Information Technology (NHS)

Jackie Doyle-Price Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2011 Westminster Hall

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr Bacon) on securing this debate. I pay tribute to his tenacity in pursuing the subject. I know that he has a long-standing interest in it, and rightly so given the amount of money being spent on the project. I cannot compete with the way in which he articulated his case, or with his forensic and almost anorak-like knowledge of the subject, but I associate myself with the conclusions that he draws.

The project has always been over-ambitious. We would all agree that it has been poorly led and ineffectively delivered. As with many procurement projects in the public sector, the cost has escalated considerably. We have seen it happen too many times, and it is always entirely predictable. Indeed, senior leaders in the NHS were warned about that from the start.

The intention to ensure that health data should be made available at any time and anywhere was laudable, but delivering it has to be offset against the cost and whether it offers good value for money. Clinicians, practitioners and IT specialists throughout the NHS said that it would not work. Ultimately, clinicians will find their own way of doing things, and a top-down system will not work unless it is executed from the bottom up. As my hon. Friend explained, the decision to involve clinicians in the design of the system was not taken until late in the day and probably beyond the point when they could have had a useful input to ensure that the programme was fit for purpose.

Let me underline what my hon. Friend said. If we look at the initial programme of delivery and what we have achieved, we can see that we have not progressed far. Of the 4,500 sites that were contracted to receive the system, some two thirds have yet to receive anything. If we examine the progress made by Computer Sciences Corporation—my hon. Friend has outlined the history of its involvement with this case—we will see that it is contracted to deliver its systems to 97 hospitals, but so far it has delivered only four and none has been able to confirm that the system has been installed satisfactorily. Put simply, CSC has not delivered the goods against its obligations on the contract.

Once the contract is in place, everyone signs up even though it is quite clear that the company is not delivering what it promised. To be fair, in this case, the NHS started to renegotiate the contract in December 2009. None the less, more than 18 months later, no new contract or renegotiated contract is in place. CSC is still working on the same terms that it initially agreed to and we still do not have adequate delivery.

The NHS was quite clear when it said that it would not sign a new contract until it could see that Lorenzo was working. It is clear that we have to take some tough decisions because it simply is not working. As it is taking so long, we have to decide whether we are managing the project efficiently. Just how poorly does a contractor have to perform before a serious charge is made as to whether that contract should be maintained?

The NHS is an extremely powerful client. I know that suppliers have duties and obligations to their shareholders, but surely maintaining a good relationship with a customer that is as big as the national health service or even as the Government is important. We would expect suppliers to be slightly more conscious about what they are obliged to deliver.

[Duncan Hames (Chippenham) (LD)]

I listened very carefully to the initial speeches in this debate. The story that I heard was that there are suppliers and contractors who have fallen by the wayside and who have been shot and had their business fed to the others. That leaves us with the dilemma of what happens if we are left with only one supplier. Where does that leave the bargaining position of the NHS? My hon. Friend will find that there have been contractors who have found that they were not going to get paid because of their inability to deliver on their contracts.

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

My hon. Friend makes an extremely good point. To be fair, those suppliers have acted extremely honourably with regard to their obligations under the contract. When it became clear that they could not deliver the software under Lorenzo because it was not fit for purpose, they took the honourable action and negotiated their way out. Such behaviour shows a lot about those suppliers. It is increasingly worrying that CSC in particular is finding itself in a monopoly position because it has acquired and strengthened its shareholding in iSOFT. Who we negotiate with in the future is a long-term worry.

I associate myself with the conclusions of my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk about when we should take a decision on this project. Is it time for an emperor’s new clothes moment, or are we going to continue throwing good money after bad in a project that is clearly not going to deliver?

[John Pugh]

Is it not enormously hard for parliamentarians to form a judgment on that when we are not party to the actual contractual details? We do not know what cancellation involves for the firm or for the development of the project.

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

That is a good point. I was coming on to say to the Minister that he must examine this matter with considerable rigour before deciding on the right course. The message that we got from the Department was that such contracts are complex, although it was rather unclear just how complex this one was. I urge the Minister to achieve maximum value for money because ultimately this is a lot of money that could have been spent on patient care rather than on delivering this programme.

My final point relates to how these big procurement projects should be managed. We have examined a number of them on the Public Accounts Committee. Too often we find examples of poor project management. Poor leadership is assigned to these projects, which then go on to spend incredibly large amounts of taxpayers’ money.

When Sir David Nicholson appeared before the Committee, he was unable to answer a number of questions that my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk put to him even though he has been the senior responsible owner of the project since 2006. Until the machinery of government can put in place good project management disciplines to deliver effective leadership, we will continue to spend a lot of money and to fail to deliver on the intended project. I hope that this is a lesson not just for the Department of Health but for the Government as a whole and especially the Cabinet Office as it looks at how it delivers these projects and puts in place good disciplines, so that this unhappy experience is not repeated.