Surprise paper trail costs taxpayer extra £145m

The Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) - set up in 2002 to help employers vet staff wanting to work with children or vulnerable adults - has seen its cost soar from a planned £250m to £395m.

The CRB, a public-private partnership between Capita and the Home Office, has been plagued with problems since its creation, according to a report published today by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee.

The CRB went live seven months later than planned and "the computer system encountered serious problems straightaway", the report said, with backlogs in processing building up and "peaking at nearly 300,000 by October 2002".

The problems with the CRB, which will cost taxpayers £145m more than originally expected over the contract's 10-year life, stem from the CRB and Capita not being "sufficiently effective in working together to address the problems which had started early on with ambitious and overly optimistic timings for development and implementation", the report said, adding that "an effective partnership... was not established until the crisis was underway".

The CRB will now not break even until 2005-06 - a year later than planned - and is still not providing the "standard or range of services originally envisaged".

The CRB's main function is to provide employees with details of potential staff member's criminal convictions, cautions or police warnings.

Capita predicted that the majority of requests - between 80 and 85 per cent - for information would be made over the telephone, rather than with paper forms. Other companies who bid for the contract predicted a higher use of paper applications and were consequently more expensive, bidding at least £100m more than Capita.

PricewaterhouseCoopers, which had bid for the project at around £380m, estimated that 40 per cent of requests would be filed on paper.

According to the report, "Capita confirmed that at the time, the assumption that 80 to 85 per cent of customers would choose the call centre option appeared reasonable to them because it was largely the only option being made available to customers. The introduction of the paper forms halfway through the implementation process led to a fundamentally difference business process having to be developed, which in turn impacted on the contractor's costs."

In a statement today, Capita pointed out that it is not the only one involved in the CRB document management process.

Its response read: "Capita welcomes this report into the start of the CRB service. By working to support our public sector partners and responding to the changes that were needed, the situation was resolved quickly. The service has been working well for over two years with Capita meeting its performance targets."