It would take an imaginative New Labour apologist to argue that this government’s IT procurement record has been impressive. From the botched National Programme for IT in the NHS to a cancelled system for processing benefits commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions, the headlines have been unremittingly negative. Closer to home for lawyers, successive justice ministries have blown millions struggling to produce the LIBRA system for magistrates’ courts, £4m in consultants’ fees making a pilot system for the commercial courts, and hundreds of millions on the disastrous National Offender Management IT system, C-NOMIS.

A Gazette investigation that has taken eight months and repeated Freedom of Information requests to pull together may reveal some of the reasons why government is so bad at buying IT. Would you be happy if the government decided that going through a proper tender process, gaining quotes from multiple companies against a technical specification, was just too much effort; and your cash was spent on a system that cost nearly five times more than it might have done? Of course not, but it appears that this is how the MoJ bought the case and document management system for the Supreme Court. And perhaps the affair also helps to explain why the justice system now has over 30 case management systems and yet still keeps inventing new ones. In short, the taxpayer keeps shelling out again and again simply to reinvent the wheel.

The law lords moved to the new Supreme Court in October and legal services guru Professor Richard Susskind was among those to have lauded the IT system installed there. But they are unlikely to have known that the new court’s case and document management system was procured from a company that has never undertaken a UK courts IT project, and that it was bought through what seems to be a method almost devoid of best practice.

Case managementThe company tasked by the MoJ to buy the Supreme Court’s case management was Logica – one of the two companies that has an exclusive agreement to procure IT systems for the MoJ, the other being Atos. Logica and Atos won the contract to buy IT for the MoJ (then the Department for Constitutional Affairs) and its agencies (such as HM Courts Service) under the DISC contract in 2006, through which the two businesses replaced a plethora of underperforming companies.

Logica declined to answer questions put to it by the Gazette about any aspect of the Supreme Court procurement process. We understand from talking to suppliers that the company sent out invitations to tender for the Supreme Court’s IT system back in 2008, and according to FoI answers from the MoJ, four companies were ‘considered’. Two of these were small operators that had previously either built existing courts IT case management systems or pilots using relatively inexpensive software – Visionhall and Design Systems. Two were major document management businesses – Open Text and Objective.

Logica issued technical briefs to possible Supreme Court suppliers, but it seems that the tender process quickly unravelled. Objective dropped out after Logica changed the technical specification. Three companies ended up trying to pitch against the specification, but Logica only got proper pricing from one company – Open Text, the company that won the contract. It received a ballpark figure from one of the other companies, Visionhall, and nothing from Design Systems. Design Systems’ director, Bill Dowton, says he was subsequently told by Logica when he tried to offer a quote that his company’s bid had been ‘overlooked’. Despite these apparently clear deficiencies in the process, Logica then told the MoJ that it had obtained ‘indicative’ pricing and that it had completed a project costing and estimation service.

Contacted by the Gazette, Open Text could not name any UK court installation of its system. Open Text is not even the government’s preferred document management firm – that company is Documentum. After the Gazette made enquiries to Open Text, the company’s PR man declined to comment on whether Open Text had installed anything like the system now in place in the Supreme Court anywhere else. He did say that he thought similar installations were in place at the European Court of Human Rights and the Supreme Court of the Netherlands. This would be impressive, if it were accurate – though the Netherlands is using something similar, the ECHR only uses Open Text for document management.

Of course that does not necessarily mean the company was incapable of providing a good system, and there is no reason to believe that what has been created for the Supreme Court is not good, or even excellent. But that system came at a price, and must have needed a lot of expensive tinkering – FoI answers say that Logica was paid £910,000 to deliver the system, and neither Logica nor the government will confirm how much went to Open Text and how much to Logica. The MoJ also refuses to say how much the system will cost to run a year, leaving it unclear whether that sum includes up to 10% as a de facto third-party procurement fee Logica charges to the government. The fact that Logica pockets such a fee was only uncovered through FoI enquiries. In respect of what effectively amounts to a mark-up, the MoJ stated: ‘It has been accepted that there are associated costs when third-party services and/or products are purchased to meet a new requirement, that is risk in the solution, administrative costs and profit. Up to 10% is applied to pass through costs to reflect this.’

What is surprising is that no one appears to have thought that perhaps one of more than 30 case management systems already floating about in the justice system might be up to the job. At least one of these was built by Design Systems, which claims it was ‘overlooked’ before it could quote. The other small firm in the frame, Visionhall, built the successful pilot for the Commercial Court in 2006 and was involved in working on 2010’s Business Court (more of which later).

Ignoring the myriad other IT systems in play is a shame, because both Visionhall and Design Systems estimate that they could have shaved some £700,000 off the sum charged to the government for the system it eventually got, and claim their yearly maintenance charges would have been significantly lower too. As maintenance is often a percentage of build, this seems highly likely.

Whether the Supreme Court – and the taxpayer – got value for money from this whole process is highly questionable, therefore. For a start, one must query a process that pays a percentage of the total fee to the procuring company.

Prices for comparisonDesign Systems, the company that did not get to provide a price, has built several case management systems for the government, including the only system the Supreme Court’s IT was specifically built to integrate with – the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council’s system. Its director cannot understand why his company’s bid disappeared from Logica’s radar.

Dowton told the Gazette: ‘We tendered for the system for the new Supreme Court and expected, and were told, as the incumbent for half of it, that we would be on the shortlist. This never happened. We were told, before we had the opportunity to submit any pricing, and rather abruptly, that "Logica has decided not to pursue the use of your organisation’s products and services further".

‘When pressed for reasons, Logica initially refused to make any written response but in a telephone conversation said "there were other products which were a closer fit to the requirements we were looking for – both the MoJ requirements and our internal commercial needs". [When] I finally met the Logica director responsible [I] was told that our offering being "overlooked" was a mistake and that we "fell through the cracks".’

Logica refused to answer questions about why it went with the Open Text bid and closed the door on Design Systems. When the Gazette asked the MoJ to explain why it bought the most expensive kit on the table, it responded: ‘Logica carried out the procurement taking into account the business requirements and wider MoJ IT Strategy and as part of a Project Costing and Estimation Service exercise. Logica produced a product selection report which states the approach taken in regards to evaluation criteria [including] cost, strategic fit, delivery timescales, risk profile of the supplier and ability to support the system.’

The MoJ told the Gazette that ‘indicative costs for the shortlisted systems were provided to MoJ by Logica in their options evaluation and costing report’ – yet Logica only had ‘indicative’ pricing based on a ballpark figure from just one alternative supplier.

In respect of selection criteria, says the MoJ, ‘suppliers were required to respond to the Statement of Requirements document indicating how their product met the requirements out of the box or with standard configuration. They were also required to state if there were any areas that needed further bespoke work such as integration with other products or event scripting to meet the requirement.’ But it can be argued that the system procured was the least ‘fitted’ system in the mix – at the very least, Visionhall and Design Systems already understood UK courts and had built systems for them.

Logica’s refusal to comment makes it difficult to draw any definitive conclusions. But it appears that the company created a brief asking for systems that fitted as easily as possible into the UK courts, aligned as closely as possible with MoJ strategy, and then bought the most expensive system it saw from a company that had never built a system for UK courts.

External contractorsBut it would be wrong simply to direct questions at Logica. The MoJ bought into this process, and it also has a number of external contractors working for it that negotiate with external companies supplying IT. They are often the ones who liaise with companies like Logica and Open Text; they are the ones who manage the projects; and they are the ones whom civil servants trust to deliver value.

Buying something seemingly so overpriced for the Supreme Court just might have made sense if those consultants and internal civil service counterparts tasked with managing these projects thought they would use this as a pilot for a larger-scale courts case and document system.

But this seems unlikely to be the case. Right now there is yet another case and document management system being piloted in the commercial courts, which is being built from scratch based on technology that could end up costing the government a fortune. Logica has nothing to do with it, as it is being run by individual external contractors and internal staff – but yet again it seems the wheel is being reinvented.

A key point to note about the system being prepared for the new Business Court – E-working – is that it is based on Adobe commercial products, but no one has made public what Adobe might earn from a wider rollout of such a system or what it might cost to run. Nor has anyone involved in the pilot detailed why this set-up, rather than any existing or previously piloted system, was chosen. Yet when the Gazette attended a stakeholders’ meeting on the project, statements were made about how the system could be ‘extended’ beyond London, possibly into the key regions.

With luck, someone will read this and ask pointed questions about why the case and document management pilot for the Business Court looks set to cost millions, when perhaps it too could be built on systems already in existence, for a fraction of the cost.