Government Connect creates the new 'public service network'

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

The deadline has passed for councils to transact data securely with the DWP. Philip Littleavon, who led the change programme, explains to Mike Lowe the scale of the change and its future possibilities

For years, ministers and civil servants have discussed the possibilities that a networked public sector could realise. Promises of greater data sharing through secured networks to make a number of public sector processes a lot smoother and more efficient, despite the controversy surrouding its affect on civil liberties, are continually touted. Unfortunately a lot of attempts in the past have struggled immensely in the implementation phase. The intelligence agencies, the Courts Service, the Ministry of Defence and, of course, the NHS, have all had issues in completing their plans.

Yet it appears it is not all doom and gloom. A project which has been running since 2005, and has stayed out of the limelight for most of it, may be on the verge of achieving one of the biggest coups of government IT. Quietly, and seemingly without fuss, the Government Connect team has connected nearly every single local authority in England and Wales to a secure network. Just two councils are waiting for the hardware to be installed and no council should be any later than September for full connection as the 31 March deadline, set by Government Connect, passes.

In practical terms this means any council can access council tax and housing benefits data securely if its infrastructure has been installed and it complies with the Code of Connection. The Code of Connection is a list of 91 criteria based on an international standard for information assurance. Once complete, a council can then activate its connection and securely share data with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

Philip Littleavon, programme director for Government Connect, calls this a "big milestone" and lauds the progress made since he took over the programme in April 2008. "What we're looking at is 380-odd circuits and we'd only really just got going when I took over in April. That means more than one circuit is being installed every day," he explains.

So what does the immediate future hold for a connected local government? Littleavon claims the potential for the network, called the Government Connect Secure Extranet (GCSx), is "immense".

"We don't want to oversell it as it is just a network, other networks exist, but it's a network unlike any other for local authorities because it's a network that can be fully trusted by central government, it can be fully trusted to deliver shared services involving sensitive data cross-government," he says.

"For example the Courts Service has an application called Libra. Local authorities, particularly in youth justice scenarios and youth offending teams need access to Courts Service records. Libra and the Ministry of Justice have agreed to make that application available to local authorities, piping it through the GCSx connection. It's obviously sensitive data that could not be provided if this network was not in place. So local authorities, particularly the youth offending teams, will now have access to that sort of information, which they do need, really quickly."

The initial function of the GCSx was to provide secure access to the Customer Information System (CIS) database, which is held at the DWP. Yet, as Littleavon explains, there are already departments investigating how it can be used to transact data from other secure systems. Future uses could include connecting local authorities with the assets recovery database, traditionally only available on the Police National Network (PNN), and the ContactPoint database.

Some might say this could sound too good to be true and if it is really this effective, then maybe the costs will be really high. But then Littleavon explains the costs, and it sounds really rather cheap compared to most government IT projects.

A participating local authority gets the GCSx for free until 31 March 2011, as the bill is footed by the DWP, the Communities and Local Government (CLG) department and the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF). Following that time, councils will be charged a fairly nominal amount, although the price may vary from one authority to another, Littleavon says.

"First and foremost we've got a rough idea of what it costs under today's commercial arrangements. We're really in at the lowest end about £5,000-6,000, at the highest end about £18,000. We have talked about these numbers in the past. It's not a huge amount of money," he says.

Government Connect is also planning for the aftermath of the GCSx implementation. A conference will be announced soon, Littleavon says, which will show councils the "roadmap" for the next stage. To encourage further innovation in the future, Government Connect has also launched a benefits realisation fund to help the public sector develop a whole range of other uses for the GCSx.

"We've had 193 applications for projects, which would beneficially use GCSx," he says. "These are ones that local authorities have come up with, as opposed to previous examples where central government have said we want to talk to local authorities about the sorts of information we transact. They range from information-sharing type projects to business aspects of local government."

One of the biggest culture changes that Littleavon notes with GCSx is the addition of secure email within local authorities. A process that might involve a courier, or a fax or a written report that needs to be sent, and he admits this is very common, can cause constraint. Staff cannot just write it down in an email or attach it as a file and send it on.

"Local authorities, to their credit, have taken their information assurance pretty seriously. They're not sending the stuff over the internet; there's a culture where you can't do this. So a lot of these projects are what I call really good, ground-up, benefits realisation. So a lot more local authorities are realising they can do more things electronically and not with whizz-bang IT, it's just using the GCSx to improve processes. So a lot of continual service improvement is going on there and that's going to grow in my view," he says.

"Longer term, what we will be looking at, and we're starting some work on this now, is to better position for local government the GCSx network as the platform for shared services," he adds. "There are quite a lot of local authority networking partnerships that are coming along, and I think a lot of those were born out of less successful parts of Government Connect, where expectations were not met, authorities have said the Government Connect programme is not going to deliver and we need to share information with neighbouring authorities and create partnerships."

Government Connect is expecting local authorities to realise that they should be building their local government to local government partnerships around the public sector infrastructure, Littleavon says. As GCSx is part of the Government Secure Intranet (GSI), which connects central government departments, he believes government IT is now moving on. Instead of just being a "Whitehall network", it is transforming into a broader "public service network (PSN)".

"It's all there today, that's why it's such an untapped resource," he adds.

So has it been a success? Littleavon has a background of working on IT change projects, with his biggest test likely to have been his time at the Child Support Agency as its interim director. In a sign of how bad it was, he seems quite pleased that he left it at "a point where it now roughly works".

Despite that rather gruelling role, he seems remains upbeat with his current role and believes it has been done very well.

"I would feel considerably less liberated if I knew this was done in a slightly less than ideal way and the authorities had major reservations about how my employer went about doing it. I take comfort in that; that it can and has been done right," he says.