Examination of Witnesses (Questions 216-219)
COLIN BARNES
AND JULIE
DOUGHTY
6 MAY 2003
Q216 Chairman: Mr Barnes, Ms Doughty,
welcome to this session. I think you have heard the previous session,
so you have probably heard the indications given to the inquiry
that we are engaged on. And let me say how grateful we are to
you for giving your time to be with us this afternoon and we look
forward to what you can tell us.
Ms Doughty: Thank you. Could I
just explain that we are representing the Managers Association
which is a professional association of public and private law
team managers. We are not here representing CAFCASS management.
Chairman: We understand that and it is
very helpful to put that on the record at the beginning of the
proceedings. And indeed we hope that your role, because you represent
the Managers Association, does give you some freedom which perhaps
individual officers might not feel that they had to be quite open
with us about the difficulties that the organisation has faced
and how they can best be dealt with. Mr Cunningham?
Q217 Mr Cunningham: Can I ask you
to what extent CAFCASS is still suffering from poor planning before
it was set up and the disruption after it was set up? Can you
comment on that?
Ms Doughty: Well, you have heard
a great deal about that this afternoon. When I was looking through
the uncorrected evidence that was given that we were allowed to
have a look at, I think we felt that the analysis that was given
by Mr Poyser from the Inspectorate was fairly accurate and reflected
our views really about what had happened in the run up to CAFCASS.
And that was two years ago when we really feel that now we want
to move on, but unfortunately there is quite a legacy of bad feeling,
as you have picked up from this afternoon. So we would agree very
much with Aaron Poyser's summary of what happened there. Just
a couple of issues I think perhaps that he would not have known
about was that there was a great deal of confusion about the financial
projections shortly after CAFCASS came into being in April 2001.
There were some really very bizarrely inaccurate financial projections
presented to senior management which has caused incredible difficulties
for them, I am sure. And there has been quite a lot of comment
about what happened to all the paperwork before April 2001. I
would just like to point out that there are several team managers
and some practitioners that were involved in those task groups.
We have retained our paperwork. We have sent in copies of all
sorts of paperwork to people in HQ since April 2001. So a great
deal of that information is still available.
Q218 Mr Cunningham: Is that information
in use? Have you retained the information? I take it that it has
not been used by the managers or is it being used by the managers?
Because one of the points that emerged earlier on was that there
was information gathered by the task force etc., etc. and it was
not used. You are now saying to us that some of that information
was retained and that is the question; is it being used?
Mr Barnes: One of the points that
I would like to make about the work of task groups, and indeed
the project to set up CAFCASS, is that a lot of that information
is still available. People who were on the task groups are still
with us as managers. I, on behalf of the CAFCASS Managers Association,
and before that the Association of GALRO Panel Managers, have
looked particularly at IT and have been involved in all the discussions
about IT throughout the life of CAFCASS. The thing about the past
is that we cannot go back and change it, but we can learn the
lessons and I think our main concern, in the Managers Association
at the moment, is that the current CAFCASS administration should
look at the lessons to be learned from the mistakes that were
made at the time of the project team.
Q219 Mr Cunningham: But have they
actually implemented them? They have looked at them, but are they
actually starting to implement them then?
Mr Barnes: I believe that a lot
more could be done. The original project was set up under good
project management schemes, as far as I can see. The idea was
that there would be a Programme Board, these task teams would
be run as separate projects that would be brought together by
the Programme Board. That never happened. The IT one, on which,
as I say, I was a member, was transferred into a proper project
management methodology of the sort that is recommended in Government
guidance from the Office of Government Commerce and so on. But
unfortunately, that floundered at the time CAFCASS came into being
and my evidence is that the Government guidance about how to run
a project, how to make change in public bodies and, in particular,
implement IT, has never been implemented in CAFCASS even though
there were lessons, not only from the project team failure, but
also from failures in the Probation Service beforehand. Some of
you may have heard of the CRAMS, which I think cost £119
million and never delivered a useful case management system. CRAMS
is a computer system that was meant to deliver case records not
only to the Probation Family Court Welfare Officers, but also
to the criminal side as well.
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