Hundreds of register offices across the country have been ordered to abandon a new online system for recording births, deaths and marriages in the latest IT fiasco to hit the government.

The Times has learnt that the huge £6 million IT project has met with “complete system failure” and online registration has been suspended in half the 3,000 offices.

Registrars have been told that a long-term solution will take “many months” and in the meantime those affected should revert to the old computer system, even though that means none of the hundreds of births, deaths and marriages that occur each day will be centrally recorded.

Registrars have complained bitterly about the problems caused by the new system, which at times has forced them them to ask grieving family members to give details of their loved ones twice because the data has been lost.

In many areas, multiple death certificates cannot be issued because of the problems. Multiple certificates are vital for transferring assets and pensions as companies do not accept photocopies as proof of death.

The hardware and software, developed by Siemens and US group ManTech respectively, was tested extensively before being introduced at register offices late last year.

However, when the last tranches of offices was added in March, the new system almost ground to a halt. Officers said that its performance was so slow that it was unusable.

When IT staff came to try and sort it out, they found it could not reliably save data.

Details of the fiasco are contained in a letter to today’s Times. The author, a registrar in the home counties, said that since it was known in advance exactly how many staff would be using the system every day, volume testing had clearly been inadequate.

Concerns raised by staff about the reliability of the new system were dismissed, the registrar said.

Details of the latest government IT fiasco come just days after a new row erupted over its new online application system for junior doctors.

A security lapse on the new recruitment website revealed highly personal details about applicants for several hours.

Doctors’ leaders had already condemned the new system for recruiting junior doctors as “shambolic” and Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, has ordered a review.

The breach in security on the doctors’ site has led to new fears that fraudsters will find it easy to obtain data on births and deaths to forge identities from the online service.

Online registration was introduced for recording civil partnerships in 2005. Births and deaths were added last year. Marriages are due to be added later this year, and a government spokesman said it was still the intention to go ahead in the offices still using the new system.

A spokesman for the Office for National Statistics, which oversees the General Register Office, said testing had been thorough. “There was a lengthy period performance testing to see if the new system could cope with the load and we ran two different pilot programmes,” he said.

“Those were successfully completed, and in March we began the phased roll-out to all areas. To begin with, it seemed to go pretty well, but when the last tranche was added on it produced problems of slow performance. We decided to withdraw the system in some areas, so half have gone back to using the old electronic system. There will be no loss of data, registration will go ahead as normal and we are going full steam ahead in trying to sort out the problem.”

However, registrars say there are no arrangements or funding in place for all the hundreds of hours of overtime that will be required to enter all the data, currently being held in handwritten registers and the old computer system, on to the online system once it has been fixed.

Glitch in the machine

Passport agency

Computer problems struck in the summer of 1998 forcing thousands to cancel their holidays and costing taxpayers £12 million to fix

Child Support Agency

An IT phone system was launched in April 2003, two years late and £56 million pounds over budget. The 1.2 million existing cases could not be transferred on to the new system because it failed to work

Benefits Reprocessing Payments Programme

Set up in December 2003 to streamline payment of benefits and save £60 million by picking up new and repeat claim data by telephone and the internet. Shelved last year

NHS medical records and appointments booking system

The £6 billion project has been dogged by glitches and delays

Criminal Records Bureau

It emerged last year that “loopholes” meant hundreds of thousands of teachers were going unchecked. Teachers convicted of sexual offences were cleared to work in school

Junior doctor’s online recruitment

System under review after best qualified junior doctors failed to get interviews under the new scheme. Government then forced to apologised after a security lapse enabled public to see confidential information on thousands of applicants

Source: Times database

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