Edward Garnier

Conservative Party | Harborough

Letter to Jack Straw

I am writing following press reports today that the Director of Probation, Roger Hill, has admitted that the C-NOMIS system cannot be delivered within the original costings, and that a revised programme for implementation will “inevitably involve a reduction in the planned functionality and scope of the system”.

The Government’s entire rationale for bringing the Prisons and Probation services together in NOMS – and for that matter for bringing courts and offender management together in the Ministry of Justice – was to provide for end-to-end offender management.  The NOMS website today still claims that “central to end-to-end management is C-NOMIS … both prisons and probation staff will be able to share constantly updated information, thereby increasing efficiency and reducing risk”.

Scaling back the NOMIS project would therefore appear seriously to compromise the Government’s strategy to protect the public and reducing re-offending.  In view of this I would be grateful if you would answer the following questions:

1. If the scope of C-NOMIS is limited, and in particular if the system is not successfully rolled out to probation officers, how does your Ministry propose to join up the two ends of offender management and thereby reduce risk to the public?

2. Napo claims that the costs of the project have quadrupled in five years, from an estimated eventual capital cost of about £234 million to the latest estimate of “in the region of £950 million” for national roll-out.  Can you confirm these figures and provide the latest estimates of the costs?

3. How many bids were received for the project, and will you place a copy of the Department’s tender documents in the House of Commons Library?

4. How much public money has so far been spent on the system?

5. What consultants have been advising on the project and what is the total committed cost of them to date?

6. Can you confirm Napo’s claim that NOMS originally made no allowance for VAT on the project, and if this is the case, explain how such an extraordinary omission could have occurred?

7. Napo claims that EDS, who currently hold the contract, would have to be paid a minimum of £50 million in cancellation charges.  Can you confirm the position and state what the cost of any revised programme will be in cancellation or other charges?

8. Roger Hill’s letter of 6 August says: “We have advised Ministers that we will need to undertake a fundamental review of the work, to return to an affordable plan” and that a “rapid review” is underway.  When was this advice given to Ministers?

9. As recently as 21 March this year John Reid told the Commons that “the main C-NOMIS base release, encompassing full prison and probation functionality, will be available no later than July 2008.”  Clearly by July the Government knew that this was no longer gong to be the case: Roger Hill’s letter of 1 August confirms that Chief Probation Officers were told on 20 July that a strategic review of NOMIS had taken place.  Parliament was still sitting at this time.  Why did Ministers not correct the assurance given to Parliament that the project was on schedule?

The Ministry of Justice is the department now charged with taking forward Gordon Brown’s proposals to “to promote and restore trust in politics.”  I would be interested to know how you reconcile this ambition with a total failure to keep Parliament and the public informed about this situation.

I am today writing to the Comptroller and Auditor General of the National Audit Office requesting that he launches an investigation into what already appears to be another lamentable failure by the Government to deliver an IT project on budget and on time, and potentially a scandalous mismanagement of public funds.

In view of the public interest in this issue I have released this letter to the press.