The Public Accounts Committee has criticised the government for not using appropriate governance arrangements or available project management skills when delivering the National Programme for IT in the NHS.
It stresses that the public sector needs to build up “internal expertise” in these skills, and not “abdicate responsibility” to external contractors.
The House of Commons committee, responsible for overseeing public spending, says: “Failure to put in place the right management skills and governance affected the delivery of projects reviewed by the Committee including the National Programme for IT in the NHS (NPfIT).
The PAC says in a new report, ‘Learning and Innovation in government’: “It is a positive sign that more expertise is being brought into the government, but internal expertise needs to be built up too.
"Things go wrong where unsuitably skilled staff are brought in to run a contractual relationship, or where they abdicate responsibility to private sector contractors.”
It continues: “There is no substitute for building up the learning and experience of in-house managers so that they can manage projects and the risks associated with them, and get the best from external contractors.”
The report also calls for a “well-informed understanding” of risk, as well as “transparent” monitoring of progress so that failing projects can be halted early.
“Numerous reports from this committee have highlighted that government can repeat mistakes and fail to learn from the past,” it says.
The report highlights that the economic downturn, ageing population and climate change, mean that the public sector’s ability to learn from past experiences and to innovate are more important than ever.
“Experimentation is necessary, but with public money at stake, government needs to be able to halt ineffective activities quickly and learn lessons from them.”
The committee, chaired by MP Edward Leigh, acknowledges that the Office of Government Commerce’s (OGC) Gateway Reviews are one of the ways of capturing lessons for others to learn. But the report notes that projects subject to the gateway reviews are still subject to problems.
The PAC report adds: “Government has also paid insufficient attention to analysing the lessons from the reviews. A lack of good management information is still a hindrance in some cases, and inhibits understanding the impact of innovation.”
The report calls for the reviews to be published and shared more widely across government and for the data from previously completed reviews to be analysed systematically in order to identify lessons which should be shared more widely.
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