Offender database a "masterclass" in sloppy management

The database was intended to track prisoners

A multimillion-pound database of offenders has been slammed by the government spending watchdog as in a “class of its own” amid a litany of troubled Whitehall IT projects.

The project to track all criminals in the UK from sentence to release is three years overdue and has almost trebled in cost from £234m to £690m.

Edward Leigh, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, branded the system, known as C-NOMIS, as a “masterclass in sloppy project management”.

“Following blunder after blunder by senior managers, the programme clocked up delays of three years and forecast project costs had trebled," he said.

“All this mess could have been avoided if good practice in project management had been followed.”

The National Audit Office (NAO), which reports to the committee, blamed the project's abandonment on poor management at the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), which was set up in 2004 as part of the Home Office but later became part of the Ministry of Justice.

The project was behind schedule within two years. The report highlights failings including inadequate oversight by senior officials in NOMS.

"Roles and responsibilities were blurred, in particular financial accountability was unclear, and insufficient skilled resource was applied to the project," the report said.

In addition, the main supplier contracts were designed in such a way that sufficient pressure could not be brought to bear on suppliers to deliver to time and cost.

In January 2008, the National Offender Management Service began work on a rescoped programme with five separate systems instead of the original single central one. The revised project had an estimated lifetime cost of £513m and a delivery date of March 2011.

The NAO concluded that although the revised programme of IT systems would deliver improvements over existing ones, the main aim of supporting end-to-end offender management "would not be fulfilled".

NAO head Tim Burr said the whole initative had been expensive and unsuccessful.

"These problems could have been avoided if the National Offender Management Service had established realistic budget, timescales and governance for the project at the start and followed basic project management principles in its implementation," he said.