17 August 2007
Civil servants have called on the government to consider in-house bids for future IT projects after spiralling costs forced the suspension of an outsourced offender monitoring system.
The Public and Commercial Services trade union, which represents staff in the prison and probation services, said the government must move away from the 'mindless mantra of private good – public bad' when deciding on IT overhauls.
It follows the Ministry of Justice's decision on August 9 to place under 'rapid review' the Custody-National Offender Management Information System, an IT project outsourced to contractor EDS.
The cost of the project, which was intended to monitor 300,000 prison and probation offenders by merging 200 existing databases, was initially estimated at £234m in 2004. But Whitehall sources now claim the bill could be closer to £1bn. It appears that the initial projections omitted VAT.
A leaked letter from Roger Hill, director of the Probation Service, says: 'The original costing for the C-Nomis programme proved to be optimistic… We have advised ministers that we will need to undertake a fundamental review of the work, to return to an affordable programme.'
Peter Olech, the PCS's Prison Service representative, said: 'Once again, an IT project that has been contracted out to the private sector has run into problems – and once again costs have spiralled. The public sector [should] be given the chance to demonstrate that it can deliver these IT projects in-house, on time and on budget.'
Around £155m has already been spent on C-Nomis, including £69m to trial it at three prisons on the Isle of Wight.
Ministers will now decide in September how much of the project, which is already six months behind schedule, can be salvaged. 'This review will consider the affordability of the overall programme and will report to ministers in the autumn with recommendations for a revised programme,' an MoJ spokeswoman said.
However, C-Nomis's planned introduction across 15 prisons next month has been postponed and some experts are predicting that the final system might not cover probation services.
Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary at the National Association of Probation Officers, said C-Nomis was 'arguably an outrageous waste of public money'.
PFaug2007
