IT Systems (Army Recruitment)

David Nuttall Excerpts

Tuesday 14th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

I have heard Capita referred to as a lot of things, but not normally as “smaller and leaner”. The hon. Gentleman is referring to precisely the tension that I mentioned a few moments ago—between the desire to allow smaller players to come in, provide IT solutions to the Government and utilise existing IT solutions, and the desire to ensure that the integration risk lies with the supplier. My view is that the Government are poor at managing integration risk, and I suggest that a solution that may look superficially good value, but which transfers integration risk to Departments, is probably to be viewed with some suspicion.

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

The Secretary of State explained that the interim solution will lead to an improvement in recruitment numbers over the next few weeks, and that we should start to see that improvement come through. Will he therefore explain why the interim solution is not capable of being turned into a much cheaper long-term solution?

[Mr Hammond]

There are a number of elements to that. I said that potential recruits seeking to access the system will notice an improvement in the quality of the IT platform, principally because the front end—the web-based portal through which they will access the system—will be replaced at the end of January by a system that is now running but still being trialled before it goes live. The system will work, but that is by applying additional manual resource, which, as I have already told the House, is costing us £1 million a month. The purpose of the partnering contract is to take about 1,000 personnel who were involved in the administration of recruiting out of that role, and save about £300 million a year. In the long term we still need to harvest that saving, and it will be necessary to have a proper ICT solution to do that.