City council rejects inquiry into £130M Oracle IT disaster Birmingham City Council voted down proposals to hold a full independent inquiry into its disastrous introduction of an Oracle ERP system, which "effectively crippled" its ability to manage and report on its finances. Late last month, a report from external auditors found that the English council's effort to replace an aging …
I like (sarcasm) my Conservatives councillors, up for re-election in May: blaming Labour for the cancellation of the local hospital upgradeable, not appreciating it being pointed out that Rishi was the one who first announced the go ahead and then more quietly cancelled the upgrade programme on grounds of affordability…
I like your idea and it is a sound one and very logical but...
It doesn't work like that. If it did then every NHS trust could do the same with their systems and adopt another trusts systems.
When I were a young lad council systems weren't online. The systems behind them of course were computer based (Hey, I'm not that old...) but they were accounts packages and various CRM systems etc... Most of them were more than likely built in house originally. Councils have been around for a very long time. In fact they were here when we first started using computers in the workplace and before. Therefore like the NHS each council evolved it's own systems and practices over time with a big mash of systems. Those systems were then migrated to other systems then online and that's where they are today.
If you tried to replicate one council into another it wouldn't just be the systems. There would be huge training requirements and everything else that comes with it such as changing processes etc...
Therefore the logical option whilst not very effective is to take an off the shelf system and try to use that. What else can they actually do? I agree there is negligence but not for the reason of trying but for the poor implementation and mismanagement.
The same logic I have previously applied to the NHS applies here. Rather than everyone doing their own thing get one council to migrate and perfect it then apply it to all in a controlled manner. I would even say to the likes of Oracle or whoever they choose that you don't get paid till you perfect one and then you can reap the benefits of running them all. Sadly government lacks the joined up thinking this requires.
> huge training requirements
I experienced major system overhauls while working in tech. Usually it took 2-4 weeks to adapt. People were reluctant first, but there was an ultimatum and deadlines for the change. So suddenly everything worked. The same requirement to adapt is necessary when changing jobs.
I assume intelligent people working in councils. So a political will is necessary. Threaten layoffs for those unable to adapt and proceed. Two months later everything will work normal.
Why? Are they only training one person? I didn't realise councils only employed a single person and not a whole host of departments and functions. I honestly never knew. Thank you for correcting me.
My council employs over 7 thousand people. Good luck training 7000 people in 2-4 weeks. You got the trainers to do that?
or are you thinking about some customer service system upgrade where you are training them to enter notes on a system that you can send out instructions in a word document? Do you think councils are just customer service agents? I'm guessing you have never done a complete system overhaul in a complex organisation. In fact no one has within 2-4 weeks of training.
Just ask Wiggle Chain Reaction Cycles
https://engage.oracle.com/kirklands/items/online-sports-retailer-wiggle-uses-oracle-to-support-double-digit-growth
https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/31/wiggle_it_infrastructure_sale/
This sort of thing is constant in the public sector though, constant re-orgs of the NHS/police/fire services etc with no thought to IT or contracts. See also the ESN fiasco with replacing radios with 4G and the move to national rather than regional police and fire services in Scotland.
Just reminiscing but, back in 1970 I had a job at the Debenhams (a now defunct UK department store chain) computing centre during university holidays. The computer occupied the entire ground floor of one of the office blocks (I don't recall what make/model it was); two floors above was a large office full of young ladies (mostly) punching cards. One of my jobs whilst working there was, every Tuesday, to collate and check the sales figures for each department in every store (posted in the overnight mail) - then deliver them to the punch girls. I couldn't leave those evenings until I received the printout of the results - usually OK but, one week, the entire batch run was rejected. Cue an IT team panic - around 9pm we discovered the problem - the previous week's figures had been entered with the wrong date (later than it should have been) and the program's error checking threw out the latest run because it had an earlier date. Easily fixed but the incident stuck in my memory.
But, to the point here: the county council offices were just across the road and a line had been run whereby the council was able to rent computer time overnight, when we (Debenhams) weren't running anything. Probably that council's first foray into computers... (the job was certainly mine).
>” There would be huge training requirements and everything else that comes with it such as changing processes etc...”
I suspect the issue is cost. Remember companies complained about Windows and MS Office changes and the training requirements. We have now got to the point where employers blindly rollout new versions of desktop software with zero user training and expect users to just get on with it. I suspect this mindset has also infected the rollout of large business systems which by their nature will also transform the way things are done.
The use of off-the-shelf packages probably also feeds into this mindset ie. Birmingham is probably recruiting users with Oracle ERP experience and simple expect them to know the councils customisations. I have had this with Quick Books, the features are there to support project based forecasting and accounting, however, they require setting up and a little effort when entering data to populate data fields. It surprised me to discover the accountancy company my client was using and who sold them Quick Books had no knowledge (helpful to me) of these features.
Fun fact, I was looking at the obfuscated code for <major system currently used in many UK councils> and found a copyright notice* from 1982 attributed to Bull.
*I'm not entierly sure if a simple SQL query to select financial values between 2 dates is actually copyrightable, but here we are.
Let's not have a local investigation into whether there was anything illegal happening within the council structure because:
"On the issue of the possible offenses, I think this council should remember that this is not a court of law, and that those matters are rightly and properly pursued by the council's legal team,"
So, have the council's legal team been instructed to conduct an investigation this with respect to illegalities? It appears not as there has been no local investigation to raise specific legal concerns to be investigated by the legal team. So that's ok then - Procedure 37a subsection 2: "Beware of the Leopard: ensuring one's own arse is well covered before opening the basement door" successfully enacted ...
Has any other project, even some of the gloriously awful military and government ones, actually managed to go 10x overbudget?
10x over budget? Yes! Another Council: East Sussex.
Reported in Private Eye* this week is their shambles over an urgent bridge redevelopment. Slated in 2017 to cost £2m, no work was done until 2021 by which time the budget cost had risen to £10.5m. It's currently calculated to cost £21m and is "no longer viable". The council has, however, apparently spent £4.6m with nothing to show for it except a set of temporary traffic lights.
*Issue 1644, Page 15, Rotten Boroughs
"Has any other project, even some of the gloriously awful military and government ones, actually managed to go 10x overbudget?"
I'm sure there was an NHS IT project some years back that cost the taxpayer somewhere north of about £350m that didn't amount to much in the way of change.
> Has any other project, even some of the gloriously awful military and government ones, actually managed to go 10x overbudget?
10x overbudget is quite a hurdle: HS2 (London-Birmingham) was originally forecast to be £9.6bn and is currently projected to cost £66+ bn… The wry laugh is that if they had put it in tunnels from the outset it would probably have cost less.
@Andy the cat
Remember there is an enquiry already in progress. And the commissioners can basically tell the councillors what to do in certain specific areas at present so I assume that they would have just blocked another enquiry if the vote had gone that way.
(FWIW I would actually like some kind of public hearings about the extent to which the Oracle system is able to work out of the box with the requirements of a UK based public corporation).
"Has any other project, even some of the gloriously awful military and government ones, actually managed to go 10x overbudget?"
Pretty sure that the total cost of my last private sector employer's SAP debacle went more than 10x over budget - in 2011 they did an SAP "upgrade" with International Buggerups as SI, and that initiated a chain of IT and data fiascos that lasted until 2018 and had a total cost of around a billion quid and led to the company being dismantled, with all costs written off.
This post has been deleted by its author
"Has any other project, even some of the gloriously awful military and government ones, actually managed to go 10x overbudget?"
Only 4x over budget and 7 years late (at the moment) but the only operational fiasco ferry sprang a leak this week after 2 whole months of service , so give it time and it could get there - the second ferry is still under construction.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr7218d50m0o
Refusing to hold an enquiry does rather give the impression there's something they want to keep out of view. The court of public opinion will^H^H^H^H has already decided that this was an omnishambles of the first order and, I suspect, there's very little trust in the council. Refusing to hold an investigation will only undermine any remaining public confidence.
I'm reminded of what Sir Humphry said in Yes, Minister: only hold an enquiry when you already know what the outcome will be.
"Refusing to hold an enquiry does rather give the impression"
It certainly does. Nothing screams "guilty and we know it" more than this.
But on the other hand, if they're guilty and they know it (clap your hands) then voting to have an enquiry would be like turkeys voting for Christmas.
"I suspect, there's very little trust in the council"
But what can be done? Can constituents call for a vote of no confidence to move to kick them out?
Quote from OA. My emphasis.
"However, the UK government has appointed commissioners and launched a local inquiry to investigate the cause of the difficulties faced by the local authority, including the Oracle project and the equal pay dispute, both of which contributed to the council becoming effectively bankrupt in autumn 2023."
The UK government has appointed commissioners and launched a local inquiry
This. How many inquiries do we need?
Another inquiry adds more costs on residents, won't have any additional benefit, and may just drag the whole sorry fiasco out longer.
This isn't Conservatives fighting for residents; it's Conservatives attacking Labour. If the proposal had been accepted they would have delighted in having added to the cost which they would blame on Labour. But they knew it would be rejected and just did it anyway as a 'what have they got to hide?' dog whistle to provoke a pile-on.
Conservatives are more interested in stoking the flames of anger and discrediting Labour than having the problems resolved.
"But what can be done? Can constituents call for a vote of no confidence to move to kick them out?"
Not outside normal process council elections. Last full election was May 2022, and the full depth of the Oracle debacle wasn't public knowledge at that time. Next full council election is (I think) 2026. Given entrenched voting patterns and the shortness of public memory I'll be surprised if many existing councillors lose their seats. Let's face it, after the chaos years of the last Conservative government, and the turncoat behaviours of the LibDems when they were in a national coalition it's not like there's any party that is a bastion of responsibility and competence, is it?
This is starting to feel more and more criminal the longer it goes on.
Ultimately there needs to be an inquiry. The £130m figure is banded about because on the face of it, it's not real money. No one really can quantify what £130 million is. We all know what a £20 note looks like, we know what £200 looks like. But £130m? Not really. But that money comes from the residents of Birmingham and they don't have a choice in the matter. We're all paying the council tax (which they want to increase above the limit) and if we don't pay it we go to prison. Every one of the residents knows what £1,500 a year looks like as they know what £150 out of their account looks like each month. But the fuckers in "control" of the council aren't interested because it's not their £150 a month. It's not their £1,500 a year. It's never been their £130m spunked on fucking nothing.
Heads need to roll, I think people need to have their collars felt, porridge should be given.
Is it a scam or is it fraud though? It feels far more like fraud.
Given that because of the new system they haven't been able to do proper audits for the last couple of years (you know, the sort of audits that would detect any fraud), you might very well think that this stinks to high heaven, but I couldn't possibly comment...
'"the administration cabinet delegates to senior officers and senior officers delegate to junior officers and officers below them delegate it to a consultant. [...] And all in all, no one is taking responsibility," he said."
In my professional experience this is how councils seem to work as normal. I remember working with one local authority where for the entire (then 10 year) life of PCI-DSS, compliance had consisted of filling in a quarterly spreadsheet of "progress towards compliance" without making any enquiries about what was really being done (actually, nothing at all). And the delegation tree didn't stop at the boundaries for the council. The first time the relevant acquiring bank challenged this bullshit was when the officer "responsible" for completing the report forgot to sign the cover sheet -- it was the absence of the signature, not the nonsense in the document that triggered the challenge.
Delegation is not abdication...
The senior bods *are* responsible for what the junior ones do whether they wish to accept that or not.
However if you fire them all and start again will you get a better outcome? Unlikely, the next shower will be just as useless as the current crop.
Yes there should be a full independent inquiry. It’s unacceptable that councils think they can audit and regulate themselves.
However, the bigger issue is, they still can’t audit all of the money they’ve spent since the system went live.
No wonder they don’t want a full inquiry.
Not sure why a councillor was on a "board" for the project when councillors aren't supposed to interfere with council business.
Anyway. The issue here should 100% be investigated. I've seen issues like this before in local gov when working for one. Annon as still do. A council that decided to move to Google because it was a pet project of a new director. The new director bought in a consultants that hadn't tendered who the director personally new, which is against the rules but this was brushed under the carpet by the equally corrupt CEO (who covered up asbestos dumping issues. Fired people lower down who then were rehired on appeal due to illegal firings). The consultants bought it to convince the councillors the move to Google would be cheaper were lied to. The report, that is publicly available, claimed 365 would be more expensive as they took the enterprise price, ignoring the council got a discount due to being local gov. Not only this, but the e-mail migration Microsoft said they'd do for free, Google charged £20k, which was also left out of the report. They've now been with Google for 10 years and its cost way more than if they'd moved to 365. All exec and managers of the digital team were all complicit in the deception.
During the move it became a bit like a Trump world, before Trump. If you weren't on board with the move, you found yourself made redundant. Everyone left either kept silent or were kissing the ring of said director. Issues were pointed out, security issues and more, all ignored by the exec team. And this is where it will lie with this council, it will be the exec team ignoring all advice given to them by their own IT team. Its always the way. Exec teams rely on consultants who the taxpayer have to pay and ignore advice from their own local IT. This will never change unless people are fully investigated and fired. But instead, they'll be given "golden handshakes" to go away and keep quiet. People low down always end up fired, the execs always get given golden handshakes to leave. Its the most annoying part of being in local gov.
This is the same council where all the DPOs left due to poor management by an incompetent legal head of service. Said legal manager decided "Maybe we can just not replace the DPOs and save money". Said manager is in legal, yes legal, yet doesn't appear to understand its a LEGAL requirement for a council to have a DPO.
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