South Wales Evening Post - 14 April 2007
Swansea Council has been severely criticised over its bungled handling of a multi-million pound IT contract.
The £83 million deal with Swansea- based IT firm Capgemini was agreed in January 2006. It was the first phase of the council's eGovernment programme aimed at streamlining its services and saving millions of pounds.
However, it soon became apparent that the projected savings would not be made, and shortly after the deal was agreed, the second phase of the project was dropped because of spiralling costs.
Now, a stinging report into the project has highlighted a series of mistakes and bad practices in the run-up to signing the deal. It has also revealed that far from saving anything up to £17.3 million, it will actually end up costing council taxpayers an extra £2.5 million over 10 years.
Councillor Mark Child, the Labour group's spokesman on IT, said the findings posed serious questions for council leaders.
He said: "It is a pretty bad report and it makes it clear that the ruling administration, including the Tories, did not have a grasp of the size or importance of this contract.
"The project was worth three or four times more than the leisure centre, and council leaders should have kept a much closer eye on things. I know they will say it was started by us, or that they were not kept fully informed, but at the end of the day they were the ones who made the decision to go ahead with it and they should be held accountable."
The report points out that senior council staff had little confidence in Capgemini's savings targets before the deal was signed. However, the report by auditors PricewaterHouse Coopers said these concerns were not passed on to council leaders. It adds: "More work should have been undertaken to verify the savings proposed by the bidders.
"The concerns (of senior staff) should have been reported more explicitly (to councillors)."
The report also criticises the council for the way it looked at alternatives before committing to the Capgemini deal. And it is critical of the lack of checks carried out on the various bids and said comparisons should have been made with other councils and with Swansea's own IT provision before the deal was signed. It points out that the lack of a review of the council's own staff means there is no way of knowing if the new deal is offering value for money.
Councillor Child said: "It seems like they could only see the end vision and there was not enough questioning of how we were going to get there. They seem to have just accepted everything at face value."
Swansea Council is now preparing a response to the report , which is due to be discussed by councillors on Thursday.
Councillor Rene Kinzett is the chairman of a committee looking at the handling of the eGovernment scheme.
He said: "This is just one part of an ongoing review of eGovernment and, without prejudicing that, this report is quite clear. There were a number of basic things that had not been done.
"Benchmarking other schemes to see what was available and at what price is one thing that should have happened.
"If Capgemini was so confident of making the savings, then why did they not take on more of the risk. And why were the concerns of senior staff at this authority not passed on."
Councillor Mary Jones said the report showed there were lessons to be learned.
"Our eGovernment programme will provide the council with new IT systems and modern working practices to make us more efficient and improve services for customers.
"With all major programmes of this kind there are always lessons to learn and we welcome the PWC review as a way of helping us improve the way we work in the future. The eGovernment programme is not due for completion until March 2008 and by that time we expect to realise further financial and non-financial benefits for the people of Swansea."
