Same old refrain

Tory leader Rene Kinzett does not appear to have been paying attention in class. He claims in today's Evening Post that he has not been kept up-to-date on the Council's e-government scheme. Yet a Council spokesperson points out, he is chair of the Councils' e-government working group, which body receives monthly updates.

Kinzett seeks to use this alleged shroud of secrecy as an excuse for confusion over issues such as cost:

He said: "In these circumstances, where information is given out on a less than timely basis and where members are kept in the dark and given half the picture, is it any surprise that the media print stories which may not be entirely accurate?"

Well actually Rene, the real reason why recent media stories have been inaccurate is because you have been feeding them misinformation. Maybe the problem is not that nobody is telling Kinzett what is going on, but that he does not understand it.

Humble Pie

Following the Evening Post's faux pas of printing unsubstantiated allegations regarding the relationship between Capgemin and the Council we understand that the newspaper are about to eat humble pie.

An e-mail has been circulated to all Councillors this evening to say that a meeting has taken place between Council Officers, Cap Gemini and Evening Post editor Spencer Feeney to discuss the article. 'The Post has agreed to print an apology/correction in tomorrows edition which we understand will be on page 3'.

No clue as yet as to what action if any will be taken against the perpetrator of these serious allegations.

A matter of law

For somebody who repeatedly refers to his chairmanship of the Council's e-government working party, Councillor Kinzett displays an incredible lack of knowledge as to what is going on in that programme. Not only does he constantly display a fundamental misunderstanding of the finances but he has now resorted to inventing events so as to get publicity.

The Upside Downers are speculating as to why the Evening Post article on this alleged scandal has been taken down from their website. Perhaps they will find the answer in the e-mail sent to all Councillors by the Cabinet Member for e-government this afternoon. Councillor Mary Jones writes:

You may have seen the article in today’s Evening Post on Page 2, which claims that the Council is being sued by Capgemini.

I would like to make it clear that the Council is NOT being sued by Capgemini. We are liaising with Capgemini to issue a joint statement firmly rebutting this allegation.

The idea that the relationship between an internationally respected company such as Capgemini and their client has broken down irreparably so that they must resort to legal action is clearly damaging to that company's reputation and may affect their ability to win contracts in the future. This is especially so when that allegation is untrue. It is likely that the enormity of their gaff has dawned on Evening Post and they are doing everything possible to limit the damage. It may be too late.

The Evening Post has consistently misrepresented the e-government programme in their articles. Even when their errors have been pointed out to them they have persisted as if they were facts. That stance has also been adopted by the opposition who have also consistently and deliberately distorted what is going on. Their opportunism on a programme that they started has been startling and outrageous.

Today's article is a good example of the Evening Post's campaign of misrepresentation. They start off by referring to the project as being worth £170 million even though it has been pointed out to them on numerous occasions that it is in fact worth £98 million. They then proceed to say that phase two will not have a call centre. That decision has not been taken and it is still the Council's intention to deliver that.

The most bizarre claim in the article is that the 'whole Service@Swansea saga has been an embarrassment to council officers who failed to heed warnings given by council staff when they took strike action against the plans in 2004.' The only embarrassment is the Evening Post's coverage. They obviously do not know what the strike action was about nor that the project is delivering what it was designed to do and officers are proud of the efforts they are putting into it and their achievements. Essentially, the journalist has made up that passage to gild the lily. It is appallingly bad journalism, even by the Evening Post's standards.

Finally, the reporter repeats once more the untruth that the second phase has been dropped. It has not. It is proceeding with a different contractor.

What is actually happening is that an enormously complex contract is being played out between the two parties. Failure to meet savings in the current year are likely to lead to claims by the Council for Capgemini to pay the penalties detailed in the contract. Capgemini are seeking to off-set those costs by counter-claiming for delays they allege are the Council's fault. In a contract of this size that is normal and healthy. It is not something that we would expect the Evening Post and their cub-journalists to understand. In running to the press in this way Councillor Kinzett has managed to place himself in dunces corner alongside them.

Triumph @ Swansea

We are not in the habit of using this blog to pre-empt announcements by the Administration, so why exactly the Inside Outers felt that they should have read it here first that the Council is doing a deal with Cardiff on e-government we cannot say. Nevertheless if they choose to re-read our posts on this subject they will see that we have been hinting at it for some time.

Despite all the spin coming from Labour and the Tories the facts are these:

1. The Administration decided that the figures did not stack up on phase two with Capgemini and rather than take a risk with taxpayers money decided to look at other alternatives. Councillor Mary Jones told Council that it was still the intention to go ahead with the contact centre using a different provider.

2. No expenditure has been committed to phase two and therefore all the talk of money wasted is just nonsense. The figures on phase one are clear and add up. Now that we are proposing going into partnership to deliver phase two then we will be able to deliver the contact centre we promised.

3. As one comment on the Evening Post website said: "The council have delivered what they said they would, a new contact centre with the appropriate technology at a fraction of the original price quoted."

What is amusing is how suddenly everybody has acquired the powers of foresight. Councillor Mark Child for example tells the Post: "Unfortunately, we no longer have the IT expertise to be able to implement this in-house as they were all transferred to Capgemini. Having said that, this is the approach we have been advocating all along."

As Labour's Technology Spokesman Child should know that it was not the expertise that was lacking it was an appropriate record management system and if he really has been advocating this course of action all along then he must have been whispering it very quietly. It was certainly not on the agenda of the previous Labour Administration when they started service@swansea in the first place.

The Evening Post is equally as prescient. However, they also need to understand that the driver for going to another local authority was the fact that costings on phase two were not affordable. The use of Cardiff's CRM could not have happened without phase one being implemented first.

The Administration also did not inherit a blank sheet. When we took over a process was well underway with preferred bidders and all the legal advice was that we had to see it through or else end up paying compensation.

The outcome is much better than it could have been. We have a system in place that is starting to produce the anticipated savings and we also have a workable alternative to Capgemin so as to deliver phase two. We have done this without busting the budget originally set by Labour when they conceived of e-government in the first place.

Update: Labour reproduce a previous post of 28 April 2006 from the old Inside Swansea blog but all they have succeeded in doing is to prove our consistency on these matters. The Council is still on course to achieve its savings whilst the deal with Cardiff will guarantee the massively improved interface with the public that will transform the Council's customer service record. Labour ask what we have been doing for the last three years? The answer is sorting out the mess they left us and getting e-government right.

One for the Gipper

Labour really cannot let e-government go. The problem is that they seem to be making it up as they go along. The letter in today's Evening Post from former Councillor Derek James is a classic case in point. He pretends to know what is going on but actually he is as confused as the newspaper's journalists.

Mr. James should know better than to talk about local government in terms of profit and loss. He is also experienced enough to know that even Labour's more extravagant e-government scheme was as bad as he imagines the current project to be.

If Derek wants to know the true costs he only has to read this blog. We would be more than happy to provide an on-line tutorial for him.

Labour bring on the clowns

An e-mail arrives consisting of a letter to the Evening Post in answer to the nonsense written by Jeff Baker and David Phillips in tonight's Evening Post.

As we have no shame we have corrected one item in it and used it as the basis of this post:

In his letter, Chris Powell states that the Service @ Swansea project has cost council taxpayers up to £170 million for both phases to come to fruition. The actual value of the work to date is £98 million over ten years. Of this £37 million is new money. The rest is paid for out of existing budgets and savings.

As phase two has not commenced there is no additional expenditure on this part of the project. The whole point of deciding that we would not proceed with phase two with Capgemini was to ensure that the Council did not overstretch itself and commit to expenditure that it could not afford. That is a prudent action and it is the reason why we will not get the massive increase in Council Tax bills predicted by Mr. Powell.

In the light of these facts it is difficult to reconcile the charges of incompetence from Trade Union Boss, Jeff Baker, with the reality. The Administration has already made it clear that it is investigating alternative ways of implementing the contact centre in a way that is affordable and deliverable. The out-of-date IT systems are being introduced and are already making a massive difference to the way that the Council is administered, whilst the suggestion that jobs are at risk as a result of this decision is a fiction.

The comments by Councillor David Phillips make even less sense. He refers to £18 million as savings that should have been made from phase one to fund phase two and yet the budgetted savings for this part of the project is £8.5m. He also claims that that we cannot make it phase one break even but with the first year not yet complete we have already identified half of the ten year savings.

We have not implemented phase two precisely because we did not believe that the figures stacked up. That decision has saved the Council millions. We will only implement phase two when we believe that it will deliver what is expected of it and that it is affordable. Phase two and the contact centre have not been cancelled. We are trying to find more affordable ways of delivering it.

When the present Administration came to power it found a legacy of neglect: the Leisure Centre had closed because of the failure to maintain it, the Guildhall had a £30 million maintenance backlog, money needed to be spent on schools, roads, car parks, lamp posts and many other assets just to keep them running. The same is true of the Council’s internal systems. If the Administration had not invested in ICT then millions of pounds would continue to have been poured down the drain from inefficient practices, duplication and poor information. To be fair Labour recognised that too, which is why they started the e-government programme. It is a shame they cannot continue to support that modernisation.

Pulling the plug

Having been nice about the New Labour blog we can now get back to the business in hand and point out their inconsistency, hypocrisy and sheer brass neck once more.

In this instance it is their spin on the decision by the Administration not to proceed with phase two of e-government using Capgemini.

It has been clear for some time that this part of the scheme was unaffordable and needed to be re-thought out. In fact members of the Administration have said as much in the Evening Post. It is also the case, contrary to what is said in the Post and on the Labour blog, that phase one is likely to achieve both its objectives and the savings expected of it. Indeed, half of those ten year savings have already been identified. That fits precisely with what we said on 28 April 2006.

The Evening Post say that projected savings have been scaled back from between £30m and £50m to £26m, but that is because only half of the original scheme is being implemented as envisaged. As for Councillor Phillips' allegation that we need phase two to implement the contact centre, that is not strictly true, and of course it is always possible that phase two can be resurrected with a new partner or via a scaled back in-house option. All of these are being looked at.

The biggest laugh however is Labour's selective quotation of the Evening Post article. They note the paper's description of the decision as a u-turn but ignore completely the comment article in which the Council is praised for taking this course of action:

Pressing the pause button heralds a common sense approach from County Hall and its new chief executive, and is in marked contrast to his predecessor's head-in-the-clouds attitude to local government.

Having taken this project through a strike caused by the previous Labour administration's mishandling of the issues, and having had to mould their wild ambitions for IT into a more manageable form, we believe that our whole approach to e-government has been a common-sense approach. If Labour had had their way the Council would have been bankrupted. Now we can enjoy the benefits of improved working, better IT systems, a combined contact centre/library and financial savings. Phase two may still be possible, but we are not going to put front line services at risk to pay for it.

Learning to count again

Oh dear, presumably thinking that they are now safe from contradiction, the Inside Outers are up to their old tricks - spinning the facts in a way that fits their story rather than telling the truth.

They are fully aware that the e-government programme did not cost £90 million and that it is much more than mainframe renewal. After all it was their programme. The Administration just scaled it back to make it more affordable and deliverable.

The value of the phase one contract is £83 million over 10 years. The majority of this cost is to run the Council’s ICT Service which was transferred to Capgemini when the contract was signed. Included in that sum is £18 million, which is the cost of the new ICT system. In addition to the cost of the contract the Council will incur costs of £15 million over the 10 years, which is mainly how much the Council needs to pay to manage the programme and the outsourced ICT contract. Therefore the total value of the project is £98 million over 10 years.

The programme will be funded from a combination of the existing ICT budget totalling £53 million over ten years, new investment of £3.7 million a year and savings of £8.5 million over the period of the contract. The council has already identified half of those savings before the first year has concluded.

Labour and the Inside Outers are very fond of using the word 'incompetence'. We would suggest that the main reason for that is that they are so intimate with the concept. It was their mishandling of e-government that led to a strike and pie-in-the-sky arithmetic that we had to bring back down to earth.

It was their incompetence that led to the closure of the Leisure Centre and a bill for maintenance across the Council's property portfolio that runs into tens of millions of pounds. There is a whole catalogue of similar charges that Labour have to answer before they can go shouting the odds about others. We are sure that future posts will elucidate further.

Broad Banned

The saga of Laptop Lawrence has taken a new twist today with a front page headline grabber. The temporary sigh of relief experienced in August has been replaced with the old adage of "I have been advised to make no comment".

The touchiness shown when he appeared to threaten the Deputy Leader with his lawyer in the council chamber when discussing the Leisure Centre redevelopment has to be put on the back burner.

We hope that the inside outers will now consider a BAIWATCH in their spin off site in the same spirit of the other watches there.

This latest twist has hardly assisted the smooth running of the Llansamlet Labour Party selection procedure for 2008. We understand that this has been 'put on hold' until something or another is cleared up.

Meanwhile temperatures are rising in County Hall because curiously all Councillors have had to hand in their laptops to be locked down. In no way are we suggesting that this has got anything to do with todays developments but when you hear thing like "Why should 71 of us suffer because of one", it does indeed make the mind boggle.

John Miles is rumoured to be furious as 5 years worth of research into his family tree has been lost because his hard drive was wiped clean in the lock down. But you can't please everyone in this life can you?