All the talk this morning is of ‘yet another public sector IT disaster’ as the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) publishes its report into the aborted FiReControl project. To paraphrase the report, the Department for Communities and Local Government’s ‘ambitious vision’ of abolishing 46 local fire and rescue control rooms around the country and replacing them with nine regional control centres ended in ‘complete failure’ when the contract was cancelled in December last year. According to the PAC report, a minimum of £469m was wasted. Eight of the completed regional control centres remain empty as ‘costly white elephants’ and the Department still needs to spend £85m to meet the project’s original objectives of improving efficiency and interoperability within the Fire and Rescue Service.
The project’s failure stems from many of the same issues that dogged the infamous National Programme for IT in the NHS (NPfIT). First among them is a top-down approach to impose a national system on locally accountable and independent Fire and Rescue Services and a failure to ensure local buy-in from the start. PAC also found the project was rushed, leadership relied too much on external consultants, and the frequent departures of senior staff led to weak oversight.
IT was only a relatively small, but nevertheless important, part of the problem. And unlike NPfIT, the IT supplier/s escape PAC’s critique relatively lightly. The contract for a national IT system linking the control centres was awarded to Cassidian – formerly EADS – three years into the FiReControl project. When it became clear Cassidian couldn’t deliver in an acceptable timeframe the project was cancelled. PAC found the IT contract was poorly designed and awarded to a company ‘without relevant experience’. But the blame for the project’s failure has been laid firmly, and rightly in our opinion, with the government client.
For TechMarketView’s latest analysis of the outlook for the UK public sector SITS market subscribers to PublicSectorViews should see our two new reports: UK Public Sector SITS Market Trends & Forecasts and UK Government ICT Strategy: progress and direction.