Paper-assisted digital - what happens to Digital by Default when personalities collide
- Summary:
- The clash of personalities and priorities involved in Defra's ongoing payments systems upgrade has taken its toll on Digital by Default and the taxpayer. A long read, but important.
Personal rifts, disfunctional and counter productive behaviours and senior staff unable to work together, which we find entirely unacceptable.
That was the opening salvo from Meg Hillier MP, chair of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee as she kicked off a two-hour grilling of parties involved in the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) development of new IT systems for payments of subsidies under the European Commission’s (EC) Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) Delivery Program.
While there was a lot of discussion in the ensuing couple of hours about the intricacies of the CAP, payments and billing and the challenges of ‘moving goalposts’ as a result of the EC changing the rules, at the heart of the session was an expose of the challenges of digital transformation meets ‘old school IT’.
Defra has, according to Hillier:
an inglorious history of failure when it comes to developing systems to support subsidy payments to farmers.
But this is really the story of a wider ‘turf war’ between digital incomers from the Government Digital Service (GDS) and their colleagues at the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) locking horns. This isn’t supposed to happen, noted Hillier disapprovingly:
Government widely struggles to deliver large and complex digital programs well, an issue the Government Digital Service is meant to be addressing.
The PAC hearing was a fascinating insight into the cultural challenges of introducing digital transformation into the risk-adverse, conservative (with a small c) culture of UK government, where the ‘not invented here’ mentality crashes headlong into the revolutionary zeal of digital outsiders.
While there have been many rumors swirling around similar clashes around the Universal Credit program, this is the first full-scale ‘opening of the kimono’ to public gaze. The trigger for this was the scathing National Audit Office report last week which savaged the progress of an IT refresh.
Public sector IT programs going awry are sadly still not uncommon, but what caught the NAO’s eye this time around was the culture clash and the behavior of the leadership teams. NAO boss Amyas Morse stated bluntly:
We very rarely indeed write reports that relate to personal behaviour like this. This is a most unusual event to have such extensive comment on behaviors which were distressing to staff and visibly confrontational.
Childish spat?
At the heart of this was what Hillier dismissed as a “frankly childish spat” between Liam Maxwell, Chief Technology Officer for the UK government, and Mark Grimshaw, Chief Executive of the Rural Payments Agency, which is responsible for filtering European cash to farmers.
Richard Bacon MP, a long-standing member of the PAC and ferocious critic of the old-style of ‘big ticket’ IT programs across the UK public sector, accused Maxwell of being:
Mr Fancy Pants, coming in from outside with your digital dreams.
For his part, Maxwell conceded that there were cultural clashes between the GDS way and the RPA, but argued that his role is “to challenge and support”, admitting:
I am never going to defend myself as the most conciliatory person.
I would not call myself Mr Fancy Pants, but I am somebody who has come in to support and help and sometimes when someone comes in from the centre in that way people do find that it’s difficult.
He added:
I don't really want to sound as if I'm being glib by saying I'm from the centre and when someone from the centre turns up it is difficult. But when someone turns up, with that little time to go on a programme which didn't have a walkthrough product, clearly there were very clear conversations about what we needed to do to fix it.
Maxwell was drafted in as Senior Reporting Officer with only 8 weeks to go before the registration deadline on the program in May this year. He admitted to the PAC that there were cultural divisions from the off:
They [the RPA] were culturally very different. People dressed differently. People used different methods of reporting, much more traditional ways of reporting of management information. The programme itself used modern digital techniques to help report what was going on. And I think people found this very difficult, as a different way of existing or a different way of managing a project.
There are two sides to every ‘personality clash’ of course and it’s clear from yesterday’s testimony that RPA’s Grimshaw needs to take some share of the blame here, something he acknowledged, albeit couched in verbose civil-service-ese:
One of the things that I regret about the development of the program over time was my personal inability to be able to explain the requirements of the program in terms of the key controls versus any of the ancillary activity, which is a frustration that I still bear.
What that apparently means is that he and Maxwell didn't see eye-to-eye on the direction of the program. Seemingly only vaguely recalling the situation, Grimshaw conceded:
I'm fairly sure that that would have led to some quite interesting and robust exchanges of comments between Liam and I and other senior people in the program.
Or if you like, there were some serious shouting matches between the two. For her part, former Defra Permanent Secretary Bronwyn Hill pitched herself as peace broker in all this:
I would say that I encouraged people to take a more collaborative approach to their leadership roles.
I didn't want to stifle the tension because we had to get these issues out on the table: what was the right balance between digital innovation and the tight controls of the EU audits? That is a massive tension in this program – it's a big challenge and I don't want to underestimate that.
But I was disappointed that the enormous of time, commitment and energy put into by everyone I knew on this program, was not always reflected in the behavior of senior leaders.
But both Maxwell and Grimshaw insisted that despite the problems, the best interests of their clients - the farmers looking for much needed subsidy payments - were not forgotten. Grimshaw said:
At no time, was there a focus on anything other than delivering a successful outcome for customers, for users and for taxpayers.
That wasn’t good enough to the NAO’s Morse, who in an unusual intervention, interrupted Maxwell’s testimony to the PAC to insist:
Just skirting around it with a bit of chat is not going to be good enough. You need to speak to this issue. It's not good enough to just explain it by saying 'we co-operated well'. You need to answer the question. You need to explain what was going on more frankly.
Others on the PAC were also less than impressed by Maxwell and Grimshaw’s attempt at a united front, with Stephen Phillips MP sharply citing the NAO report’s reference to:
Inappropriate behavior at the top - that’s you two!….I want to hear why both of you are still in post.
Digital by paper
As for Defra, current permanent secretary Claire Moriarty, who took up her role in August and inherited the current mess, said the department is now “absolutely focused" on improving the system, adding:
I do accept we haven't delivered our ambition of a fully digital service from day one.
Her predecessor Hill added that one reason for the problems had been the inability to attract enough digital experts into government to deliver on the ambitions. This is down to civil service pay rates, she claimed, that can’t match private sector rates for IT experts.
We were buying in a very hot IT market and some people choose to stay outside the civil service and earn higher amounts there.
The end result of all this is what Grimshaw attempted to position as evolutionary thinking:
We’ve evolved [Digital by Default] so it is now Digital by Design, Practical by Implementation. Those farmers who need to apply with paper because they don’t have broadband or access to the system will be able to do so.
Others would call that a hurriedly cobbled together compromise.
What makes this worse is that this was supposed to be one of the Cabinet Office’s Digital Exemplars, best practice examples of how to do digital transformation. It is however, said MP Bacon, actually an exemplar of what not to do.
My take
Paper-assisted digital.
Three words that sum up the failures at the heart of this fiasco.
But the real problem here is the fundamental breakdown of the relationships between the stakeholders and leaders, the digital champions and the ‘not the way we do things around here’ administrators.
For what it’s worth, Maxwell’s emphasis on improving the front end service delivery seems to me, as an outsider, to have been the right one, albeit one that was emphasized too late in the day.
On the other hand, Grimshaw’s repeated stance that there was no requirement from the EC to focus on this looks like defensive bureaucratic nitpicking to excuse not changing the way things are done.
He insisted, in various forms at various points during the PAC session:
There is no requirement from the Commission for us to capture data digitally.
Oh well, then - let’s not bother, eh? Even though there are efficiency and economic benefits to be had from such an approach, as Grimshaw himself conceded.
Is this still the prevailing civil service mindset? Interestingly, Maxwell admitted during his testimony that this sort of ‘resistance’ is something that has been experienced across all of the 25 Exemplar programs, but that different departments reacted in different ways, with some being more open to change than others.
I fear we will be here again. The road to digital transformation in government is a bumpy one. But Richard Bacon MP is correct : this is a great exemplar - of what has to change! No-one emerged from yesterday's hearing unscathed. Maxwell concluded:
Had we had our time again, we could have gone in earlier and in a more collegiate way.
Meanwhile, one last thought: no disciplinary action has been taken against anyone - anyone! - involved in a mess that’s cost the taxpayers millions of pounds…so far. The civil service view is apparently that 'punishment' comes in the form of reputational damage rather than, for example, being sacked.
A comforting thought if you're a farmer getting a nasty phone call from the bank this winter, no doubt.