Offender IT is a 'spectacular failure'

Thursday, March 12, 2009

The failure to implement a central database on offenders was put down to poor management and unrealistic expectations, the National Audit Office (NAO) said in a report.

C-NOMIS was designed to track criminals in England and Wales from sentence to release. Yet the NAO found the project was abandoned due to a number of errors with the National Offender Management Service's (NOMS) programme management and the actions of its senior management. Plans for the £234m C-NOMIS, began in 2004. However, by July 2007 the project was two years behind schedule and its estimated costs had soared to £690m. As a result, the Ministry of Justice abandoned plans for a single shared database in favour of five separate smaller IT projects at a reduced cost of £513m, the watchdog said.

At the project's beginning, a project board was established to manage C-NOMIS, with a requirement for it to report to the NOMS board through routine reporting systems. The report said the NOMS board did not ask for any other details on the project other than these routine reports. In addition, the project board only met once every two months and did not "actively monitor delivery of the project and was unaware of the full extent of delays or the implications of decisions it made upon project cost", the report said.

The initial planning of costs and timescales was "overly optimistic", the report added. In its analysis of the planning, the report criticised a number of areas that were found to be insufficient for the successful delivery of the project.

"There was no overall plan bringing together the different workstreams (up to 40 at one point) and hence it was difficult for managers to assess overall progress. Budget monitoring was absent, with cost control focusing on monitoring the spending against the annual budget rather than matching cost against project deliverables. Change control was weak, and there was no process in place for assessing the cumulative impact of individual change requests on the project budget or delivery timetable," it said.

The technical complexity of the project was also found to be "significantly underestimated". Whilst the report believed a single offender database was "technically realisable", it said NOMS did not adequately explore other potential solutions and underestimated the cost of customising the software it had already selected for the Prison Service. As a result, whilst it met the Prison Service's requirements in full, only 29 per cent of the probation service requirements were met. Due to an inaccurate assessment, business requirements also changed. The report found this required customisation caused the cost to develop the application to rise from £99m in June 2005 to £254m by July 2007

Procurement for C-NOMIS was also found to be sloppy. Rather than tendering for key project contracts, NOMS opted to use its current suppliers under existing framework agreements to develop and deliver the C-NOMIS application. The report said NOMS let these contracts go forward on a time and materials basis for longer than it should, which meant that there was insufficient pressure on suppliers to deliver to time and cost. More significantly, NOMS did not try to renegotiate its contract with the software developers Syscon after the extent of the customisation required came to light.

"Syscon is now able to market the improved software, but taxpayers will not benefit from their investment in the product," the report said.

"In conclusion, although technically feasible, C-NOMIS was a very ambitious project thought to have the potential to bring much closer working across the criminal justice system. The desirability of the project's aims appears to have overly influenced decision makers, leading to the failure to evaluate other technical options sufficiently and establish realistic budget, timescales and governance for the project."

The report also concluded that the core aim of a shared database to provide a single offender record accessible by all service providers "will not be met". "Although programme management has improved considerably in the last 18 months, weaknesses remain," it added.

Tim Burr, head of the NAO, said the project had been "expensive and ultimately unsuccessful".

Edward Leigh MP, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, described C-NOMIS as a "spectacular failure". "The central goal at the outset of the initiative was to have, by January 2008, a single, co-ordinated IT system for managing offenders across the prison and probation services. What they delivered was a master class in sloppy project management."

Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of probation officers union Napo, said the programme had been "a scandalous misuse of taxpayers' money". "From the beginning there was no consultation with service users and a total underestimate of the amount of traffic that the system would generate," he said.

Conservative shadow justice secretary Dominic Grieve said the money would have been "better spent on prison overcrowding and monitoring criminals released into the community".

The Liberal Democrats' shadow justice secretary David Howarth, said the government never seems to learn and continues to be "obsessed with massive centralised IT projects as if they were magic solutions to all of our problems".

In response, prisons minister David Hanson said the government took immediate steps to halt the project and preserve the work already done when the true costs and delays became clear.

He said: "The revised programme builds on this work, and steps have been taken to ensure the programme remains on time and in budget. NOMIS will support our commitment to ensuring that prison and probation service staff have improved access to the information they need to effectively manage offenders in custody and in the community."