| NHS IT, WASTE AND MR WATMORE |
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POACHER TURNED GAME KEEPER: Ian Watmore, former
MD of Accenture, who now heads the team determining
the future of the wasteful NHS IT programme |
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HAVING revealed the dismal performance of the NHS National Programme for IT five years ago (issue 1157), a year later a special Eye report System Failure (1179) exposed the shocking background to a £12bn project “that wasn’t wanted and doesn’t work”. Now at last the auditors have woken up.
With £6.35bn paid so far for a fraction of what should have been delivered, the National Audit Office finally agrees with the Eye and with the programme’s only effective watchdog, Tory public accounts committee member Richard Bacon MP. “The original vision for the National Programme for IT in the NHS will not be realized,” the auditors concede. Or as the member for South Norfolk put it in language his constituents will understand: “This turkey will never fly.” The main justification for the monolithic national programme – a central medical database for everyone available everywhere – has long since been ditched; and everything else, in particular the local IT systems, is way off target and over-cost. Pisspoor software and equally useless suppliers with regional monopolies have screwed these up at a cost so far of £2.7bn.
As the NAO says: “The NHS is now getting far fewer systems than planned despite the [health] department paying contractors almost the same amount of money. This is yet another example of a department fundamentally underestimating the scale and complexity of a major IT-enabled change programme.” This view is in sharp contrast to the NAO’s original report - after the Eye had first exposed the scheme’s failings - which one MP called “easily the most gushing” praise he had seen from the NAO.
“An utter waste of money” – so let’s give that man a job!
So now what? Health minister Simon Burns admitted on Radio 4’s Today programme that the national NHS IT initiative was “a farce and utter waste of money”. The health department under him, however, seems keen to plough on, telling the NAO that “the money spent to date has not been wasted and will potentially deliver value for money”.
Its future, complicated by huge contracts given to under-performers like BT (chaired by David Cameron’s business adviser, Sir Mike Rake) will be determined by a “major projects team”. It will be run by the head of Cameron’s efficiency and reform group, Ian Watmore.
Watmore is a former managing director of one of the suppliers, Accenture, that walked away from the programme. And although last week he told parliament’s public accounts committee that the NHS programme was a victim of “over-ambition by the department and overselling by the companies”, he was in fact the managing director of Accenture when in early 2004 it sold its useless services to the government in the first place!
From 2006 until 2009, the adaptable Watmore was head of Tony Blair’s delivery unit, from which vantage point he staunchly defended the programme. So there is every chance that this particular turkey might live to see a few more Christmases yet. |
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