Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-70)
PROFESSOR PATRICK
DUNLEAVY, MR
TONY COLLINS
AND MR
RICHARD TYNDALL
24 NOVEMBER 2005
Q60 Jenny Willott: One of the other reasons
the Government has given for saying it would be a good idea to
have an ID card is that you could use it to tackle benefit fraud,
and obviously that is one of DWP's priorities. From my understanding
of it, most people who are committing benefit fraud are not lying
about who they are: they are lying about their circumstances and
saying they are not working when they are, and things like that.
Is there any evidence from local government of situations where
it has been used successfully?
Mr Tyndall: No.
Q61 Jenny Willott: Okay!
Mr Collins: You are absolutely
right that when you talk about benefit fraud you have to distinguish,
as you have done, between individuals who are simply trying to
sort themselves out and organised rings of people who are in the
business of manufacturing false identities to claim wholesale
benefits. Obviously there are far more individuals, but the value
attached to successful fraud and potential savings to the system
all lie with preventing systematic fraud where false identities
are systematically manufactured. The prospect of a stronger authentication
of identity, both in the base register and at the point of benefit
claim, is that that systematic fraud can be squeezed out. Whether
that is realised or not we will wait to see, but the prospect
is there.
Q62 Jenny Willott: The assumption that
we have been talking about with the IT system is that it would
be used by government departments. We already know that banks
are potentially interested and in theory lots of areas of business
would want to start using the system as well. Does that have IT
implications for the sort of system that it would need? Does it
have cost implications if there are going to be others accessing
the information that is held by government that are not currently
able to access it that way? Does that have IT and cost implications?
One of the things Professor Dunleavy mentioned in the submission
is about leakage of information to unauthorised users. Is that
being taken into account with the planning of the IT of this system?
Obviously you are always going to have people getting information
through dodgy means, but if you have more and more different types
of organisations accessing central databases, what is being done
to ensure that they cannot access information that they are not
entitled to access?
Mr Tyndall: In general terms,
yes, the more doors there are into a room, the more the chances
are that they will be inappropriately used. I do not know the
answer specifically to the design of the ID card scheme. I am
not able to give you evidence on that. It is outside my area of
knowledge. But the general proposition must be the case. There
are also difficulties of complying with the law. The Data Protection
Act is absolutely clear, that you can only collect information
and hold it in electronic format for the purposes for which informed
consent has been received from the person concerned. Quite apart
from leakage and everything else, there ought to be safeguards
in place so that the system is appropriately designed from the
outset. My experience is that system designers take their Data
Protection Act responsibilities very seriously.
Mr Collins: I think there can
be a gap sometimes between what you want to achieve and the system
and the implementation. Just to quote the smart card example in
the NHS, they planned to issue something like 800,000 smart cards
and they had very elaborate security procedures to ensure that
only those who were legitimate users could access information—they
are building a national database of electronic medical records.
All that went out of the window, they discovered, when a contractor
wrote the pin number on the smart card, because it gives access—doctors
and nurses do not want to have to log on to the system each time
and do not want to be logged off if they have not used the system
for a couple of minutes. There is not an easy answer to that,
even with the elaborate security procedures they have. That comes
back to the point I was making earlier that those are the sorts
of risks that need to be identified early on, so that you can
decide how they can be mitigated.
Q63 Jenny Willott: Is there any evidence
that they have been identified?
Mr Collins: We ask a lot of questions—What
happens if, for example, in the NHS people do not bring their
smart cards with them? How do they identify locum doctors?—and
we are told the procedures are there and they expect people to
adhere to them.
Q64 David Heyes: It is this unwillingness
or inability to learn from mistakes of the past that I would like
to take you back to. We keep going into these projects built around
IT, not equipped with a reverse gear. Once you are in, you cannot
pull out. Everybody is so heavily committed to it, and we do not
learn post hoc. You have mentioned already the Revenue
and Customs settlement with EDS just announced this week. It sounds
very good on the face of it, £70-odd million to be paid back
for their failures, but it is an agreement that has what they
describe as a "significant confidentiality requirement".
This is an area in which this Committee is particularly interested,
the foul-ups on tax credits, and this looks like we are closed
down from learning through investigating what has gone on. Should
it not be the case that the Gateway review is the answer to this
problem? We can learn as we go, that can feed back and we can
avoid making the same mistakes again.
Mr Collins: Gateway reviews are
part of the answer, but also the strategic business case and outline
business case as well if you can edit them for confidential information.
The Gateway reviews are not carried out that regularly. There
is a six-stage process that starts with the feasibility of projects
right through to the benefits realisation, but at least it would
give an idea. Some of these reviews that we have seen just refer
to the department's ability to meet its commitments: Does it have
the buy-in of stakeholders? That is not commercially sensitive
information. I have not seen details of costs. Sometimes these
Gateway reviews do refer to the suppliers, but the suppliers themselves
do not see them. They are not even passed around departments:
there is only one copy made and it is up to the department head
to release them. From the Gateway reviews that I have seen that
have been published I cannot see why they cannot publish them
with sensitive information removed. I think it would be a very
good idea because it enables assumptions to be challenged. That
is the key thing. If you have the information, you can question
whether a problem has been identified as a potential show-stopper.
That is the real issue. We have seen time and again with projects
that go seriously awry that the potentially serious problems are
dismissed as teething. If there were scrutiny, then as parliamentarians
you do not need a lot of technical knowledge to see that sometimes
a project is going wrong. Usually it is for managerial reasons
or policy reasons or a divide between policy and the technical
people.
Q65 David Heyes: So Gateway reviews should
be made public. That would be your recommendation.
Mr Collins: Indeed, suppliers,
when asked that question by the Work and Pensions Committee said,
"Yes, we would like to see them. We would like them to be
published".
Professor Dunleavy: There are
other mechanisms that might be helpful for learning. Sir Gus O'Donnell
has recently announced—and no doubt you will be looking
at it—the idea of bringing in the equivalent of comparative
performance assessments into departments (Capability Reviews).
At the moment, the problem is that the departments' basic administrative
systems and so on are not reviewed in a public way by other people.
They are reviewed by themselves. There is a dialogue between civil
servants and ministers, with scrutiny by the select committees.
This is not really the same as looking at the ability to draw
lessons and to learn lessons and to move things forward. If you
were looking at the Home Office, it has a whole set of quite complex
IT projects on the go all at once. It would be very helpful to
learn lessons from different projects and to see that that was
being fed into the way that other projects were being run. And,
increasingly, running these projects is what central government
departments mainly do. These are very critical. They are not just
back-office systems, they are vital to whether or not you deliver
on your core objectives and your core targets.
Q66 David Heyes: Indeed, it could apply
across the whole field, with increasing marketing of service delivery.
Professor Dunleavy: Yes.
Q67 Chairman: If we had a system that
was working well, we would have the plug being pulled on projects
at various stages, would we not?
Professor Dunleavy: That has happened.
The Office of Government Commerce has pulled the plug or has done
Gateway reviews which have then caused ministers and departments
to decide to pull the plug.
Q68 Chairman: We have departments on
the whole and ministers who are committed to projects because
they have announced their commitment to the project. As we have
heard, they have oversold the benefits of projects, because that
is what you do, and you have suppliers who are also in the business
of overselling the benefits, because that is what they do. On
the kind of figures that we are talking here it makes old kind
of lobbying look pathetic. We are talking on a scale here that
goes beyond anything that we have seen before. You have a lot
of people who in a sense are wanting all this to motor along,
even if there are difficult bits of evidence coming along, so
unless we build in the critical elements, the external elements,
which is what you are suggesting, there are things about the system,
are there not, which almost induce us to finish up with these
outcomes that cause us unhappiness.
Professor Dunleavy: Yes. But one
thing that happens an awful lot in IT projects, which has been
a key source of contractors earning more money than was originally
outlined, is that ministers do change their minds. Policy decisions
are made and then remade and remade again. A few years back, the
norm in the IT industry was a six-for-one ratio, that you would
go in for a competition and you would compete for a certain amount
of money and you would then expect to get possibly up to five
or six times as much extra as a result of policy-induced changes
that were made subsequent to the contract having been agreed.
That is not a very effective way of running your relations with
a very large industry. If you compete for a £100 million
contract and you know that ministers are going to change their
minds and you are going to end up with a £600 million contract
at the end of five years because of policy changes, then you are
in a different situation from if ministers have to commit and
there is good pre-legislative scrutiny or pre-policy scrutiny
and there is a good updating project that keeps Parliament informed
on how things are going.
Q69 Chairman: We did have pre-legislative
scrutiny on the Identity Card Bill but your argument is that we
did not have it on the kind of information that you would need
to have to do it properly.
Professor Dunleavy: Not only that,
but as far as I can see there has been a considerable change in
the scheme and a move towards what is basically just a chip-and-pin
scheme and biometric validation at the beginning or every 10 years.
That is a different scheme from the one which the Home Office
conceived.
Q70 Chairman: But, as we are hearing,
it is the nature of these things that the schemes do change long
the way.
Professor Dunleavy: Absolutely.
Chairman: This has been fascinating.
It has been extremely helpful in making us think not just about
the particular issue of identity cards but about how Parliament
gets a handle on this whole area. The reality is we shall probably
reconvene in about 2020 to do a retrospective audit on what went
wrong, but you have given us a glimpse of how we might do it differently.
Thank you very much indeed for the session.
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