Labour’s IT bungles cost taxpayers £26bn

oldtimer

And lest we forget - it now seems but a distant memory - there were all those millions of lost personal records of that were never found again.

ndm

A quick gander at Wikipedia suggests the real problem with the Government IT programme, as these things so often are, was the outsourcing to firms whose primary duty was to enrich themselves not the project. This is just as much a failure of private business as it was Government failure.

True Bred Pomponian

The price you pay for putting generalist civil servants who have never run an IT project in their lives in charge of IT projects. The Team Leader on one project I worked on asked to be reminded which was bigger, a gigabyte or a megabyte.

Michael Booth

and having wasted so much money and cocked things up gloriously they are going to make us pay even more for the privilege...something rotten somewhere

Liberty

I read that Essex County Council, a Tory council has asked IBM to supply and manage the automation of all services. I'm not an IT man but this corresponds to best advice, getting a firm like IBM to manage and supply the whole thing because politicians, and most people for that matter do not know enough to do it. We'll have to see what happens.

JohnW

A terrible waste indeed but is it simply due to bungling? Given the revolving door nature of senior civil servants and directorships on the firms that waste all this money I suggest that it's deliberate.

Big Al

Anyone had your 2010 tax code yet? Losing tax allowance will cost you approx £470 per month to help pay for this IT mess.

Lord Monkington-Smythe

Yes, generalist civil servants should not run the minutae of a huge IT program, but you are ignoring the fact that a massive proportion of the cash wasted has been spent on private sector IT consultants, who gave bad advice.

Andrew Taylor

NDM
But the government should have written the contracts more tightly and should have been monitoring and policing the process more carefully. It is not on to absolve the government of responsibility in this. Many of the firms contracted were set up primarily to access the government trough, having little other business and having little interest in getting anything other than business. Unless you lock in these creatures of the dark in with penalties (preferably personal penalties for the management), they will just take advantage of the system. In the real world firms, who in the end bankroll government spending through taxes, would not put up with this sort of performance. Late projects and hits to their bottom line would be picked up early and resolution sought. Meanwhile this bunch of muppets continue to just throw more (or our) money at a problem. Many in the government have never had a 'proper' job and certainly most have never run a company, so how the hell can they run a nation - they just think that the we are just there to fund whatever next clown idea they have.

Yam Yam

New Labour's policy-making works like any good computer: if you feed junk in you get junk out.

Andrew Watson

You say the ID cards scheme is now "virtually scrapped", but sadly the opposite is the case. From 2011 Labour plans to force everyone applying for a British passport to apply for an ID card at the same time. Coercing the public to get an ID card in this underhand way has always been the core of the Home Office's plan since the Identity Cards Act was passed in 2006. See http://www.no2id.net for details.

David Parker

I wonder if a single civil servant was sacked as a result of these examples of gross incompetence. In all probability they were either promoted or moved sideways into posts where they can continue to waste our money until they retire upon their bloated pensions.

Archie

Well quite, Mr. Blackburn. But hang on a minute; weren't all these projects delivered - if that's the right word - by private companies in the first place?

Paul Hawkins

Consultancy for government is a hopeless task unless you just want to trouser the money and don't care about delivering anything for it. Speaking personally you are faced daily with:
Changes in priorities and objectives
Lack of project sponsorship
Lack of ownership
Mind numbing political correctness
Absolute ignorance
Inflexibility
Inexperienced people in key positions(in one case an ex councillor and former taxi driver who ran a project by quoting tracts from the Microsoft project help files!)

David Blackburn

Archie,

Yes, but managed by the Civil Service, who do not have the expertise to manage IT projects, as several above posters point out. The post-bureaucratic age intends to rectify that.

In2minds

Andrew Watson @10.37am is correct. However, if you write to the Tories about their plans for ID cards the response is not exactly encouraging. And the reason for that is the EU is at the root of the ID card scheme. On matters EU the Tories say they will 'not let matters rest'. But in the case of ID cards I think they will be as big a problem as Nulabour.

David Blackburn

Andrew Watson and In 2 Minds,

Agreed, but will it ever be enacted?

JohnOfEnfield

There are plenty of very successful, profitable computer applications in place in this world. Not many of them are in the public sector.

IT systems tend to reflect the needs of the user. Centralised autocracy is incredibly inefficient even without IT systems. IT systems just tend to make them even more incredibly inefficient.

The Socialist vision of public services delivered efficiently by wondrous technology is a fundamental contradiction in terms. IT solutions have to grow from the "bottom up". They have to prove themselves at every point in the life cycle. Their success in the market place they serve is what counts. Their sustainability is derived from the product or service being profitable for the users. All this is an anathema to the Socialist planners, which is why their large, top down, imposed solutions will ALWAYS fail. I repeat - ALWAYS FAIL.

I am surprised it has taken until now for people to realise it.

TrevorsDen

I also very much doubt that the amount of training needed to work these computer systems properly has been factored in. Nor the amount of 'maintenance' they will need. Upgrades debugging and 'improvements'.

PS
top story in the news today should be, in a word, 'INFLATION'.

Labours legacy will be rampant inflation, rising unemployment and soaring deficits and debt.
Whats new?

Oh and thinking of that word, 'legacy' ... remember this was what Blair spent years worrying about. So where is it/ What was Blairs 'legacy'.

Robin Guenier

No, the problem is not senior civil servants’ lack of IT skills. These failures are project management, not IT failures. Project success requires five key factors: (1) a clear business plan, with measures of success; (2) a strong overall management with one identified leader – from inception to completion; (3) widespread (and continuing) consultation with key users; (4) alignment of the project with current process; and (5) willingness to revise (even cancel) the project in the light of lessons from (3) and (4).

Paradoxically, government understands all this – numerous NAO, Cabinet Office, OGC, select committee etc. reports have reiterated these points. So why are they rarely implemented? A factor may be that senior people never stay in the job long enough to see a project through. But probably the main reasons are (1) that success comes from hard project experience (and no politician and few civil servants have that experience) and (2) that JohnOfEnfield is right: massive “top down” projects cannot survive the discipline of the above factors.

True Bred Pomponian

@Robin Guernier : No, the problem is not senior civil servants’ lack of IT skills.

Whilst you are correct about needing the basic priciples of project management, as you have listed, at your finger tips, it is also essential to have had some experience of managing projects in your own field to be aware of the issues that are most important. I am quite comfortable running IT projects, on the back of considerable exeprience, I would be stuck trying to run a construction project, purely on the basis of my PRINCE2 qualification.

2trueblue

The problem is that they have no idea how to plan anything. It is not their money, they do not understand budget, plan, budget, organise, budget.
Look at the Olympic situation. How many times overbudget are we now? When will have the real figures? Well Liebore don't care, they won't be there. ut we will have to pay yet again for their failure. Come to think of it there hs been very little in the news about it recently?

Fred Brierley

The article says that "£26bn has been wasted on IT projects". This figure includes £7.15bn "wasted" in the MoD.

Was all that money simply thrown down the drain? Did we really get nothing for it? Or is it just journalistic nonsense and we've actually got quite a good new system in the MoD?

Does anybody actually know the facts? It's certainly not easy to extract them from this article.

If the MoD system cost £7.15Bn, and is £180M overspent, that is an overspend of 2.5%. Are we really complaining about a 2.5% overspend on a massive government IT project?

Surely, in deciding whether public money has been wasted or not, you ought first to decide whether the project has been a success or not. This article has made no attempt to do that.

It's equvialent to saying that all spending in the public sector is, by definition, a waste of money, regardless whether it leads to a successful outcome or not.

Pretty low quality journalism.

David Blackburn

Fred Brierley,

The competence of the system is not at issue - the issue is that it was delivered late and over budget and was commissioned without a pilot. This article is about government practices and why they need reform in an era of cuts, not the competence of IT systems per se, though that would be interesting.

Colin

If you stick your finger into a light socket and you get an electric shock, you could be forgiven for doing it one more time, just to check that it is indeed painful and dangerous.

If, however, you then continue to stick your finger in the light socket, don't be surprised if you end up electrocuted...

My first piece of advice to whoever is in charge of public sector projects after the next election, would be to recognize, as quickly as possible that the model of employing large professional services companies, especially the ones with a proven track record of mediocrity and failure, is just not working. So, just stop doing it! You'll be surprised at how quickly things improve. The private sector is starting to wake up to this, as a result, fewer of these monolithic, value destructive deals are being done.

Secondly, open up the procurement process to enable smaller, hungrier and more innovative companies to participate. Better still; allow your IT leaders to resource large projects by going direct to the talent market. Cut out the middlemen and stop funding the margins of professional services companies. After all, that's exactly what they do.

As for IBM and Essex, we’ll see…

Robin Guenier

@True Bred Pomponian:

Maybe - but it's far better to have someone (even without experience in the relevant field) running a project if he/she understands the principles of project management and has hard-won project experience than it is to have someone trying to run it (even with experience in the relevant field) without such understanding and project experience.

JohnOfEnfield

Fred (Brierly):

I very much subscribe to your penultimate paragraph - i.e. I am very much for "small government".

The point I made above is that it is very difficult to define what success IS in the public sector - there are virtually no signals to tell the perpetrators of the system what is good or what is bad. Hence my subsequent point that an IT system will more than likely make the public sector even more incredibly inefficient.

If that argument is considered "low journalism" then so be it.

Marcher Baron

"the MoD’s defence information infrastructure (over budget and late at £7.15bn and which was commissioned without a pilot)..." So it's all down to the Tars and the Pongos, then. Thank goodness the RAF isn't to blame!

AAE

The Civil Service proves time after time that they can't write a contract. If they could, and these IT systems didn't do what it said on the tin, the loss wouldn't be the taxpayers.
And why is The Indy coming up with all this? Where is Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition? Ah yes I remember, that's the opposition who have opposed only 15% of Government Bills, and up until a nano-second ago, supported all Government spending. The Tory mantra should be, an increase in public spending is a CUT in the income of all those hard-working families who they seem to assume are going to vote for them.

JohnAnt

Big Al - I didn't understand your reference to lower tax codes next year. The tax code for 2010-11 is the same as for 2009-10.
Of course, the fiscal drag means that (if we have salary increases) more of it will be taxed. But where do you get the specific sum of £470?

JohnAnt

Isn't there something of an, ahem, symbiosis, between the IT firms who win the contracts, and New Labour?
And once the money's been wasted, the government has little motivation to get it back. It's not theirs, after all - only ours.

kawerau

'160 health organisations out of £9,000'?
How about a bit of proof reading?

Carl Barron

Why is it, that from central Government to local Town and County Councils they all seem incapable of drawing up contracts, which state, ‘Payment Only Upon Completion and to the Payees Satisfaction’?

Why whenever it’s ‘Taxpayers Money’ are there no if any safe guards on costs spiraling beyond the original estimate?

The manner in which this country governs the expenditure of the ‘Taxpayers Money’ is wholly and utterly unacceptable and bordering on what may well be considered as criminally incompetent.

Signed Carl Barron Chairman of agpcuk

http://carl-agpcuk.livejournal.com/

http://disqus.com/Carl_Barron/