Uk government: bungling snoopers

The Telegraph's editorial writers (not the biggest fans, it has to be said, of Nu Labour's construction of our database nation) have labeled the UK government "bungling snoopers", following the publication of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee - Second Report on The National Programme for IT in the NHS: Progress since 2006.

"A report from the Commons public accounts committee has again exposed the Government's folly in committing huge sums of taxpayers' money to centralised databases that are neither effective, nor secure, nor even necessary. A £12 billion NHS computer project to link more than 30,000 GPs to nearly 300 hospitals in England is reportedly on the brink of failure after "disappointing progress" in deploying a new care records system. The NHS is forecasting a completion date of 2015 – four years later than originally planned, though the MPs said even this revised schedule looks overly optimistic...

Ministers have also decided to proceed with another IT folly, the ContactPoint system that will hold details of all our children. Well, not quite all. The offspring of "celebrities", including MPs, will be excluded on confidentiality grounds. Why is this necessary if the system is secure, and why are the children of MPs entitled to more privacy than the rest of us? Here is a classic Labour cocktail: the snooping state reaches new, and unacceptable, levels of intrusion but ensures special privileges for the political classes and their celebrity friends. These databases and the new data-sharing laws now before Parliament must be scrapped."

The conclusions and recommendations from the report itself read quite clearly.

"1 Recent progress in deploying the new care records systems has been very disappointing, with just six deployments in total during the first five months of 2008-09...

2 By the end of 2008 the Lorenzo care records software had still not gone live throughout a single Acute Trust...

3 The planned approach to deploy elements of the clinical functionality of Lorenzo (release 1) ahead of the patient administration system (release 2) is untested, and therefore poses a higher risk than previous deployments under the Programme...

4 Of the four original Local Service Providers, two have left the Programme, and just two remain, both carrying large commitments...

5 The termination of Fujitsu's contract has caused uncertainty among Trusts in the South and new deployments have stopped...

6 The Programme is not providing value for money at present because there have been few successful deployments of the Millennium system and none of Lorenzo in any Acute Trust...

7 Despite our previous recommendation, the estimate of £3.6 billion for the Programme's local costs remains unreliable...

8 The Department hopes that the Programme will deliver benefits in the form of both financial savings and improvements in patient care and safety...There is, however, a lot of work to do within the NHS to realise and measure the benefits. Convincing NHS staff of the benefits will be key to securing their support for the Programme, and the credibility of the figures in the benefits statement would be considerably enhanced if they were audited...

9 Little clinical functionality has been deployed to date, with the result that the expectations of clinical staff have not been met...

10 The Department has taken action to engage clinicians and other NHS staff but there remains some way to go in securing their support for the Programme...

11 Patients and doctors have understandable concerns about data security...

12 The Department does not have a full picture of data security across the NHS as Trusts and Strategic Health Authorities are required to report only the most serious incidents to the Department...

13 Confidentiality agreements that the Department made with CSC in respect of two reviews of the delivery arrangements for Lorenzo are unacceptable because they obstruct parliamentary scrutiny of the Department's expenditure. "

So,

• the systems don't work very well if at all
• staff don't like them and don't trust them
• government claims about the functionality and value of the systems are unrealistic
• no one knows how much it is all costing
• the contracts interfere with appropriate auditing of the systems
• data security threats are significant and the government department responsible thinks it "is not practical for it to collect details of all security breaches"

An unbridled success story then.