Derek Twigg
Main Page: Derek Twigg (Labour - Widnes and Halewood)Department Debates - View all Derek Twigg's debates with the Ministry of Defence
IT Systems (Army Recruitment)
Derek Twigg Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Hammond
No, I did not. It is Atlas that has failed to deliver an IT platform that Capita can utilise effectively.
To answer the question of the hon. Member for Colchester (Sir Bob Russell), just under 1,000 personnel are involved. Some of them have been surged into front-end recruiting and are acting as military recruiters on the ground, and others are providing manual support for administrative tasks that should be, and ultimately will be, carried out by the IT platform.
Derek Twigg (Halton) (Lab)
Not long after the Secretary of State visited Upavon, it was visited by a number of members of the Defence Committee, including me. It was clear that there had been problems for quite some time. The Capita representatives said that there was no reality in what they were being asked to deliver. When did he and his Ministers first become aware that there was a serious problem with the project?
Mr Hammond
As I said earlier, in early summer last year, it became clear that there were problems in integrating the Capita processes with the Atlas IT platform. It was when I visited Upavon in October that I formed the conclusion that there was no way of resolving the Atlas problem, and that we had to revert to the Capita option and place the integration challenge back with Capita to deliver a platform and a process.