Q91 Chairman: Are you going to say sorry to all of those employers who could not recruit and all those volunteers who could not volunteer, the ordinary people, hundreds and thousands of them, whose lives were wrecked because you put in such a low bid which we now know was totally unrealistic?
Mr Pindar: I am pleased to have the opportunity to say sorry to the people who have been inconvenienced by the fact that the go-live did not proceed in the way that we would have hoped.
Q92 Chairman: You were seven months late, that is an understatement, is it not?
Mr Pindar: The fact that the go-live did not go as we hoped had absolutely nothing to do with the price of the bid. Again I would echo the comments which have been made by my colleague, we believed-and we have seen many instances where-the bid process was run in a professional and a diligent way. Again I will emphasise the points which were made earlier, the reason that the price has changed to the extent that it has is because the nature of the job and the service that is being received by 11,500 registered bodies is far wider and far more complex than was originally envisaged.
Q93 Chairman: You seriously thought when you put in for this bid that 80% of people would be making this application by phone and individual applications by phone are easily processed. It never occurred to you that as people are applying for a job it makes sense for employers to group all of these applications together and put them into the Bureau as one, it never occurred to you?
Mr Pindar: At the time the bid was put in that option was not open to them so there was no reason why it should have occurred to us. It was not a channel which was open to us. We run many, many operations for different people and clients have a choice of how they wish to apply for whatever service it is that they wish. At the time that the bid was submitted these people did not have the opportunity to apply via the blank form route.
Q94 Chairman: Mr Lewis, I think he is firmly putting the blame at your table, you are the one to blame as far as Mr Pindar is concerned.
Mr Lewis: I think it is entirely fair to say that what we asked all of the bidders to bid for was primarily a telephone-based service, that is absolutely right and that is what they bid for. We were too slow to recognise that was not a service which our customers wanted. By the time we realised that, which was later than it should have been, not only did that have inevitable consequences for the service which we were able to deliver but it did mean inevitably that any bidder who had won that contract was going to end up bearing far higher costs. I would like to apologise on behalf of the Home Office for the failures of service which undoubtedly occurred at the time the Bureau was set up and subsequently. Having said that, and I do want to say it very clearly, it is also worth saying that, as the NAO Report fairly points out on the other side, the CRB is now a more comprehensive and consistent service than its predecessors and it is now reliably delivering over twice the number of checks undertaken by the police each week under the old arrangements. That balance needs to be there as well.
Chairman: There are one or two supplementary questions that colleagues have asked to put.
Q95 Mr Field: Mr Pindar, you said only once you have not had a renewal of your contract, there have been contracts like the Individual Learning Accounts that did not get to renewal, I wonder given your track record and the almost extraordinary wish of the public sector to cascade money towards you how many times do you pinch yourself when you wake up in the morning?
Mr Pindar: Firstly let me make sure my words are recorded accurately, I said in the instances where are contracts are up for renewal in respect of material contracts, which can be defined as being more than 1% of our annual revenue, we have only failed to renew that contract once in our history. The ILA for its size was not in that category and as you have rightly identified the contract was not renewed anyway. I do not actually pinch myself in the morning for a whole variety of reasons, one is I am actually very proud of what Capita has achieved.Again if I may indulge you and your colleagues, when we set this business up 17 years ago we had 33 people, we now employ 20,000 people in this country in a whole variety of constituencies, some of which I have to say had major unemployment problems before we came along. For example in the likes of Blackburn we have committed to create 500 new jobs in five years, we actually did it in under two. In terms of the creation of employment I am very proud of what we have achieved. In terms of our work with our customers we have grown our customer base at that time from 12 to 25,000. We work extensively in government. I am conscious of the fact that we see reports in the media that sometimes things do not go well. Some of the things we get wrong, when we get them wrong we acknowledge them. In this instance here we demonstrated we were very quick to try and put them right. In other instances we do not get treated fairly by the media. Most significantly in 97% or 98% of the contracts we run we run them successfully and we meet our clients' requirements, which is why we get them renewed.
Mr Field: Given Mr Lewis was responsible and introduced the new deal I can see the attraction that Capita has for somebody with that background. My colleague Mr Bacon told me that in one well known magazine you are known as Grabita, I wonder why it was that you did not sue when it is quite clear you are not grabbing anything?
Mr Bacon: It is Crapita.
Chairman: Forget that.
Q96 Mr Field: There is no grabbing going on. The public sector seems to have a predilection to push contracts and push taxpayers' money your way.
Mr Pindar: The first thing is that suing people does not tend to be a very constructive thing to do. I would also hope we have a little bit of a sense of humour and if people want to call us Crapita it is entirely up to them and I wish them well.
Mr Field: Mine was a Freudian slip-hearing it as Grabita. I will leave it there.
Q97 Mr Bacon: I was not proposing to pursue that line but I thought I should correct the record. What was the one material contract you lost on renewal?
Mr Pindar: One of the projects we were fortunate enough to win was the organisation which was charged with the implementation of the theory driving test. If you think back to 1996 at the time there was a practical driving test but now you also have to do a written test to get a driving licence
Q98 Mr Bacon: How much was the contract worth?
Mr Pindar: It was worth £15 million a year at the time.
Q99 Mr Bacon: 15, and that was material?
Mr Pindar: It was in those days, yes.
Q100 Mr Bacon: What is your turnover now?
Mr Pindar: We have just reported our results, our turnover now is £1.08 billion per annum.