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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

moved Amendment No. 29: 29: Clause 2, page 1, line 17, at end insert— ““( ) to promote an open competition to replace the Child Support Agency Information Technology System when the current contract ends”” The noble Lord said: We now turn to technology and Amendments Nos. 29 and 204. Amendment No. 29 requires an open competition to replace the Child Support Agency information system when the current contract ends. I wonder whether I could be allowed to start with a cheap shot at the Minister because his computer statistics do not add up. The noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, and I did not meet over breakfast, but no doubt, like me, he has looked at the quarterly statistics from the computer. Table 19.5 is wrong. How do I know that? Because the summary of the statistics shows that in December 2007 maintenance collected or arranged for the year ending 31 March was higher than the next year’s target by quite a margin—£5 million. That cannot be right because it is hard for a target to be reached, never mind for the next year’s target to be reached. Table 19.5 should read £741.7 million not £975 million, but maybe someone will check that. What I think has happened is that the period over which that maintenance has been collected has been misallocated not as April to December but as December 06 to December 07. Maybe someone will put me out of my misery about that. One would think that after spending that amount of money on a computer it would be able to add columns up right. No doubt someone will tell me whether that is right. These two amendments are important. We have to look at the history and at the information technology relationship with EDS. On Tuesday, I referred to the National Audit Office report, which is an important precursor for understanding what has gone on in the past. I had it mind to go in some detail into how we came to be here, but I shall not as that would tax colleagues’ patience. Suffice it to say that in August 2000, the information technology services agency, which retained all the corporate knowledge within the department, was outsourced to EDS. EDS then got the contract, and the contract has never worked. It was fundamentally reworked in 2005, and it still has not been fully developed. It has two years to run and, as far as I am concerned, the development work is still ongoing. I think there are a number of important questions around it. A lot of them were raised in the National Audit Office report. Apart from anything else, we spent £91 million on external advice— consultants—and we have a negative net present cost outcome. The net present cost forecast for this new reformed computer when it was put in place in 2003 was a net asset of £71 million. The Child Support Agency computer system may not be running after 1 April because the contract is due to run out in April 2008. If that is the case, I do not know who is going to be running the old cases after that date, unless there has been a roll-on of the contract. There are still 600 manual worker rounds. The computer is not producing management information that is fit for purpose. It is a contract with the department and I do not know how that will be transferred cleanly to the commission—I assume that the commission will be responsible for all the contracts that deal with technology in future—and how it will manage to disentangle the relationship that is already done through the Accord/EDS system of contracts without making it difficult for what is left of the department. I do not understand. I would like to be told a little more about that. Obviously, there is a key decision to be made—and it is looming—by the commission when it is put into place. We have the prospect of the operational improvement plan being completed by March 2009. Only then will the National Audit Office be able to look at how effective the operational improvement plan has been in terms of its objectives. There will probably be a Public Accounts Committee report in 2010; there will probably be an election in 2010; and it will probably be around 2010 or 2011 before we really see how effective the operational improvement plan has been. By which time the new commission will have to decide what it will do next. The new commission has two years to make a decision about what it does next in terms of sustaining the EDS contract. The EDS contract is a contract for services; it is worth £1 million per week. We do not have a big shiny Apache server with terabytes of memory in the Minister’s office; we have a service agreement. We can use the services of the contract. If the contract stopped for some reason on Monday, there would be nothing left that would be tangible by way of systems, software or anything else. It is a service only contract. It is a very big ask to leave. The Minister regularly suggests to the committee that we should leave all this to the commission. I do not believe that we can. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, used her best endeavours on the CS2 reform— and she tried hard. There are genuinely difficult questions about commercial confidentiality, which Ministers are protected from. I understand why that is important. Ministers for their own safety often cannot be told what is going on in case they go around to the pub and speak to somebody who is a competitor. Then you have a class action against you in the courts, and all that stuff. It is not easy. Ministers find it difficult to stay on top of what is happening in current circumstances. We went through the CS2 reform. The whole policy platform that was put together in 2003 suffered and has never really recovered from the fact that the computer is not fit for purpose. The two suggestions I make here are based on lessons—and I promise I can speak without hesitation and deviation and not even with repetition about all this for a much longer time—that we really need to learn in terms of what went wrong in 2003, and to make sure that we do not make the same mistakes again. The Commons Select Committee, which I had the privilege to chair, produced a report on this in 2003. One of its recommendations was that there should be a full-blown review of CS2 at the earliest possible time, as soon as it had settled down and become stable. We are not there yet, so we cannot do that. As I say, it will probably be 2009 or 2010 before we get the results of that. It would only then be safe for Parliament to make a decision about which route to take. We do not have that time. The commission that we are creating in the Bill does not have that time. Therefore, we are faced with what Parliament is asking the commission to do. These two amendments in very simple terms say that it is not safe in 2010 merely to continue the contract without going back to the marketplace with an open tender for contracts, and all the rest of that. It is complicated. It may take time and cost money as you may have to encourage alternative contractors to take part in the competition because it may not be what they want because it is so troubled. I do not see how else we can get any satisfaction in Parliament. We were kept in the dark last time around. The only way I can think of getting any kind of influence over what is happening with the decision the commission will have to take—and take very soon—is that it should engage in an open process of tendering before it makes that decision. Amendment No. 204 simply seeks to get what comfort we can. The full OGC gateway reviews are now part of the established way of doing these things, partly as a result of the disastrous consequences of the EDS experience earlier with the IT for the CSA. There is now quite a lot of corporate knowledge within the Office of Government Commerce. It has got, if not full-blown gateways, health checks and access to Gartner which can do reviews and give assurance on some of the things and try to get a handle on what the risks really are before we actually get the commission to take the big decision that it will have to take about what platform it uses for technology in the future. My personal suspicion is that it has no choice. I would be very surprised if it was not just tied, hook, line and sinker, into this contract. The people who entered into this contract in the department deserve to go to gaol. It is a proprietary contract, which ties people to the suppliers with no room for manoeuvre. We may have to go with another version of an EDS contract. I hope that once it has finished being developed, it will be fully compliant and all the other bugs and defects will have been rung out of it. However, I say seriously to the Committee that, if Parliament does not have a method of getting assurance that we will not make the same mistake as in 2003, there must be something in the Bill. Otherwise, it will be left to whatever operational decisions force it to take decisions that have to be made very quickly. Parliament should be part of that process and these two amendments are designed to achieve that end. I beg to move.