Fears were correct – police IT faults DID potentially put people at risk
Since iOPS was launched the Observer and our sister paper the Manchester Evening News has been inundated with worried approaches from police. This week a critical report said failings had potentially put vulnerable people at risk.
reports on a story with far-reaching consequences
IT may seem, on the face of it, like a niche issue to keep writing about. But the story of Greater Manchester Police’s new Capita-built computer system has potentially farreaching consequences, for the officers using it, for the public, the taxpayer and for the politicians charged with overseeing the force.
In the eight months since the iOPS system was launched last July, we have been inundated with worried approaches from police officers and civilian staff, as well as some council officials, councillors and MPs. Some even walked up to me in the street to say how important the issue was. Many concerns have continued to be raised right up to this week.
From the outset, GMP’s line on this has been that the problems the new system has experienced had been predicted. The very first statement I received on the issue, on August 7 last year, said the roll-out was ‘progressing as expected’ given that it forms part of an enormous IT transformation.
In retrospect, it’s hard to believe that was really the case. In fact, as a report by the policing inspectorate highlighted yesterday, the system was initially unable to get documents across to the court service, a situation that had not been anticipated. Neither was it flagging thousands of child protection cases or domestic abuse incidents with safeguarding teams.
Back in the summer, the Chief Constable was clear: ‘No one is at risk,’ he said on Twitter. Subsequent statements from GMP also reiterated repeatedly that they ‘do not accept that children are at risk as a result of the new system.’ But worried officers still kept blowing the whistle.
At the end of September, a report from GMP to councillors on the region’s police and crime panel was unimpressed. ‘Negative media attention’ had ‘not been helpful,’ it said, having often relied on ‘unreliable or uniformed [sic] sources.’ (This was correct only inasmuch as they were indeed uniformed.)
A few weeks later - four months after the system had been launched - the inspectorate found much of what they had been warning was actually correct.
In reality GMP was only then discovering exactly what risk was hiding in an enormous backlog of crimes that had built up on the back of problems with the new network.
The force ‘doesn’t yet have a full understanding of the nature of the threat and risk that all the backlogs contain,’ said inspectors upon completing their visit in November.
More than 600 open crimes, 74 of which had not been allocated for investigation by officers, had not been moved over to the new system at all. Nearly 700 domestic violence cases were waiting to be risk assessed, some of which had been there for 100 days.
There had been a 50pc drop in the referral of highrisk domestic violence cases to partner agencies tasked with safeguarding. In one part of Greater Manchester, nearly three quarters of child protection cases had not been referred to social services in the first few weeks of the system being live. It took three months, according to HMI, for the force to come up with a new ‘business process’ to get around that.
Those things do not appear to have been ‘progressing as expected.’ If they were, you have to wonder why the senior safeguarding officials who wrote to the force at the end of August reeled off a host of ways in which the system wasn’t working from their point of view, specifically where domestic abuse and child protection was concerned.
There were also ‘risks’ inherent in officers being unable to find correct information on the system, found HMI.
In short, HMI found the new system had, in fact, potentially put people at risk. And staff felt they were being blamed for its problems.
All this and more had been persistently highlighted by officers. Going back through those messages, it is striking how many said they were not only fearful of the risks they were seeing, but also the risk of losing their jobs: several said they had been told explicitly they would face misconduct proceedings if they were found to have spoken to us.
Bolton West MP Chris Green told colleagues in January that he had been told the same thing by officers.
This is not intended to be an exercise in attacking a force for trying to roll out a new - and by all accounts overdue - IT upgrade. But there are surely lessons to be learned in the way it has played out, as well as a myriad of unanswered questions about why.
Among the Freedom of Information requests I have had rejected, for example, was a request for details of the iOPS procurement exercise; how much the awarded contracts were worth; any in-built penalties; and who all the different elements had been awarded to. Virtually all public reports or documents that went to the thenpolice commissioner, Tony Lloyd, about the system’s procurement have vanished from the internet.
Rumours abound within the force about how much the bill for iOPS really is, once overtime, temporary staffing costs - incurred as a result of the backlogs - and the extension of old software licenses is taken into account. Overtime in August alone shot up by £500,000. But GMP insist the project is within budget, which leaves an obvious question: will these costs somehow be recovered from one or more contractor? Nobody seems to have an answer.
Which brings us to the mayor.
In a few weeks’ time, the policing precept will go up again, to pay for more police officers.
“In terms of my almost three years in this role I am in no doubt whatsoever that the top priority of the Greater Manchester public is more police on the streets,” the mayor told the budget meeting of the police and crime panel in January.
How much will they be on the streets, though? Her Majesty’s Inspectorate warns that neighbourhood policing resources had been diverted in order to deal with the backlog that had built up thanks to iOPS. While GMP may insist the system will eventually make processes slicker, many officers on the frontline remain unconvinced.
Or, to take the precept rise of two years ago, that paid for scores of new call handlers. Yet the call time improvements this year ‘were not as great as expected,’ according to the mayor’s budget report a few weeks ago...because of ‘issues faced following the roll-out of iOPS.’
We can’t, at the moment, even tell what GMP’s performance figures look like. Also because of iOPS.
The mayor, however, is elected as the responsible person for that. So while he may have said little on it publicly so far, all the signs are that the region’s caucus of Tory MPs have now got it on their radar. This political issue is not likely to just quietly disappear.
Yet the biggest lesson of all in this is one that neither force command nor the mayor’s office has articulated, so let’s just say it.
The whistleblowers were right.