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222 The LSE Identity Project <strong>Report</strong>: June 2005The UK Government has suffered a track record of cancellation of IT projects atintermediate stages and of projects that are acknowledged as wholly or partly nonworkingor non-productive. 535 In comparison with other countries, a large number ofprojects over the last decade have been scrapped, with significant losses of completeinvestments or with partial write-offs of investment. Many of these failures can beattributed to an ongoing insistence on highly centralized projects that give rise toincreased uncertainty. Even as the Government moved on from the mistakes, failures,and incomplete projects of the 1990s, the uncertainty and inadequacy has continued intothe e-government era. Research has argued that current projects seem “misplaced andoverambitious”, and that “central government should remedy the fundamentalchallenges of departmental IT project management before wide-ranging ‘joined up’ e-government schemes can be attempted.” 536This is due in part to the political environment in the UK.“An absence of effective parliamentary scrutiny of legislation and adeficit of checks-and-balances internally under some conditions bothcontribute to a ‘fastest law in the West’ policy style in the UK. Forinstance, new tax, welfare and regulatory laws are regularly adoptedby ministers and approved by Parliament for which IT systems havenot yet been planned, tested or implemented, but which instead haveto be constructed post-legislation from scratch, often within verydemanding timescales.” 537After the cost and time over-runs of years and the billions of pounds expended on avariety of systems, some e-government experts are sceptical.The Government insists on achieving extremely broad ‘purposes’ for its identity cardprogramme, leading to an unnecessarily complex system design based on vagueprinciples. This point was made by the UK Computing Research Committee in itsmemorandum submitted to the Home Affairs Committee. The CRC warned theGovernment that if it continued to proceed with a plan based on ambiguousrequirements and specifications without matching them to real-world requirements“it is inevitable that the technical requirements will change, leading todelays, cost escalation, and loss of control over project risks. We areadvised that that a current study of problems of large scale projects bythe Royal Academy of Engineering will report that poor projectdefinition is one of the major contributors to project failure.” 538Similarly, the British Computer Society notified the HAC that their“primary concern is that there does not seem to be any firm and fixedstatement of what the system is meant to achieve, what success or535 Ibid., p.21.536 ‘The Coordination of e-Government in Historical Context’, Joe Organ, Public Policy and Administration Journal,18-2, Summer 2003.537 ‘Government IT Performance and the Power of the IT Industry: A Cross-National Analysis’, p.22.538 ‘Memorandum submitted by the UK Computing Research Committee’, submitted to the Select Committee onHome Affairs, available at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmhaff/130/130we52.htm.
The LSE Identity Project <strong>Report</strong>: June 2005 223failure criteria are imposed and which scope limitations have beenimposed. Without such fixed objectives, the risk of failure issignificantly increased. Given the already high risk attached toextremely large systems this would be a major concern.” 539Rather, QinetiQ argued that the scheme should not be constructed around law and order,identity fraud and illegal migration and working. “It should instead be centred on thebenefits to a digital society of the use of biometric authentication of registeredidentity.” 540In comparison with other similar countries, the UK contract prices for government ITare relatively high. According to one study,“UK civil servants take great pride in insisting that competed contractslet under long terms achieve market-comparable or better prices, andpoint to scrutiny by the UK’s strong supreme audit institution (theNational Audit Office) to support their contention. And initialcontracts let by departments and major agencies to contractors haveoften been competitively priced. However, the UK also becameunique amongst the countries we analysed in the extent to whichgovernment departments effectively acknowledged that when policychanges or other new developments made alterations of existing ITsystems essential then only the incumbent IT suppliers couldconstitute a plausible firm to deliver these changes. Large firmsdealing with government grew expert in estimating the likely scale ofpolicy-induced changes, often effectively driving a coach and horsesthrough the carefully specified initial contracts. It became expectedpractice to pitch prices for initially competed tranches of workrelatively low in the expectation that later revisions and extensionswould create negotiated contracts of between 4 and 6 times the initialcompeted contract price. Assessing negotiated contracts for pricecompetitiveness is sometimes attempted, by means of pricingstandardly-designated ‘function points’ in systems, suggesting thatinitial prices are rarely matched later on.” 541The report concludes that this leads to a situation where the UK “government-ITindustry relations have become dangerously unbalanced.” 542These aspects are reflected in controversy over the potential cost and complexity of theNHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT) the budget projection of which appears tohave escalated from an initial procurement figure of £6 billion. 543 There is a NationalAudit Office report on the scheme due in the summer of 2005 which will examine the539 ‘Supplementary memorandum submitted by the British Computer Society (BCS)’, submitted to the SelectCommittee on Home Affairs, May 2004, available athttp://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmhaff/130/130we52.htm.540 ‘Memorandum submitted by QinetiQ’, submitted to the Select Committee on Home Affairs, January 2004,available at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmhaff/130/130we52.htm.541 Ibid. p.28-29.542 Ibid. p.36.543 IT pain in the NHS tied to technology, Seamus Ward, Accountancy Age, November 17, 2004,http://www.accountancyage.com/features/1138663.
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