Police watchdog admits over-confidence in failed IT system

Bosses at the police watchdog have admitted there was “over-confidence'' in a failed multimillion-pound computer project.

The £46 million i6 scheme had been expected to result in £200 million of savings for Police Scotland, but it collapsed amid disagreements between the force and contractors Accenture.

While the money spent on the project was protected as part of the procurement process, Andrew Flanagan, chair of the Scottish Police Authority (SPA), admitted years had been lost, and the expected savings had not been delivered.

He told Holyrood's Justice Sub-Committee on Policing that the “waterfall'' structure of the project meant its failings were not realised until the system was passed to Police Scotland for testing.

Further scrutiny of what went wrong with i6 comes after the SPA told the Public Audit Committee that 125 legacy IT systems remain in place, with an annual maintenance cost of more than £1 million.

A report by the Auditor General found there may have been “optimism bias'' and a reluctance to pause or halt the project sooner.

Mr Flanagan said: “I think there was a belief that this could be delivered. It was a very ambitious project.

“To take a single system approach to 80% of your operational needs is a bit like putting all your eggs in one basket.

“It wasn't structured as a modular approach where you could break it down to bite size chunks and deal with it in a less risky manner.

“In a lot of the aspects of this I think that over-confidence that it would be all right at the end is a justified position that the Auditor General has called out.''

He added: “I think the issue is there is a three-year gap where we are not getting the benefits that we expected.

“The reality is we still don't have a system and we're not getting the savings that we expected to deliver. So we're spending more money than we need to do at the moment.''

John Foley, SPA chief executive, said: “I think that there was over-confidence and that is a lesson learned.''

He said IT projects would “follow a different path now'', with more awareness of “where the pitfalls might lie in the future''.

Liberal Democrat MSP Liam McArthur said the over-confidence appeared to have “hamstrung'' Police Scotland financially.

“The over-optimism, that had also given rise to the expectation of savings to the order and magnitude of £200 million,'' he said.

“There wasn't a eureka moment where this was found not to be a workable solution, but before that there must have been anxieties.

“Were there attempts made to downgrade the level of efficiencies that could ever be delivered by this programme?''

Mr Foley said there had been some concerns during testing in summer 2015, but it was still “believed that the future benefits would be adequately taken in years to come''.

The SPA has stated that a single, national IT system for policing is still viable, but should happen using a phased approach.