19 December 2008
By Julie Read Taxpayers will have to find £81m to cover the ‘stupendous incompetence’ of the Department for Transport following its failure to implement plans for its shared service centre, a senior group of MPs said this week. The Public Accounts Committee said that the DfT’s ‘accelerated’ plan to share corporate services with its seven agencies had led to a ‘lamentable’ result in terms of spiralling costs, inadequate procurement, implementation and delay. PAC chair Edward Leigh said: ‘The Department for Transport planned and implemented its shared corporate services project with stupendous incompetence. This is one of the worst cases of project management seen by this committee. This was an efficiency drive aimed at saving £57m by 2015. It now looks like the taxpayer will have to stump up £81m to pay for it. The plan was for the central part of the DfT and its agencies to be sharing services in Swansea by April 2008. But the timetable was too rushed, the report added. The IT system did not have the confidence of the staff, especially as it occasionally issued messages in German. The DfT initially estimated that it would cost £55m to set up the programme and that the benefits over the first ten years would be £112m, yielding a net benefit of £57m. But the DfT failed to offer its IT support arrangements to full competitive tender, specify its requirements precisely enough, or manage its suppliers sufficiently closely. Current forecasts show that the Programme will cost £121m, benefits over the first ten years will be £40m and the net cost to the department will be £81m.The report urged the DfT to hold the senior managers responsible for the system failure to account and to scrutinise the expertise of its project managers. To date, only the centraldepartment and two agencies are using the shared service centre, said the PAC. A DfT spokesman said: ‘As with any large-scale and long-term project, there have been aspects of shared services that have taken longer to implement than others. ‘However, the system is now starting to deliver real change within the department with smoother and more streamlined processes. We continue to develop shared services and believe that the new way of working will result in significant improvements.’
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