
3. Home Office may still have to pay millions to US supplier for an e-borders programme that wasn't delivered
In 2003, the government decided to launch an e-Borders programme which would be able to track all passengers in and out of Britain within 10 years. US company Raytheon Systems was chosen to design the system in 2007 winning a nine-year contract, but in 2010 the department had terminated the contract on the ground that key milestones had been missed.
The Home Office was then told to pay £224m to Raytheon, after the company claimed the termination of the contract was unlawful and therefore entitled it to recover substantial damages.
But the Home Office won an appeal, after a court ruling that it was "tainted by serious irregularity".
Home secretary Theresa May said that the award would be set aside in its entirety to be determined by a different tribunal. The judge has granted both parties permission to appeal.
Keith Vaz, the chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee, said: "This is another twist in a saga that has cost the British taxpayer millions of pounds. We still do not have an e-Borders programme, nor do we have information that can help us determine what went wrong with the Raytheon contract."
Yet another project in which millions was spent, with nothing to show for it.
2. Disaster at DWP
Well, if we're being technical Universal Credit is still ongoing and therefore can't be considered along this list of atrocities. But quite frankly, the programme has been nothing short of a disaster from its inception.
It was designed to merge together several different benefits programmes into one unified system.
In February, the Public Accounts Committee labelled the programme a £700m flop which had only seen "very little progress" after constant delays and technical issues. The same organisation slammed the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) for its "alarmingly weak management" of the project in 2013, and in its damning report it said that at least £140m was spent on IT systems that cannot be used and would therefore have to be written off - the full losses for the project could be much higher.
But unlike many other projects - many people who have worked on the project have come forward to explain what the deep-rooted issues with the DWP's IT strategy are.
Computing came into contact with a consultant who worked at DWP, and said the organisation's strategy is hampered by employees worrying about whether the tabloid press will approve of their actions, while DWP lawyers would write up a contract without consulting the IT people who would be responsible for overseeing it.
Meanwhile, a job centre employee said that the system is ‘completely unworkable, badly designed and already out of date', and a survey of Universal Credit staff found that over 90 per cent of employees found the IT system to be ‘less than adequate'.
Although it may be ongoing, it has a similar feel to it to many of the other government IT disasters that have gone before it, and despite Iain Duncan Smith's suggestion that all will be fine with the project - it seems like another huge waste of taxpayer's money so far.
Most worryingly, the former DWP employee told Computing that it was one of many DWP failures on the horizon.
1. How to waste £10bn on something that doesn't exist - the National Programme for IT (NPfIT)
After years of delays and issues, the government finally decided to dismantle (in its own words) Labour’s ill-fated NPfIT. The programme included several schemes which were aimed at modernising the NHS, including a national e-mail system, an electronic care record system which would enable hospitals and GP surgeries to share patient information, and the ability to transfer X-rays and prescriptions electronically. But by 2011, the Major Projects Authority said that the scheme was not fit to provide services to the NHS. The project, which was set up in 2002, is estimated to have cost the government £10bn of taxpayers’ money, and there have been suggestions that the overall amount spent could actually have totalled more because of costs associated with the termination of Fujitsu’s contract as well as other long-term payment costs.
In 2013, MPs labelled it the "worst and most expensive contracting fiasco in the history of the public sector”.
They weren't wrong there.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Sooraj Shah
Quelle/Source: computing, 20.08.2015
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