Summer Adjournment

Richard Graham Excerpts

Tuesday 19th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

I am delighted to participate in today’s debate. I want to talk about the recent National Audit Office report on fire control centres and the lessons learned. The FiReControl project was introduced to replace 46 local control rooms around the country with a network of nine purpose-built regional control centres using a national computer system. In many ways, on the face of it, Members might have thought that that was a good idea, but the NAO’s report describes the plan as “flawed from the outset”, with “unrealistic estimates of costs”, an under-appreciation of the complexity of IT involved, hurriedly implemented and “poorly managed”, and concluded that at least £469 million will have been wasted.

As many Members will know, the project was doomed to failure but was sadly continued with for a very long time. It is of particular sadness to the people of Gloucester, my constituency, that the tri-service centre—a centre combining police, fire and rescue and ambulance services, which was a model of its kind when it was created only a few years ago and which performed strikingly well during the 2007 floods—was to be replaced by a regionalised fire control centre at Taunton. Despite that sadness and the irony of the then Minister with responsibility for fire services having been my predecessor, I want to discuss the lessons that can be learned from that botched project. There are four particular aspects that I would like the Minister to consider.

The first lesson concerns the plan for regionalisation. Over the past 13 years, we have seen a series of attempts to regionalise our country. That was particularly the case in my constituency with the attempt to regionalise the Gloucestershire constabulary and then the fire control centres. I hope this Government will never again try to regionalise services that are best delivered locally through the long-established shires, cities and districts of our nation.

The second lesson concerns large IT projects, a lesson that has surely been learned time and again by Governments, at least over the past quarter of a century. When IT projects are large and complex, they tend to be beyond the hopes and expectations of Ministers, Departments and the companies implementing them. I hope that our Government will look closely at the issue as we take forward important new projects, such as the single universal benefit.

The third lesson that the Government will want to study concerns project management, which bedevilled the previous Government in relation to Building Schools for the Future, the rising costs of architects’ and consultants’ fees, and the unnecessarily complex procurement mechanisms and processes. In the case of the regional fire control centres, project management was a skill sadly lacking at the top of Government. Again, as this Government look at reducing costs, taking out waste and making government more efficient, I hope we will focus on the most effective project management skills available.

The final lesson in this unhappy saga comes from the role of the Select Committees. It is still not clear to me whether the Communities and Local Government Committee of that time, over the 10 years of the project, firmly identified to Government the error of their ways by pointing out the likely problems at the beginning, where—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order.