Examination of witnesses (Questions 80
- 99)
MONDAY 15 JUNE 1998
MR ROBIN
MOUNTFIELD, CB,
MR MARK
GLADWYN, SIR
ALAN LANGLANDS
and MR FRANK
BURNS
80. Do you think there is a need to issue
guidance given the point Mr Leslie has raised about the potential
liability that these organisations supplying the software and
hardware could carry?
(Mr Mountfield) It is a matter we are looking
at at the moment but we have not yet taken the decision to issue
guidance in those terms. Perhaps I am misleading you, it has been
pointed out to me that the general question is addressed in the
very substantial six volume guidance the CCTA has published. That
covers a huge range of different year 2000 issues. There is material
there but we have not issued a specific guidance letter on liability
questions up to now.
Mr Hope: My time is
up but I share Mr Leslie's concern that you have been taken for
a ride and that the people that supply materials known to be defective,
which I regard them as being, should be pursued for doing so.
I think that is part of the Government's responsibility in this
case.
Mr Clifton-Brown
81. Good afternoon. Can I ask you, Mr Mountfield,
about the 9.9.99 problem. A senior air traffic controller advised
me not to travel in an aircraft on 9 September next year, 1999,
the four nine problem, because a lot of the older IT equipment
may well cease to function on that day or if not that day the
day after. Is this a problem the Government has addressed because
it is considerably earlier than the year 2000 problem we have
been looking at so far?
(Mr Mountfield) If I may I will ask Mr Gladwyn
to help us on that. My understanding is that there is quite a
number of caution dates of which 9.9.99 is one, and the year 2000
is another. Of course we are already living with this problem
in some cases. Computer systems in the private sector as well
as the public sector are already throwing up peculiarities geared
to one of those caution dates. That really reinforces the need
to get on with the job and do it as soon as possible.
(Mr Gladwyn) Specifically on the 9.9.99 problem
it is in fact in the CCTA guidance which was published as one
of the questions the department should look out for. I recall
from my days as an ICL on 1900 programmer, that in those days
9.9.99 was used to stop the machine so it would be interesting
if such a code was still in use. I think it is a very important
problem. I think that whilst of course people should be prudent
about their travel arrangements, I would hope that the air traffic
control systems have this taken into account and checked and corrected.
82. It is not only a problem for air traffic
control, it could be equally as important a problem in any field,
the NHS or any other field the Government covers. What specific
measures, other than merely putting it in page goodness knows
what in the guidance, is the Government actually doing about it?
(Mr Gladwyn) It is part of the checking and testing
programme for year 2000 compliance which will be required for
a department to make a statement that its systems will be year
2000 compliant.
83. Can I move on to all of the gentlemen
and try and get a little bit of a better handle on these costs.
Can I start with you, Sir Alan, and congratulations, as others
have also congratulated you. You have given the Committee this
afternoon a figure of £320 million as a figure for the NHS.
I take it that is made up of £170 million for compliance,
the millennium compliance, plus £150 million for upgrading
clinical and IT equipment and other equipment, is that correct?
(Sir Alan Langlands) No, it is made up of £170
million to deal with all of the IT issues and £150 million
as a contingency against problems with medical devices.
84. Can I confirm that figure is for the
whole of the NHS, i.e. England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland?
(Sir Alan Langlands) No, that figure is for the
NHS in England, which is my responsibility.
85. Could you or could Mr Mountfield give
us the entire NHS figure?
(Mr Mountfield) No, I do not think I can give
you a figure for the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish figures.
Those I do not think will be included within the £400 million
we have for Central Government because in those territories, as
in England, they are treated as separate categories. That is one
of the areas we have not got mapped at a central level.
86. Mr Mountfield, presumably you advised
the Prime Minister when he made his speech on 30 March in which
he said that the overall figure for Central Government—paragraph
132, page 18—was likely to be in the order of three billion.
How could you have arrived at that aggregate figure if you cannot
tell the Committee this afternoon what the total figure for the
NHS is?
(Mr Mountfield) The three billion in the Prime
Minister's speech was explicitly not a forecast by the Prime Minister.
He said it was a figure he merely quoted and it seemed to him
reasonable. The calculation that I tried to describe a few moments
ago was that we have certain reasonably firm figures for substantial
parts of the public sector. We have £400 million or so for
Central Government and the armed forces. We have a figure which
may be a rather rough and ready figure, £500 million for
local government, and we have a figure of up to about £320
million for the NHS in England. There is then a series of other
parts of the wider public sector which lead us to the view that
about three billion will not be unreasonable. There is another
way of looking at this problem which is to start from the assumption
that £400 million we have got for Central Government is about
right, and clearly that can be no more than an assumption at this
stage, and that relates to something like 700,000 employees in
the Civil Service and in the armed services, which is about 13
or 14 per cent of public sector employment. On a rule of thumb
basis that indicates that three billion may well be the order
of magnitude.
87. I am getting very worried about this
figure. I am going to ask the Treasury how this figure is going
to be financed and then I am going to ask the National Audit Office
whether they think the figure is robust. Can I ask the Treasury,
this is a substantial amount of money, £3 billion pounds,
is it already provided for in the departmental budgets in the
Red Book or is it to come out of the contingency reserve or will
there be supplementary estimates?
(Mr Martin) No, the Government's approach is that
the costs should be met from within existing budgets but I would
like to emphasise that not all of that three billion or any of
the figures being quoted will be an additional call on resources.
I think both witnesses have said that a lot of the year 2000 activity
which is going on will involve for example the replacement of
hardware and software which will have been a requirement in any
event. Similarly, a lot of the cost will be of IT staff within
the department who, when they are spending their time on year
2000 problems of course will be moved from other IT activities.
So again these staff costs will not be an addition to total planned
spending on IT by the department. That said, the Government's
approach is that these costs should be met within existing plans.
88. That is an extremely helpful answer
because I want to come back to Mr Mountfield in a minute about
how far the Government's IT programme has been delayed by this.
Can I ask you, Deputy C&AG, you have in your Report this figure
of £3 billion and you also have in your Report paragraph
16, page 8 which says that the costs to the NHS alone could vary
between £200 and £850 million. Now, if the costs as
a whole for government go up towards the top end of your estimates,
we are way above the £3 billion figure that the Prime Minister
estimates. Have you done any work to try and ascertain how robust
this £3 billion figure is?
(Mr Le Marechal) No. As Mr Mountfield said, the
Report does not say that it is the Prime Minister's own estimate,
as it were. He commented that that ball-park figure was a reasonable
one. Our Report draws attention to a great many things which now
need to be addressed and, therefore, a great many uncertainties
about any estimate which could be produced at this stage, so we
have not found it appropriate at this stage to try and produce
something which is more robust than £3 billion, but it is
clear from our Report that there is a great deal of approximation
and roughness attached to that figure.
89. Well, given that it is a substantial
figure, I wonder, Chairman, whether it would be reasonable to
ask for a note from the Deputy C&AG as to how the £3
billion is broken down between government departments. Would that
be feasible?
(Mr Le Marechal) We will certainly try to get
an analysis like that[1],
Mr Clifton-Brown, but I do not think it was our figure either.
It was not actually an analysis that we have produced.
90. If I can come back to you, Mr Mountfield,
we have had several hearings in this Committee, not least the
one with Sir Alan Langlands on Read Codes, of severe problems
with IT programmes within government. We heard that the NIRS 2
system, for example, in the Contributions Agency was likely to
lead to employers not being given their appropriate rebates on
time at the beginning of the financial tax year. Now, they are
very, very serious problems. How far, in your view, is this effort
and financial cost of the compliance problem delaying the entire
Government's updating of IT systems?
(Mr Mountfield) First of all, may I narrow the
question down initially at least to the central government figure
of £400 million? As I have tried to explain, that £400
million is made up of estimates made by operational professionals
right through the central government machine who are already part-way
through the programme. I cannot guarantee that that number will
not escalate because clearly there is a long history of escalation,
but I think as we get nearer towards completion, one has an increasing
amount of confidence that that is of the right order, though it
may be a little on the low side, it may not. Now, that figure
is actually quite small in relation to total running costs.
91. With respect, Mr Mountfield, I have
moved on from figures and I asked you in relation to the Government's
IT programme and the severe problems, with NIRS 2 and Read Codes
being just two of them, how far the devotion of this huge amount
of financial resources and human resources was going to delay
the development of the Government's total IT programme? I will
come to Sir Alan in a minute, but Computing magazine estimates
that in the NHS alone it will be two years, so can you tell us
across the government spectrum how much it will be?
(Mr Mountfield) No, I do not think I can in those
terms. The Government of course does not run its IT programme
as a single unitary programme; it is operationally, and quite
rightly, integrated with business plans right through every department
and agency and it is much more sensible, I think, to look at it
from the point of view of how it fits into each department's programme.
As a very rough order of magnitude because there is no budgeting
calculated on this basis, the Government spends at least £2
billion a year on IT procurement and services, upgrading and so
on, so a figure of £400 million over two or three financial
years is not hugely disproportionate. It clearly changed some
priorities within those programmes. It may mean, for example,
in some cases accelerating replacement, which is justified for
good reasons otherwise. It may mean postponing an upgrade in some
cases. I do not think we have, indeed I think it is unlikely that
we could ever get, a comprehensive view or assessment of the extent
to which priorities are being displaced, but we get no sign from
the reports we have got that that is becoming a major worry to
the departments.
92. Sir Alan, I will, you will be glad to
know, move you off figures and on to one or two specific items.
The Report makes quite clear that the individual chief executives
of the trusts and the health authorities are responsible directly
to you for compliance and that they are responsible for compliance
in each of their areas. Why is it that the Medical Devices Agency
is not ensuring compliance of a class of equipment across the
entire country? That would seem to me to make a far greater degree
of sense.
(Sir Alan Langlands) Well, just for the record,
not to duck the question, but for the record, the Medical Devices
Agency is not accountable to the NHS Executive, but its accountability
is to another part of the Department of Health, but of course
we are working closely with them. I think the point is that it
is impossible, in dealing with this sort of huge range of equipment
that we have to deal with, to generalise even for each class of
equipment. This is a global market and there are literally thousands
of different items of equipment in play and to ensure or to check
compliance, you have to be clear about manufacturer, you have
to be clear about the function of the equipment, the model of
the equipment, sometimes even the batch number, and bits of equipment
with the same batch number might even have different embedded
chips in them, so the agreement that we reached with the Medical
Devices Agency is that the initial check on each bit of equipment
would be made by the appropriate person holding that equipment
in the Health Service and the manufacturer. If there were difficulties,
however, in getting information back or, as we built up our knowledge,
there was a responsibility to disseminate that information, that
then would be something that the Medical Devices Agency would
carry out on our behalf.
93. Surely there must be huge amounts of
duplication going on with each trust, each health authority with
the same bit of equipment as another trust and another health
authority going to the manufacturer and doing the same compliance
audit. Would it not make sense for the Medical Devices Agency
to take over a class of equipment and in that way it is far more
likely that where there are problems, a central government agency
would pick them up? If one trust has one problem with one bit
of his equipment, it may well not be picked up.
(Sir Alan Langlands) It is not the case that checking
one piece of equipment necessarily means year 2000 compliance
for a very similar piece of equipment. The point is that each
of these things has to be checked individually and there has to
be a plan and each health authority and each trust has a great
inventory of all the different bits and classes of equipment that
they use. Now, clearly there are well-established partnership
relationships between the Medical Devices Agency and the NHS and
clearly, as we have built up our information, we have established
in a central unit a clearing house, a database on which people
can exchange information and indeed manufacturers are being very
good sometimes at exchanging information with us.
94. What problems have already arisen in
the NHS? We hear, for example, that University College are not
able to take outpatient appointments after the year 2000. Are
you aware that problems are already starting because of this non-compliance
of IT systems?
(Sir Alan Langlands) We are certainly aware of
the potential problems that I referred to in relation to the call
and recall systems with screening and we are certainly aware of
potential problems, which have now been dealt with, in relation
to prescribing for people with chronic diseases. We are aware
of some operational problems where instead of entering a two-digit
code, OO, to represent the year 2000, there is now a requirement
on staff to enter a four-digit code. All of these problems, as
they arise, are being systematically dealt with by the project
managers in each trust and often, as I have underlined in the
previous answer, working in partnership with the manufacturers
and the suppliers because they are not on the whole in a competitive
relationship, but they are there and they are keen to work with
us on these issues.
95. Final question for you, Sir Alan. On
paragraph 2.58, page 43—I have two yellow cards so I suppose
that must amount to a red card—the NAO recommends further
selective direct intervention. Are you proposing any further selective
direct intervention?
(Sir Alan Langlands) Yes. The regional offices
are already intervening on the basis of the March 1998 returns
and that will continue. Intervention can be, if you like, aimed
at bringing people up to speed, it can also be aimed at helping
people, supporting people, by disseminating information on both
strands we are using on this issue.
96. A final question, going back to Mr Hope's
question, can you say to the Committee, sitting here as confidently
as you can, you do not think anybody will die directly as a result
of these problems?
(Sir Alan Langlands) I am saying that we have
systematically assessed all the risks and will continue to do
so. We will continue to deal with them as systematically as we
can between now and the end of December 1999. Of course I cannot
guarantee a yes response to your question, I do not think you
would expect me to.
Mr Williams
97. Mr Mountfield, did I hear you correctly,
did you say the cost you now estimate to Central Government is
£402 million?
(Mr Mountfield) Yes.
98. The NAO tells us that between November
of last year and March of this year the costs rose six per cent
to £393 million. That is an increase of £23 million.
You are now telling us that since March of this year to the beginning
of this month it has gone up another nine million pounds?
(Mr Mountfield) Yes.
99. So in six months it has risen £32
million. So the rate of increase at the moment is £64 million
on an annualised basis?
(Mr Mountfield) Yes, that sounds about right.
1 Note: See Evidence, Appendix 1, page 18 (PAC
367). Back
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