MPs slam 'appalling' £400m criminal-background vetting system

The £400m PFI Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) for vetting staff who work with children and vulnerable adults was so "appallingly planned" that it went live despite concerns the system was not ready, resulting in a backlog of delays in vital background checks and a system that is still not fully functional, according to a report by the National Audit Office.

The CRB - a private finance project between the UK Passport and Records Agency and Capita - went live nine months late in March 2002 but government procurement watchdog the Office of Government Commerce only gave it the green light because the pressure to launch meant it was at the point of "no turning back".

The project will not now break even until a year later than planned, in 2005/2006, leaving the taxpayer to foot a deficit of £68.2m.

The NAO report, Criminal Records Bureau: Delivering Safer Recruitment?, reveals a litany of critical errors and failures during the initial stages of planning. These include an unrealistic timetable for implementation, and problems dealing with vetting checks after the CRB went live due to the unforeseen demand for paper applications. The system and processes had been designed based on projections that 80 per cent would come via the telephone and internet.

Capita's bid was the lowest but even at this stage concerns were raised by one of the three bidders about the realism of the timetable, the report said.

The government and Capita then only realised in the summer, when it was originally due to launch, that users wanted to apply mainly using paper applications.

"Data entry screens had not, however, been designed for keying in of data from paper forms and the Optical Character Recognition Systems designed for telephone applications had insufficient capacity to deal with the volume of paper applications."

Launch was delayed until March 2002 but concerns were still raised by the OGC, which was not in existence during the early stages of the CRB, that the system was not ready to go live. But, the report said, it accepted there was too much pressure on the government for the CRB to be delayed any longer.

"The Bureau was under pressure to go live, not least because the police had stopped accepting applications directly, as planned, in preparation for the start of the Bureau's service," the report said.

Although the backlog has now been cleared and the government says Capita is meeting service level agreements, the report said the CRB is still not fully functional.

"The Bureau's problems have impacted adversely on the intended level of service for customers which is not yet as extensive as the Government had planned."

One area where vulnerable people are being put at risk is the lack of checks on existing health care and social care workers. This only began - over six months late - in October 2003, while the CRB cannot currently access data held by Customs & Excise and the British Transport Police, as well as overseas crime databases.

The report reveals Capita has paid or is paying £3.69m in fines for not meeting service levels while the government has paid an additional £8.4m for changes in contract requirements.

Edward Leigh MP, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, said in a statement that there is a "grim familiarity" about another high profile government IT failure that was "appallingly planned and… badly implemented".

"Wishful thinking seemed to lie behind the key assumption, unsupported by any solid market research, that up to 85 per cent of applications for access to criminal records would be made by telephone or online," he said. "The Bureau and its partner, Capita, entirely failed to translate policy objectives into workable operational plans. When the going got rough they both started blaming each other. And, while the service has now improved, it is not the one we were promised."

He said gaps in record checks should be "remedied without delay" and called for research into how effective the CRB is in helping protect children and other vulnerable people from potential abusers or whether it is in fact "having any effect at all".