Jobcentre IT system has cost £250m so far

The government claims problem areas are improving, but Jobcentre staff say the jury is still out

The troubled Jobcentre Plus (JC+) customer management system (CMS) has cost nearly £250m so far, and the present CMS3 upgrade will add another £10m to the price tag.

According to JC+ chief executive Lesley Strathie, CMS should generate savings of £61.5m for each year that it is fully deployed, with total savings expected to exceed costs by £98m over the decade to 2012-13.

But so far the IT system has caused a string of problems, including huge backlogs of calls to benefits contact centres, and leaving some claimants waiting for two months for their payments to start.

Last September more than half of CMS-enabled call centres reverted to paper processes, and seven have still not returned to using the IT system.

Terry Rooney, chairman of the Commons Work and Pensions Committee, says CMS3 does seem to be an improvement.

‘But CMS and CMS2 were a waste of time,’ he told Computing.

‘I don’t know if it was the commissioning or the contract; it just didn’t do what it was expected to do, and it meant that the contact centres just didn’t work.’

Representatives of JC+ recently told the committee that 93 per cent of claims now go through as they should. But Rooney says that is not good enough.

‘There are tens of thousands of new claims every week, so even a small percentage means thousands of people affected,’ he said.

Pensions minister Stephen Timms told Computing last month that CMS is back on track (Computing, 19 January).

But staff on the ground are still reporting problems.

‘The jury is still out on CMS3,’ said Chris Brambleby, who works in Hastings JC+ contact centre, one of the worst-hit by the troubles with CMS.

‘For several weeks the system was being taken off as often as once a day to reboot.

‘We are playing catch-up all the time: before one thing gets fixed something else is going on.’