Leader: Criminal record system highlights fatal government flaws

The government’s flagship system for doing criminal background checks on people who work with children and vulnerable adults came in for some stinging criticism today from the National Audit Office and MPs on the Public Accounts Committee.

Nothing unusual there you may say – the NAO has obliged on far too many occasions over the last few years in sticking a boot into the numerous government IT cock-ups.

But this report really did pull no punches and it revealed a quite frankly embarrassing litany of errors resulting in delays to the launch of the Criminal Records Bureau, a backlog in vital checks on those working with children and vulnerable adults and another hefty bill for taxpayers to foot for a deficit until it breaks even.

The shocking revelation on this occasion was that the whole £400m system and processes were designed on an unsubstantiated assumption by the Passport Agency that most people would apply for checks over the phone or online. Only at the last minute was it realised that over 80 per cent would, in fact apply using paper forms. A government review a month before launch decided it was too late to turn back and so the system went live with the predictable chaos ensuing.

The familiar failings were that it was based on the controversial PFI arrangement (which has now thankfully been banned for IT projects by the Treasury); that the system was planned on ‘wishful thinking’ rather than thorough research; the timescale was too ambitious and it seems there was political pressure to avoid delays; and when the going got tough the government and its contractor Capita started publicly pointing the finger at each other.

We are told the system works just fine now thank you very much and better than what was in place before – except the CRB will break even a year late, it doesn’t have the full functionality initially specified and there are key criminal databases that still can’t be accessed.

There’s an argument for saying that public sector managers are too often railroaded into IT solutions by eager vendors and suppliers. On this occasion the report appears to accept Capita’s claim that the Bureau retained too much control over the planning process.

But how many more times are we going to have to write this story before there is a real step change in government IT? And will anyone ever be held accountable – or will the faceless civil servants simply be shifted round to the next government department before the full chaos they have unleashed explodes so they can repeat the mistakes again? You can be sure that in a private sector company heads would roll for failures on this scale. And when you add in a huge waste of hard-earned taxpayers money in cases like this, a damning report is simply not enough – the same cock-ups and errors keep being made.

The procurement watchdog the Office of Government Commerce claims it is too early for its own impact to be felt from the reviews it imposes on all new government IT projects but that won’t wash for much longer and there are simply no excuses for disasters on this scale for the recent and forthcoming Inland Revenue, NHS and Ministry of Defence projects.