Taxpayers could indeed be forgiven for thinking that Whitehall has a team of serial incompetents whose special interest is mismanaging the implementation of any new legislation that relies on costly, unproven technology. At the Criminal Records Bureau, for example, the planning for new technology was so inadequate that it was assumed most people would apply over the phone for clearance to work with children and old people.

In fact 80 per cent of applications for background checks were on paper, but the computer screens had not been designed for the keying in of paper forms. One result was a backlog of applications so great that at one point some applicants were employed to work with vulnerable people before it was known whether they had a criminal history, and had to be closely supervised.

So why do projects fail regularly to meet expectations? Each project runs into trouble for complex and sometimes unique reasons, but when projects are looked at over decades, it is possible to see some common factors emerging, particularly a lack of accountability and transparency.

Last year a senior civil servant, a chief communications officer, put his finger on one of the main causes of ITrelated failures in government: nobody tells it like it is.

This may be at the heart of the difficulties faced by the Government when it tries to introduce hugely ambitious schemes such as the NHS’s National Programme for IT and the technology that supports ID cards: government is set up to publicise its successes and to suppress its failures.

The National Audit Office, the public spending watchdog, publishes reports on some ITrelated projects and civil servants are questioned later on the NAO’s report by the Public Accounts Committee. Invariably the civil servants tell MPs that the lessons have been learnt.

But those who give the assurances move on and are replaced by others who embark on projects that repeat the mistakes of the past and the cycle of failure begins anew.

It is difficult to break this cycle unless the Government and Whitehall allow better scrutiny of computer projects by Parliament and the IT industry in general. Then, flawed schemes are more likely to be seen for what they are and be substantially revised or cancelled before they have become disasters that waste tens of millions of pounds.

Tony Collins is executive editor of Computer Weekly

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