Home Office, Criminal Records Bureau and Capita Group Plc
Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon. Welcome to the Committee of Public Accounts where today we are looking at the Criminal Records Bureau: Delivering Safer Recruitment? We are joined by Mr. Leigh Lewis, who is Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, Mr. Vince Gaskell, who is Chief Executive of the Criminal Records Bureau, Mr. Bernard Herman, who is the former Chief Executive of the Passport and Records Agency (which incorporated the Criminal Records Bureau and the UK Passport Service until the two were split up on 1 September 2003), and Mr. Paul Pindar, who is Chief Executive of Capita Group plc. You are all very welcome. Thank you for agreeing to speak to the Committee this afternoon. May I just ask you one housekeeping matter first, Mr. Lewis. It is very important that any supplementary memoranda are received in good time. Why did you only send us this latest supplementary memorandum on 9 March and why did you not copy it to the National Audit Office? They received their copy from the Committee Clerk. Why so late?
Mr Lewis: May I apologise for both of those omissions, Mr Chairman. We wanted to try and have the latest information in front of the Committee and that meant waiting for the latest February figures that we wanted to send you. Not sending it directly to the National Audit Office was simply an omission for which I apologies.
Q2 Chairman: Thank you. Mr. Herman, why did you not question the business assumptions that assumed that 80% would use this service by ringing up and in fact there were bulk applications by post? Was not this a fairly basic error?
Mr. Herman: We did do research back in May 2000 to establish our potential customers' attitudes to the service and the feedback we got at that point was that the telephone service which we were seeking to encourage to facilitate was going to be well received. In the voluntary sector about three-quarters of the people we spoke to said it would be fine and in the education sector the telephone was said to be the preferred channel. We were encouraged in our view that we could pursue the Modernizing Government Agenda which had been set at that time for percentages of electronic transmissions through government services. We believed it would be feasible to launch the service rather like the insurance and telephone banking world where most of the transactions would be done through the phone. We believed our customers would accept that. It was much closer to the launch date that we found out through extensive consultation that there were a large number of them that would not accept that.
Q3 Chairman: In fact, most people-obviously we are dealing with employment here-were submitting bulk applications by post and the system crashed.
Mr. Herman: That was how it turned out.
Q4 Chairman: And you reckon that was not foreseeable?
Mr. Herman: In retrospect, it would have been better to have done more research earlier and I acknowledge the fault there. It is also the case that we were seeking to change behavior because the paper application route is known to be expensive and troublesome in terms of levels of error and likely to cause a lot of ping-pong between customers and the organization. So we were seeking to change the whole of the new service rather than go down the traditional routes, but in the end I became convinced that that was going to fail and we were going to get a large number of people feeling they could not access the service. In the end my priority was the protection of children and the protection of the vulnerable. I had to make that service successful.
Q5 Chairman: Is it not a fairly basic omission in a project of this complexity to forget to do a pilot study?
Mr. Herman: We did always plan to do a pilot within the acceptance test phase but it was going to be of fairly limited duration. We were going to put a raft of dummy applications through the test programmed, but as the development programmed got delayed, as sometimes happened, things got squeezed and it was around July 2001, whilst taking stock and also going through the Gateway Review process, that we recognized it would be better to let the launch date slip, to take more time and put a pilot phase in. So we basically added more time and it was at that stage we could see the development programmed was going to produce something which was deficient in one way or another. So we thought it was important to stop and do a pilot phase and make sure things were okay.
Q6 Chairman: Mr. Pindar and Mr. Herman, why did it take a crisis to make you work together properly?
Mr. Herman: I would like to say that it did not take a crisis to make us work together properly. We were committed from the outset to working closely with whoever we chose as a partner. We, the Agency, took premises in Liverpool which the partner could move into so we would be co-located. We formed a partnership executive where we would work together to deal with any issues between us. Mr. Pindar and I used to meet bilaterally every four to six weeks with any high level issues we could clear out of the way. Capita were involved, for example, in joint road shows with staff, management conferences, annual retreats and so on. We were working together pretty well. We had made the determination that we would treat this as a partnership, although as the NAO Report quite rightly says, when we got into some stormy water soon after the launch we began concentrating on our own areas and that is where some discontinuity in the production flows was commented on in the NAO Report. We have recovered from that now. We had a Joint Improvement Plan we put together and I would say that we have worked very well as a partnership ever since then.
Mr Pindar: I have to say, Mr Chairman, I agree very much with Bernard Herdan's summary. I think we worked well during the process of implementation. At the point when we went live and the situation was not as we had foreseen inevitably there was a degree of tension around at that point. As soon as we realised we had a major issue to deal with the teams came together very well. Hopefully one of the things that you will take out of this is the fact that as soon as we realised that there was a difficulty that had to be overcome we worked very hard and everyone put their shoulders to the wheel in terms of putting it right. Also, as Bernard Herdan has said, subsequent to that time we have had an excellent relationship which hopefully is shown out in the figures which are now coming from the Agency.
Q7 Chairman: Thank you. Mr Gaskell, could you look at figure 14 on page 34 which deals with service targets and reducing the scope of the service. Is your improved performance not just a result of relaxing your service targets?
Mr Gaskell: No, Mr Chairman, it is rather more fundamental than that because even if we were to compare it against the previous targets, which were to do 90% of Standard Disclosures in one week and 90% of Enhanced Disclosures in three weeks, our performance on a comparable basis is significantly different and better than that. For example, if you will just indulge me for a minute, just looking at February's figures alone, we would have achieved 57% of Standard Disclosures in one week and 84% of Enhanced Disclosures in three weeks, which is a remarkable step change from September 2002 when it was 6% and 31% respectively. So I think there is something rather more fundamental in terms of improvement that has happened since then.
Q8 Chairman: Will you please look at your supplementary memorandum and the third page where you will see the title "Performance against public service standards for 2003-04" and you will see a line there saying, "Registration of Registered Bodies". Do you see that? Why is that 36.6 figure so low?
Mr Gaskell: There are a couple of reasons for that. I am not going to attempt to defend a figure that is clearly well below our performance target. That figure does still include, unlike the current targets for Enhanced and Standard Disclosures, time out with a customer. We have significant problems in getting applications in for registration in good order. At least half of them we have to return because of inaccuracies or because the thing that is meant to be associated with it has not come in and to some extent we are still clearing out some of the aged ones in that category that we have had a purge on in the last three months to try and clear, but unfortunately in clearing out those it further drags down performance.
Q9 Chairman: Will you please look at paragraph 4.5 on page 25 which deals with issuing basic disclosures. Will you be able to cope with this in capacity terms?
Mr Gaskell: Yes, I believe I would. If you would like me to elaborate on that I will because since Christmas we have been running at about 54,000 applications a week and coping well with those within our service standard. There were peak periods last year. There was a short period around the time of the summer fee increase where we hit well over 70,000 applications per week. On that basis I am confident that the performance of both Capita and ourselves and indeed the IT system at present is capable of supporting us.
Q10 Chairman: Would your system have caught Ian Huntley?
Mr Gaskell: The issues that the Ian Huntley case throws up are these and they are well documented already. We are heavily dependent on the information provided to us by local police forces. The diVerences in this case are this: as part of the application process an applicant must, and ought to, reflect on there any name that they have used in the past. They are also meant to reveal as part of their five-year address history, the addresses they have previously lived at and as a matter of routine what we would do is, first of all, check the Police National Computer for both of the names provided and he made no secret of his two names. We would also have sent out automatic notifications through to both the Cambridgeshire police and to the Humberside police if an Enhanced Disclosure has been applied for. If it had been a Standard Disclosure we would have been interrogating the Police National Computer ourselves.
Mr Field: Was that yes or no, Chairman?