|
CSA 'costs more than it recovers'
The Child Support Agency's enforcement unit is costing more to run than it recovers from parents, it has emerged. The unit costs an estimated £12m a year to run, but managed to recover only £8m from absent parents last year. The Department for Work and Pensions said the £8m figure was only "the tip of the iceberg". It represented what was collected through initial contact with parents and did not include what they would pay in future, a spokeswoman said. The figures emerged after a parliamentary question from shadow work and pensions secretary Paul Goodman. Mr Goodman said the CSA was "in a mess" and demanded an urgent statement on its future from ministers. Bureaucratic costs The CSA recovers maintenance from absent parents for the upkeep of their children. It can retrieve unpaid child maintenance from absent parents in a number of ways - by taking court action against debtors, using bailiffs, and on occasion confiscating driving licences. But it has come under repeated fire since it was set up in 1993, with Tony Blair admitting recently it was "not suited to the job". Three weeks ago, the prime minister told MPs it was "extremely difficult" to make the CSA - an investigating, adjudicating and enforcement agency all in one - cost-effective. He was responding to claims that £1 was spent by the agency on bureaucracy for every £1.85 that got through to children. Suggestions the government was planning to scrap the agency were played down by Downing Street. BBC political correspondent Norman Smith says officials believe improving the work of the enforcement unit is central to the agency's future. A review of the agency is being carried out by its chief executive Stephen Geraghty and is due to report at the end of this year or early in 2006. CSA a 'shambles', minister claims
The Child Support Agency (CSA) has been branded a "complete shambles" by Work and Pensions Secretary David Blunkett. Mr Blunkett told GMTV that a "root-and-branch" reform of the child support system would be announced before the end of the year. Since it started in 1993, the CSA has been dogged by controversy. In particular it has suffered computer failures causing severe payment delays. In January, a study by MPs said the CSA may have to be shut down and replaced. Mr Blunkett told GMTV on Monday: "None of us can be in any doubt that the CSA, over many years, has not delivered. "It has been a complete shambles and I am absolutely determined that we are going to do something about it." Mr Blunkett added that that one of his most urgent tasks was to bolster morale among the CSA's 10,000 staff. Mediation At the same time, Mr Blunkett announced plans for a new mediation process to try to agree payments by absent parents before they become involved with the agency. "I want to set up a gateway before people get into the CSA. We want to actually look at how we can conciliate or mediate," Mr Blunkett said. However, parents who sought to evade their responsibilities for their children were warned that "really tough" measures would be brought against them to ensure they supported their child.
Massive IT Cock Up at HMRCThe UK's Social Security system is no stranger to IT disasters. Recent 'highlights' include: the long term closure (almost two years to date!) of the online tax credits payment system after widespread fraudulent claims were detected; the scrapping of the Benefits Processing Repayment Programme before launch but after £141 million of expenditure; the admission that the Child Support Agency could not function properly because of inadequate IT systems; which itself... followed earlier admissions that many Child Support applications were simply not being processed because of inadequacies in new systems. We should not forget earlier legendary disasters including the Operational Strategy of the 1980s/early 1990s that was billed as the biggest IT project in the whole of Europe but failed to meet the majority of its objectives despite coming in around three times over budget. But, today's news that the personal details of all families in the UK claiming Child Benefit (theoretically all with a child under 16) have gone missing after being placed on two CDs and then biked by a courier, in an unregistered delivery, has to be up there with the best of them. The discs, destined for the National Audit Office, apparently carried the full records of all claimants, meaning whoever finds these discs potentially has access to the name, address, date of birth, National Insurance number and bank details of up to 25 million people. The data is, we are told, password protected, but astonishingly is not encrypted so getting into the records shouldn't be too difficult. Such basic inadequacies in protecting data really do beggar belief and, while the Chair of HM Revenues & Custom has resigned over the matter, deeper questions surely need to be asked here. I watched some of the debate that took place in the House of Commons after the Chancellor announced the full details of the incident. The Lib Dem's Vince Cable rightly asked why on earth data was being transported in this manner and pointed the finger at the prehistoric computer systems that underpin the whole social security sector. The Conservatives are using the event to attack the ID card proposals and they may well be right in suggesting this will shatter public confidence in the government's ability to run such a national ID system in a way that does not threaten privacy, especially if the HMRC data does fall into criminal hands and this breaks into the media. But, what I found most amazing of all was the intervention of Edward Leigh, the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, who said he had spoken to the Comptroller General and been told that the NAO had specifically requested that they only be sent the National Insurance numbers of Child Benefit recipients; all other personal details should have been stripped out of the data they were sent. Leigh had also established that after the NAO had informed HRMC that the data had not arrived they sent two more copies of the discs (presumably by the same method!?!?). In other words, it seems HMRC have been biking insecurely protected personal data of millions of people around the country for no good reason other than they could not be arsed to reformat it, delete the unneeded items or to fill in the extra paper work needed for a registered delivery. As Leigh says, the HMRC appear to have been 'criminally irresponsible' here. There is some good news though. Given the track record of computing projects in the sector, chances are the discs weren't burned properly and when they are found they will probably have no data on them at all.
Staff at the Child Support Agency are using pocket calculators to work out what people owe, thanks to the comprehensive failure of its IT system from EDS. Less than half the 320,000 applications received since March 2003, when the system was launched, has been processed. The Work and Pensions sub-committee took evidence last week from Andrew Smith, work and pensions secretary. He admitted that the cost of processing applications was 20 per cent higher using the new IT system and told MPs the original contract could have been better drafted. Smith also said the department was looking to reduce its reliance on one provider - EDS provides 85 per cent of the Department of Work and Pensions' systems. In a written answer, he said: "Technical issues continue to preclude reliable figures on compliance and throughput for the latest quarter. The Department continues to retain around 15–20 per cent of each monthly payment due to EDS, the service provider, due to the continuing problems with the computer and telephony systems. A special exercise is being undertaken to test accuracy to the year-end." Liberal Democrats say the failure means 95,000 single parents are missing out on payments totalling £45m a year. Professor Steve Webb, LibDem shadow work and pensions spokesman, said: "It is scandalous that the Government continues to fritter away huge sums of money trying to put the CSA's house in order. Under Labour the CSA has gone from bad to worse. We now have two different systems that don't work properly and thousands of lone parents missing out. Lone parents have been let down and left out of pocket. "It's high time the CSA was scrapped and the Inland Revenue was allowed to do the sums and make sure people pay up on time." The £400m computer system was supposed to go live in October 2001 but was finally switched on in March 2003.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has been told it should be more open about its development and use of IT systems if it wants to avoid another costly cock-up like the CSA. The recommendation was made today in the House of Commons Select Committee on Work and Pensions' report on plans to replace the problematic Child Support Agency (CSA) with the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission (C-MEC). The committee report, Child Support Reform, said: "Our predecessor committee wrote in depth about these problems and recommended that the DWP should be significantly more open about its IT projects. In this light we recommend that the government publish detailed explanation of its plans for C-MEC's IT system in an attempt to win public confidence before the work begins. The report made no assessment of how any attempt at transparency might be compromised by the "commercial confidence" obligations government departments make with their IT suppliers. EDS, the DWP's IT supplier, has shown before how corporate priorities can prevent the disclosure of public information. The DWP spent £539m on business and IT reforms between June 2000 and 2006, but was still sent to the knackers yard last summer after it was discovered that for every £1 it collected in child maintenance from absent parents, 70 pence was spent on administration. The committee report said: "We have seen no evidence that, with CSA's record of serial IT failures, this third attempt to create a new system of child maintenance arrangements with the necessary IT support will be any more successful than the first two," it said. "The National Audit Office report on IT projects, Delivering successful IT-enabled business change, highlights the complexities of the technical issues around joining new and old systems and we hope that the department has learnt from its past mistakes with the first two CSA IT systems." EDS, which has been criticised for its part in the CSA debacle, was thought likely to be retained to develop CSA v3.0 because it still had about another four years left of its 10-year DWP contract. A spokeswoman for the firm said, however, that it might not necessarily be commissioned to develop a computer system for C-MEC. The report noted a comment made to the committee in February by secretary of state for work and pensions John Hutton in support of EDS: "We have learned a lot from previous exercises and I think in EDS we have a partner which has worked very hard with us to try to fix this system." "There is a very considerable amount of painfully learnt experience that now must be applied and will be applied to the resolution of these outstanding problems both between now and when the new scheme starts and when C-MEC starts itself," he added. The report also noted how the CSA's problems had stemmed from its attempt to shoehorn complex lives into a series of formulaic rules controlled by computer. Parents would be encouraged to make their own arrangements, though the committee had been told that this might make it easy for shirkers to avoid their responsibilities.
The government has admitted it will not finish inputting all child-maintenance-claim cases onto the new Child Support Agency (CSA) computer system until 2013 - a decade after it was built.The agency's CS2 computer system, which was built by EDS, has been plagued with technical problems since it was launched in 2003, with latest figures estimating it will have cost £1.1bn to implement. Now - after system faults led the government to suspend bulk updates - work and pensions minister James Plaskitt said mass updates to the CS2 system will not resume until 2010 and it is likely to take three years to add every case. For years, bugs in CS2 have prevented the transfer of cases from the old system and thousands of cases required manual intervention to unlock them after becoming "stuck". Delays in processing claims meant that in 2006 there was still £3.5bn of outstanding maintenance payments to be collected, with only one in three parents receiving any payment. silicon.com Public Sector The CSA was branded one of the "worst public administration scandals in modern times" by MPs in 2006 and was axed following a review by Sir David Henshaw. Henshaw's report said a new organisation should be established to start from scratch and not be contaminated with system difficulties from the past. The Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill sets out proposals for a new system of child maintenance to be in place by 2010. In his written answer to Parliament, Plaskitt said: "By the end of 2008, parents will have an option to agree arrangements between themselves and move into voluntary maintenance arrangements, no one will be compelled to stay in either scheme." He added: "For those who choose to remain with the commission and the new system of child maintenance we expect the case transfer process to start in 2010 and take around three years. "During this period, parents will continue to have the opportunity to move to their own arrangements or, for those parents who are satisfied with their existing arrangements to continue with them, supported by a new simple cash transfer service based on the success of the current maintenance direct option." The Department for Work and Pensions failed to respond to repeated requests for comment.
The troubled history of the CSA After years of controversy and complaints ever since it was established in 1993, the Child Support Agency is to be axed. The brainchild of Conservative former social security secretary Tony Newton, the agency was to take on the responsibility for assessment, review, collection and enforcement of child maintenance payments.
It was initially seen by MPs on all sides as a good thing - a long-overdue replacement for the widely hated court-based system, which was seen as arbitrary and unfair and had no power to trace absent parents. The idea of forcing absent parents, generally thought to be fathers, to take financial responsibility for their children had powerful appeal for many politicians. The social security bill would also be slashed, the government argued, with benefits reduced pound for pound for every payment recovered. But even before the new agency was up and running, cries that vulnerable, single mothers would be forced to name their children's fathers - and babies be made to undergo DNA tests - echoed round the Commons chamber.
Protesters took to the streets, led by fathers' and civil rights groups. Before long "CSA snooping" was spoken of with the same distaste as the poll tax and portrayed as a modern day equivalent of Big Brother. Conservative MP David Tredinnick led demands for change saying: "If George Orwell were alive today and looking for a sequel to 1984, I suspect he would have based it on the CSA." But the warnings were not heeded and within a year of it being set up in 1993, MPs' pigeonholes were bulging with letters of complaint about the new agency. Among the 5,000 letters passed on by MPs were claims the wrong people were pursued for cash, that money was not getting through to lone parents and that unreasonably high bills were slapped on absent fathers - some of whom later killed themselves. Suicides Father-of-two Graham Clay of Mapperley, Nottinghamshire, on take-home pay of £600, had his payments increased to £297 a month - despite protests about his financial circumstances. He later hanged himself. A bundle of papers from the CSA was found in a rucksack nearby. On publication of its first annual report in July 1994, the then head of the agency Ros Hepplewhite was forced to deliver an apology for getting things wrong. "Overall our standards of service did not reach acceptable levels and we did not achieve some of our key targets. "We apologise to our clients for the difficulties they have experienced because of our shortcomings," she said. The CSA revealed it had fallen £112m short of its £530m collection target, and that it was boosting staff numbers. Two months later Ms Hepplewhite quit. Desperate dads An official report into the CSA some months later found it had made errors in 86% of cases and then social security minister Alistair Burt said work to improve things was going on behind the scenes. But the over-charging, the clerical errors and the desperate dads continued. Soon after Labour came to power in 1997, the then social security secretary Harriet Harman announced plans to simplify CSA payments. Fathers would pay less, but more of them would pay, so overall more money would be raised, she argued. At this time - of the 380,000 people who had been ordered to pay something to their families by the CSA - just three-quarters had actually made the payments. A new £456m computer system was meant to sort many of the problems out. 'Appalling service' But not long after the system was installed in March 2003, it became apparent that claims were being processed so slowly that a backlog was building up. An all-party committee of MPs found a backlog of 30,000 cases was building up each month - with an estimated 170,000 waiting to be processed. And CSA clients were receiving "an appalling level of service" because of the new telephone system. A new simpler system of calculating maintenance payments was introduced in March 2003 for new cases - but this could not be extended to the older cases because of problems with the computer system. Unhappy Ministers warned the CSA would be replaced unless it improved its act - but the problems continued. An April 2005 government report found staff morale at rock bottom with the "vast majority" of administrative staff saying they wanted to leave. Department of Work and Pensions research suggested most CSA staff were "overwhelmingly negative" about the new computer system and unhappy with the level of training they had received. Staff told researchers that difficult cases were sometimes deleted and others stockpiled and never dealt with. Some staff knowingly entered incorrect details into the system to get it to move cases on, while others devised ways of avoiding talking to clients over the phone. Worsening situation In November 2005, Tony Blair said the CSA was not properly suited to its task, adding that fundamental questions about its future had to be answered. And there was further woe when it was revealed the agency was spending £12m a year chasing unpaid debts, but had only recovered £8m from parents.
Opposition parties stepped up their calls for the CSA to be radically reformed or scrapped altogether, as payment arrears ballooned to £3.3bn and the case backlog reached 300,000. A National Audit Office report published in June 2006 said the £540m reforms had actually made some aspects of the CSA worse than before. By 2010 the total cost of trying to turn around the CSA will have topped £1.1bn, it said. Inaccurate payments One in four of all new applications received since March 2003 are still waiting to be cleared and there was a one-in-five chance that payments were inaccurate. A third of non-resident parents were paying nothing at all despite their maintenance being assessed. The NAO also pointed out problems with the design, delivery and operation of the new IT system. But the report says there are recent signs of improvement and the government's plan for improving the agency was a significant step forward. However, the government delivered its final blow in July 2006 after Liverpool City Council boss Sir David Henshaw published his review of the entire child support system.
Government glosses over child support IT costsWhat we don't see won't hurt us THE GOVERNMENT Department for Work and Pensions has overlooked the true cost of the ongoing farce at the Child Support Agency, the unit that presided over an IT disaster so dire that the whole kaboodle is being sent to the knackers yard. The Department revealed some of the ongoing cost of the CSA, which it promised in 2006 to scrap, in answer to a parliamentary question put by the Liberal Democrat shadow chancellor, Vince Cable this week. But it only told a little bit of the story. According to the DWP numbers the CSA Operational Improvement Plan was going to come in only £3million over budget, at £110million. The CSA numbers only included the cost of the IT, leaving out the organisational costs. Yet the cost of every other DWP IT project listed in the department's breakdown (and it listed them all) included related organisational costs. CSA v2.0, which was started in 2000 after the CSA v1.0 went up the swanny, had cost a total of £539 million before it was condemned in 2006. Just £152 million of those costs were related to IT alone. CSA v2.0 was such a disaster that the agency had found 600 manual workarounds. For every £1 an absent father gave the CSA in child maintenance charges, 70 pence was spent on the bodged administration. And even then there was a backlog of 330,000 children. The Operational Improvement Plan was meant to keep things tickety boo while CSA v3.0 was designed. V3.0, called the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission, will cost £866mliion (under-budget by £4m), the department estimated. It admitted in this instance that IT costs would amount to 20 per cent of the total. It is scheduled for completion in 2015. The total ongoing cost of the CSA and a reliable insight into whether and how the patch-up being performed by EDS, the contractor, would therefore be valuable. It might be that this number is hard to come by. It was originally generated for a value-for money report written by the National Audit Office and might not be easily repeated. Yet the department did come up with organisational numbers for all its other projects. The top-level specifications for the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission are still before parliament in the form of the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill, which the department said it hoped would get passed before the summer recess. It was unable to comment any further on the Libdem's revelations. Without the CSA's ongoing IT-related organisational costs, the figures showed that DWP it projects were running a total of 21 years late and £315 million over budget. Cable said in a statement that it was an "utter shambles" and called for another review of the reasons why "ministers seem completely incapable of delivering workable IT systems on time and on budget". And he took the opportunity to have a pop at the IT project: “Gordon Brown is living in a dream world if he thinks larger IT projects like ID cards are going to be any different.” He might have a point there. Sensitive projects like the CSA and ID cards, in which the government uses a computer system not to run an administration, but to administer vast numbers of people, might be the most troublesome as well as the most secretive. Last March, the Parliament's Committee for Work and Pensions asked the CSA to be more open about its IT plans so it could avoid costly cock-ups in the future. Yet the government continued to resist calls for the publication of the ID scheme's gateway reviews, which are meant to say how well a system is being designed and implemented. The now doomed CSA v2.0 was implemented in complete disregard of gateway reviews and a ridiculous number of other reviews that warned about its fate, including 40 internal reviews; as well as well as £91 million on external advice - none of which were opened to public scrutiny. |
