South Wales Evening Post - 19 April 2007
Swansea Council's top boss has admitted: ""We got it wrong" over an £83 million IT deal.
Chief executive Paul Smith has called for a frank admission about failures in the procurement process after a damning report by auditors Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PWC).
The review was ordered by councillors after it became clear the deal was failing to deliver millions of pounds of promised savings.
The project replaced aging council computer systems and was supposed to provide a "one-stop" call centre for customers. But it later emerged it would make nowhere near the savings hoped for and, in fact, will end up costing council taxpayers extra money. Spiralling costs also meant the second phase call centre never got off the ground.
Mr Smith, who joined Swansea Council after the deal was negotiated and signed, said lessons must be learned.
"The PWC report clearly outlines a series of serious weaknesses associated with the development of the eGovernment programme," he said.
"As a council, we need to admit the weakness and set about creating a clear strategy for ensuring no repetition."
The report has highlighted a string of mistakes and bad practice during the negotiations. It says not enough was done to alert councillors to senior managers' concerns, alternatives were not looked at and the council failed to scrutinise promised savings closely enough.
"The report does not reach any conclusions in respect of the direct allocation of responsibility and accountability for the situation," added Mr Smith. "This leaves unanswered questions which may need significant further work to be fully understood. Time has moved on, and there have been some key changes in personnel at the head of the organisation."
Swansea Councillors were due to discuss the report today and Mr Smith said the same mistakes should not be repeated.
He said: "I feel more work is now needed to understand the specific causes of the weaknesses highlighted in the report and a clear action plan needs to come back to council for agreement as soon as practicable."
Former chief executive Tim Thorogood, who was in charge during the procurement process but left before the deal was finalised, said everything possible had been done to ensure the deal was a success.
He said: "The deal that was considered by councillors had an awful lot of hard work, and it had been looked at in the greatest amount of detail. The council obtained substantial assistance from specialist advisers, and such advice was not only always taken but was provided directly to councillors."
Mr Thorogood, who now works for the thinktank the Local Government Information Unit, added: "Any good programme rests on its design and equally on its implementation. If, so far, savings have not been achieved experience shows that this will be as much down to implementation as it is design."
We have been asked to point out that in Tuesday's report about the issue, the word "only" was omitted from a comment by Mr Thorogood. It should have read: "Such advice was not only always taken, but was provided directly to councillors.''
