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Internet usage at Essex County Council

Aug 26th, 2011
by Richard Poole.
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The Essex Chronicle reports that Essex County Council has released figures showing the Internet sites its staff have visited most over the past year.  You can download the numbers here.  Providing its internet history since last August, the figures are broken down in terms of the number of hits and the total amount of time spent on each website.  Interesting in itself, the new data also puts further pressure on other public bodies to release similar information.

The usual suspects are there. Council staff have spent over 7,000 hours more on Facebook than both their official local governmental websites combined. Some people may try to defend staff using these sites in work time for networking and advertising purposes, but such large amounts of time simply cannot be justified purely for work purposes, and it is hard to see it fitting within statutory breaks. Other sites listed with a more professional social networking profile – such as LinkedIn – are used a fair bit, but not nearly as much as Facebook.

Many Councils and Governmental Departments have resisted providing similar statistics on their most visited sites. But lists like these are an essential tool of scrutiny, providing us taxpayers with a real gauge of what Council staff do with the time we pay them for. Without doubt, many council staff members are hardworking and dedicated employees, but we need to ensure that our money is being used as effectively as possible, and not poured down the drain by timewasters.

Taxpayers should not have to file FOI requests to collate this data. Public bodies should be transparent and proactively publish it themselves. Essex County Council and a number of other bodies such as the Department for Transport have shown it is possible.  Other bodies should provide similar data to ensure a more efficient and accountable workforce. Of course, that will have to wait till they can find the time, between shopping online at New Look and Littlewoods and keeping up with the latest cricket scores.

Speed cameras: an accident in themselves?

Aug 24th, 2011
by Richard Poole.
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The Department for Transport (DfT) has published online data for accidents, casualties and speeding at fixed camera sites. Statistics for the 75 local authorities who have so far provided their information shows that speed cameras have done very little, if anything, to improve safety for motorists and other road users.

In fact, the figures suggest the exact opposite. In some cases, speed cameras have not cut accident rates, but increased them. Research we did last year found the rate of decline in road accidents slowed when speed cameras were introduced, and today’s figures build on that. We also saw that when Swindon turned off their cameras, there was no increase in accident rates, debunking the claim that without these cameras, motorists become dangerous behind the wheel.

Many of us may be guilty of ‘panic braking’ when we see a speed camera and slam on the brakes to avoid detection, others may tactically brake because they already know where the cameras are. But even the most consistently speed conscious motorists among us will have seen this behaviour from other drivers. This camera-induced erratic driving doesn’t make for safe roads. As Claire Armstrong, co-founder of Safe Speed notes, “road safety is not measured in miles an hour”. People should be encouraged to drive safely, rather than just slowly. Yet there have been numerous cases of cameras being installed with no real road safety benefit at all. For example, a speed camera was erected on the A329 in Little Milton, Oxfordshire, in 1997 despite no previous collisions or casualties for five years.

This data further supports the suspicion that many of us have held for a long time: that speed cameras are little more than money-making machines, topping up the government’s revenue through speeding fines, rather than genuine safety devices. Motorists are already very heavily over-taxed and they don’t want to see more of their hard-earned cash pay for the maintenance and installation of fixed cameras which penalise them further. If speed cameras are not doing their road safety job effectively, they should be scrapped, something we called for in our manifesto pledge last year.

The DfT should be praised for its transparency in publishing this data but they shouldn’t stop there. All councils should be held to account and publish their data, so we know if our money is being used on ‘safety efficient’ rather than money-spinner cameras. Road Safety Minister Mike Penning sums it up:

“Local residents have a right to expect that when their council spends money on speed cameras, they publish information to show whether those cameras are helping to reduce accidents or not.”

Welsh Government’s £220m IT ‘Merlin’ contract is losing its magic

Aug 18th, 2011
by Richard Poole.
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A major national IT project in Wales has resulted in serious and costly failings. The Welsh Government’s Merlin Programme has come under heavy fire in a report released yesterday by the Welsh Audit Office. Of course, this is not the first example of serious maladministration and waste in national IT programmes. Most notably, the exorbitant cost and overall disaster of the NHS national IT scheme, the National Programme for IT (NPfIT), has led to its recent demise – but not before burning a shocking £2.7 billion of taxpayers’ cash, though.

The same old problems of mismanagement, lengthy delays, poor monitoring and a failure to ‘shop around’ for the best deal has left a large hole in the Welsh finances. The original budget of £220 million over ten years has already been smashed, with the programme landing taxpayers with a £270 million bill in its first seven years. The 10-year Merlin contract for Information and Communications Technology (ICT) began in 2004 between the Welsh Government and Siemens Information Services. It was intended to transform IT services for the Welsh Government and the National Assembly for Wales.

Huw Vaughan Thomas, Auditor General for Wales noted some positives, if you can call them that: “ICT projects delivered under the Contract have brought benefits but their value for money is uncertain”. But even some necessary items, such as software, hardware, new data networks and training were not budgeted for, resulting in an unplanned, additional spend of £24 million.

The report also slammed the Welsh Government’s ability to monitor the progress of ICT projects, which was “hampered by its inadequate reporting of progress against key milestones”. In particular, its project closure documents insufficiently set out “how projects have progressed against original schedules and costs”, a fine example of masterful civil service understatement.

Projects like this show that central government cannot have its hand in every pot. Bureaucrats should abandon their delusions of grandeur and work to provide value for money. We need to avoid creating similar ‘white elephants’. The government needs to cut profligate spending, and these expensive and wasteful national IT projects are a great place to start.

‘System failure’ – £11 billion NHS IT system finally abandoned, but not before slamming a high bill on taxpayers

Aug 3rd, 2011
by Richard Poole.
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Once again central government has come under fire because of one of its costly and failing IT programmes. Unsurprisingly, a report published today by the Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) heavily criticised the expensive 11.4 billion ‘National Programme for IT in the NHS’ (NPfIT). They’ve said that £2.7 billion of taxpayers’ cash has been wasted by the programme, as the Department of Health has very little to show for that huge amount of cash.

The report highlighted a number of failings in both the management and implementation of the system, including the inability of the Government to ensure it was getting the best contractual deals from suppliers such as BT. As the Committee notes, “BT is paid £9 million to implement systems at each NHS site, even though the same systems have been purchased for under £2 million by NHS organisations outside the Programme”, clearly underlining the Department’s poor management and inability to provide taxpayers with value for money.

Launched in 2002 by the Department of Health, the central aim of the programme was to develop an all-encompassing e-records system to make accurate patient records available to NHS staff at all times. But the project has courted controversy at every stage from its inception. Data management issues, patient confidentiality problems, numerous missed deadlines; NPfIT has it all, completely undermining its goal of increased efficiency. It has been dubbed the super-computer but there’s nothing super about it: the project takes every single failing of past IT projects – of which there have been many – and rolls them into one giant failure.

The inclination of the NHS to centralise everything has cost taxpayers dear. Richard Bacon MP, a member of the Public Accounts Committee, called it “one of the worst scandals in terms of wasting public money of my ten years on the Committee”. A scandal is right. We called for this project to be scrapped almost two years ago in our report with the Institute of Directors How to Save 50 Billion. Taxpayers’ money has already been poured down this black hole and the government have to put a stop to it, now. It seems the alternative is that local health trusts and hospitals will be allowed to develop or buy individual computer systems to suit their needs instead, but the haemorrhaging of cash must end.

And we need to remember NPfIT every single time the government – or any government in the future – comes up with a major IT project on the promise that it will magically make everything better, in exchange for a few billion from taxpayers.

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