Cloud computing, and GDS's fantasy strategy

For some time now, the Government Digital Service (GDS) have made the meaning of their digital-by-default agenda clear – they want the UK to be like Estonia.

It is thanks to the fact that practically every service in Estonia is delivered over the web that, back in 2007, Russia was able to bring the country to its knees in a matter of days. If GDS succeed with their "modernisation" plans, there will be nothing to stop that happening here in the UK.

GDS are in awe of the financial success and popularity of Apple, Amazon, eBay/PayPal, Google and Facebook. With no experience of government behind them, the over-promoted software engineers at the head of GDS want to bring their heroes' tricks to the delivery of public services in the UK.

Sensible people will see Facebook et al as latter-day Pied Pipers of Hamelin – sensible people, including the tens of thousands of public servants who will be laid off and replaced by GDS's computers when government is, as they say, "transformed".

Many of these organisations are famous for avoiding tax on their UK profits and for using their near-monopolies to tyrannise their suppliers and to milk their customers. But GDS somehow maintain their naïve veneration and on 6 November 2012 they published their Government Digital Strategy.

This fantasy strategy is an elaboration of Martha Lane Fox's ideas, set out in her October 2010 letter to Francis Maude, Directgov 2010 and beyond: revolution not evolution. Ms Lane Fox is the Prime Minister's digital champion, she's a historian, and when she says "revolution" she means it.

Her revolutionary fervour is carried over into last week's GDS strategy, which Sir Bob Kerslake – head of the home civil service, permanent secretary at the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) and previously the chief executive of first the London Borough of Hounslow and then Sheffield City Council – has greeted with a post on GDS's blog, Welcoming the Digital Strategy:

Our reform plan also made a clear commitment to improve the quality of the government’s digital services, and to do this by publishing a Government Digital Strategy setting out how we would support the transformation of digital services [how does publishing a wishlist improve the quality of public services?]. We fulfilled that commitment yesterday with the launch of the Government Digital Strategy, Digital Efficiency Report and Digital Landscape Report and I very much welcome their publication.

But why? Why does Sir Bob "welcome" this emmental cheese of a strategy? It's full of holes. Consider cloud computing for example.

The Executive summary of the Government Digital Strategy tells us that:

Government is improving the way it provides information by moving to a single website, GOV.UK. Transactional services now present the biggest opportunity to save people time and save the government money [the writers mean "save the people money", the government doesn't have any money, only the people do].

GOV.UK is the implementation of Martha Lane Fox's dream, a single government domain, one website, on which all government information is to be published, and on which we will all communicate with the government via "transactional services".

Every central government website is in the process of being re-written and subsumed in GOV.UK. No more HMRC.gov.uk, no more Education.gov.uk, etc ... One day there will just be GOV.UK. Why? What's the point of all this energetic and agreeable re-writing of what has already been written? The answer has never been made clear.

How many government transactions will GOV.UK need to carry out every year? According to the Government Digital Strategy:

There is a huge volume of transactions with government. There were around 1 billion individual transactions a year with central government departments in 2011/12. This number rises to nearer 1.5 billion when other governmental organisations such as local government are taken into account ...

Clearly GOV.UK is intended to be a remarkably important national asset. It will act as the gateway or hub through which personal and corporate tax returns are made, passports are applied for, the electoral roll is maintained, benefits are paid, student loans are granted, vehicle excise duty is paid, licences are applied for, and so on – 1½ billion transactions a year.

Further on in the Government Digital Strategy we find:

Principle: Broaden the range of those tendering to supply digital services including more small and medium sized enterprises

and

The ICT Strategy stressed the need for government to procure its technical infrastructure - its servers, internet hosting, etc - as commodity services. The CloudStore framework is an example of this shift, with over 300 suppliers offering cloud-based solutions on a pay-as-you-use basis, with a maximum 12 months contract. The learning from the development of the CloudStore framework will be fed into other digital procurement and commissioning reform.

So-called "cloud computing" is being championed by Whitehall's G-Cloud team (government cloud) and they have provided an on-line shop, the CloudStore, making it easy for central and local government to buy IT services. It's just like using Amazon. There's even a little supermarket trolley to fill up.

GDS have elected to host GOV.UK in the cloud. And elected to do so, with a company called Skyscape Cloud Services Ltd whose wares are for sale on CloudStore.

Skyscape is a startup so young that it has yet to file any accounts with Companies House. It has filed an Annual Return, though, according to which Skyscape has no company secretary and only one director, a Mr Jeremy Robin Sanders, who is also the only shareholder in the company, holding all £1,000-worth of ordinary shares issued and fully paid-up.

GDS have decided to entrust an important national asset and 1½ billion transactions a year to Mr Sanders, a decision described in an open letter as "dangerous, imprudent, ill-advised, unprofessional, wrong-headed, unbusinesslike, undignified and irresponsible". No response has been received from GDS.

HMRC also have contracted with Skyscape, to store all the data currently held at their hundreds of local offices around the country – presumably all our personal and corporate tax returns and correspondence. In future, Mr Sanders will be responsible for the lot.

HMRC are a sensible lot, you may say to yourself, so perhaps GDS's GOV.UK hosting decision isn't so dangerous, imprudent, ill-advised, unprofessional, wrong-headed, unbusinesslike, undignified and irresponsible, after all? Maybe. Or are HMRC being dangerous, imprudent, ill-advised, unprofessional, wrong-headed, unbusinesslike, undignified and irresponsible, too?

The matter was taken up with HMRC. And they responded. They say that:

The G-Cloud was created by the Cabinet Office and the Government Procurement Services (GPS) ... In order to deliver services through G-Cloud, all suppliers on the Framework, Skyscape included, were required to meet a set of mandatory criteria set out by GPS including their financial standing and Experian risk assessments. Additionally, HMRC carried out its own standard taxation and financial compliance checks  before awarding the contract and Skyscape passed the standard set by the G-Cloud Framework and HMRC.

To which, all one can say is that there must be something wrong with the Cabinet Office, GPS and HMRC procurement criteria if they determine that it is safe to store all our records with a one-man startup with no track record.

The Skyscape contracts are subject to review by CESG, the information assurance arm of GCHQ. There is that one hurdle still to jump. Given that Skyscape's landlord advertises the address of the Skyscape data centre on its website and even provides a map how to get there, it's hard to see how Skyscape can pass CESG's security tests.

If CESG veto Skyscape, well and good. If not, that's another organisation to add to the dangerous, imprudent, ill-advised, unprofessional, wrong-headed, unbusinesslike, undignified and irresponsible list.

Suppose that the GDS and HMRC contracts weren't with Skyscape but with a bigger company – would that make them better?

No.

For several reasons.

The biggest supplier of cloud computing services in the world is Amazon. Reason #1, you will have noted Amazon's appearance in front of the Public Accounts Committee yesterday:

Andrew Cecil, head of public policy at Amazon, was lambasted by Mrs Hodge for avoiding the Committee’s questions. She said she would “summon” Amazon’s most senior executives as a matter of priority to make up for Mr Cecil’s “unacceptable nonsence.”

Amazon are in the dock, along with Google and Starbucks, for tax avoidance and one member of the Committee, Charlie Elphicke, was moved to suggest that:

The tax abuse can be stopped. We can tighten UK tax presence rules, we can stop the 'expenses' used to cut business tax bills in the UK and we should refuse Government contracts for companies that don't pay a fair share of tax in the UK.

We the public all have to pay our taxes, so should Amazon and Google and all of GDS's friends and Starbucks. If moral indignation gets us nowhere, perhaps a ban on government contracts would do the trick.

Reason #2, cloud computing is normally described as being like a utility, you only pay for the services you use, you don't have to pay for any overhead. It's a "no-brainer", as GDS put it.

It certainly is. No brains at all. Someone must be paying for the overhead. Whether Amazon or Skyscape. And they're going to pass the cost on to their customers. Whether HMRC or GDS – ultimately, us.

We've just had a month of daily news about how expensive our utilities are, gas and electricity, about how there's nothing even the prime Minister can do about it and, just yesterday, there was an allegation of utility price-fixing à la LIBOR. The utility model is not an attractive one. Which may be why GDS have taken to describing cloud computing as "commodity services" rather than the previously more conventional "utility services".

Reason #3, "cloud computing" means losing control. You don't own the computers. You don't own the buildings. You don't vet or train or manage the staff. The staff can be anywhere in the world, as can the computers, and your data with them, beyond your control, beyond the reach of English law. Ask the G-Cloud team about that, and they haven't got any answer. They're just following the latest fashion.

GDS have a weaselly argument that Whitehall is no different, they don't have to have secure data centres staffed by their own people, they can be just like all the other organisations in the world – and they use cloud computing. It sounds modest, doesn't it, and realistic.

But it's utterly mendacious. Some organisations do use cloud computing, some don't.

Ask a lawyer. Ask a lawyer about the legal problems. The data protection issues. The jurisdiction problems. The compliance problems. The commercial problems – what do you do if your supplier goes bust or is taken over by Huawei? Most of all, though, ask your lawyer if his or her firm uses cloud computing. Lawyers have to keep their clients' data under control and confidential. They can't do that if they haven't got a clue where in the world the data is or who's taking what backups. They'd go out of business the day after signing up with a cloud computing services supplier.

Whitehall also has a duty to keep control of our data and to keep it confidential. Cloud computing is an abrogation of that duty.

Reason #4, what does Larry Ellison, the President of Oracle, all $41 billion of him, have to say about cloud computing?

Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

What do you know that Larry Ellison doesn't?

Where there should be answers to these questions in the Government Digital Strategy there are just holes. Revolution is proposed with no justification. And yet Sir Bob, the head of the home civil service, welcomes this fantasy.

Cloud computing, and GDS's fantasy strategy

For some time now, the Government Digital Service (GDS) have made the meaning of their digital-by-default agenda clear – they want the UK to be like Estonia.

It is thanks to the fact that practically every service in Estonia is delivered over the web that, back in 2007, Russia was able to bring the country to its knees in a matter of days. If GDS succeed with their "modernisation" plans, there will be nothing to stop that happening here in the UK.

GDS are in awe of the financial success and popularity of Apple, Amazon, eBay/PayPal, Google and Facebook. With no experience of government behind them, the over-promoted software engineers at the head of GDS want to bring their heroes' tricks to the delivery of public services in the UK.

Sensible people will see Facebook et al as latter-day Pied Pipers of Hamelin – sensible people, including the tens of thousands of public servants who will be laid off and replaced by GDS's computers when government is, as they say, "transformed".

Many of these organisations are famous for avoiding tax on their UK profits and for using their near-monopolies to tyrannise their suppliers and to milk their customers. But GDS somehow maintain their naïve veneration and on 6 November 2012 they published their Government Digital Strategy.

This fantasy strategy is an elaboration of Martha Lane Fox's ideas, set out in her October 2010 letter to Francis Maude, Directgov 2010 and beyond: revolution not evolution. Ms Lane Fox is the Prime Minister's digital champion, she's a historian, and when she says "revolution" she means it.

Her revolutionary fervour is carried over into last week's GDS strategy, which Sir Bob Kerslake – head of the home civil service, permanent secretary at the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) and previously the chief executive of first the London Borough of Hounslow and then Sheffield City Council – has greeted with a post on GDS's blog, Welcoming the Digital Strategy:

Our reform plan also made a clear commitment to improve the quality of the government’s digital services, and to do this by publishing a Government Digital Strategy setting out how we would support the transformation of digital services [how does publishing a wishlist improve the quality of public services?]. We fulfilled that commitment yesterday with the launch of the Government Digital Strategy, Digital Efficiency Report and Digital Landscape Report and I very much welcome their publication.

But why? Why does Sir Bob "welcome" this emmental cheese of a strategy? It's full of holes. Consider cloud computing for example.

Probably not the last victim of Sir David Normington's success

Sometimes it seems as if half the senior decision-makers in Whitehall are former Accenture partners.

But no-one writes "there must be something rotten at Accenture, when so many of their partners are on a veritable stampede for the exit".

Unlike Accenture, the UK public sector employs about six million people. (Six million!) But when one of them announced her departure last month, Dame Helen Ghosh, permanent secretary at the Home Office, what did Sue Cameron write in the Telegraph?

Why are Whitehall's top mandarins running for the exit? There must be something rotten in the Coalition, when so many of our top civil servants are on a veritable stampede for the exit. Right across government the mandarins are shaking the dust of Whitehall from their feet and moving on to bigger, better jobs elsewhere. They include senior officials at Education, the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Justice, International Development, Energy, and the Home Office ...

The BBC profile of her reminds listeners of the time when Dame Helen was called before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) to explain various mishaps that took place at DEFRA while she was permanent secretary there. With "the public interest" striped into her very bones like a stick of seaside rock, Dame Helen refused to attend and had to be ordered.

She was there again yesterday, up in front of the beak, Margaret Hodge, trying to explain why she had had to hire back UK Border Agency staff and UK Border Force staff who had been previously laid off with tens of thousands of pounds in severance pay in the name of government cuts. According to Martin Beckford in the Telegraph:

Dame Helen ... defended the arrangements by saying that all of the returnees had to wait at least six months before going back to work, otherwise they would have had to repay the lump sums.

Simon Jenkins isn't going to put up with a non sequitur like that when Dame Helen is working for the real National Trust and apparently the PAC wasn't having any truck with it either:

She did however admit that the Border Agency – which has faced repeated criticism for losing track of illegal immigrants, allowing in bogus students and causing delays at airports – had got rid of too many people too quickly since the election as it tried to cut costs.

Maybe the Home Office will survive her loss after all. There could even be an article in it for Sue Cameron. And this time maybe she'll pay a bit of attention to Sir David Normington.

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Televised proceedings of yesterday's PAC:



See also:
Nicholas Watt, 6 March 2011, The Guardian, David Cameron calls civil servants 'enemies of enterprise'
Jill Sherman and Richard Ford, 15 November 2011, The Times, Borders row blocks first woman from top Civil Service job
Editorial, 15 March 2012, The Guardian, Civil servants and MPs: settling accounts
Patrick Wintour, 13 April 2012, The Guardian, Civil service exodus sees one third of senior officials leave
Christopher Hope, 13 April 2012, The Telegraph, A quarter of senior civil servants quit Whitehall under Coalition
Jill Sherman, 18 June 2012, The Times, Ministers demand right to sack Whitehall mandarins

Probably not the last victim of Sir David Normington's success

Sometimes it seems as if half the senior decision-makers in Whitehall are former Accenture partners.

But no-one writes "there must be something rotten at Accenture, when so many of their partners are on a veritable stampede for the exit".

The whiff of cordite in Whitehall 2

They spend about £700 billion of our money every year, much of it wasted. Whitehall's mandarins exercise the prerogatives previously reserved to Stuart kings. Their harlot power is jealously guarded, while all responsibility is taken by more or less hapless ministers. Challenges come and go. They're usually seen off, the politicians give up and we the public carry on paying.

You may as well know that the whiff is back, there is once again cordite in Whitehall. Francis Maude thinks that if ministers are to take responsibility, then they really ought to have some say in which officials manage the political initiatives and the associated budgets. The Guardian has the story – Ministers to be given say in civil service appraisals. So does Public Servant magazine – Ministers are to manage the Civil Service:

Maude's preference now is that ministers be involved in Civil Service appraisals and be given powers to hire and fire staff. And expert advice on how to ensure maximum efficiency should be sought from beyond Britain's shores if necessary.

Francis Maude v. the massed ranks of the senior civil service?

Good luck, Mr Maude.

The whiff of cordite in Whitehall 2

They spend about £700 billion of our money every year, much of it wasted. Whitehall's mandarins exercise the prerogatives previously reserved to Stuart kings. Their harlot power is jealously guarded, while all responsibility is taken by more or less hapless ministers. Challenges come and go. They're usually seen off, the politicians give up and we the public carry on paying.

You may as well know that the whiff is back, there is once again cordite in Whitehall. Francis Maude thinks that if ministers are to take responsibility, then they really ought to have some say in which officials manage the political initiatives and the associated budgets. The Guardian has the story – Ministers to be given say in civil service appraisals. So does Public Servant magazine – Ministers are to manage the Civil Service:

Maude's preference now is that ministers be involved in Civil Service appraisals and be given powers to hire and fire staff. And expert advice on how to ensure maximum efficiency should be sought from beyond Britain's shores if necessary.

Francis Maude v. the massed ranks of the senior civil service?

Good luck, Mr Maude.

Whither the accountability of civil servants?

Lord Armstrong of Ilminster was Cabinet Secretary between 1979 and 1987. He's the one who came up with the phrase "economical with the actualité" in connection with the Peter Wright/Spycatcher business.

Great wordsmith that he is, he's done it again – here's his vintage encapsulation of Whitehall wisdom, a gem, one to treasure, quoted in yesterday's Times, Mandarins’ warning over Civil Service ‘politicisation’:

Lord Armstrong insisted that calling civil servants before committees to blame them for the failure of major projects would not accord with the principles of “natural justice”.

Turns out the House of Lords Constitution Committee is taking evidence on these upstart select committees being disobliging to Whitehall officials.

Margaret Hodge at the Public Accounts Committee seems to have particularly upset their Eminences, also Bernard Jenkin at the Public Administration Select Committee. They can't be too pleased with Keith Vaz and his Home Affairs Committee either, forever moaning about having information withheld from them, and recently Andrew Tyrie's Treasury Select Committee ditto.

The Chairman of the Lords Committee is Baroness Jay and what she's finding is that when you poke a stick in the wasps' nest, out come furious buzzing issues like responsibility and accountability and politicisation and openness and policy and delivery and management and budgeting and contractors and consultants and SpAds and NDPBs and ALBs and public service and, don't forget, natural justice. It's fearful.

You can read all about it in the written evidence, Rt Hon Peter Riddell's contribution (pp.19-22) highly recommended.

And you can watch the General Secretary of the First Division Association give evidence to the Committee, followed by four of his lowliest members – Lord Armstrong (see above), Lord Wilson, Lord Turnbull and Sir-Gus-now-Lord O'Donnell – on two hours of the most peculiar-but-fascinating TV.

Lord Turnbull gives it as his opinion that no-one will ever find out who was responsible for failure, so there's no point these idiotic select committees asking.

And the combative O'Donnell wants to know about the accountability of the select committees, who are they responsible to and what are their objectives?

Baroness Jay is in for a fine old time, trying to write up her findings but, in summary, the gist seems to be this – accountability and responsibility need to be distinguished but they can't be defined, no-one's responsible for anything, whatever "responsible" means, and the select committees don't need any new powers to do their job, whatever that is and anyway it's probably unconstitutional, because the present rules work perfectly well and much better than the Americans'.

It's an almost immaculate defence of the status quo and apparently we have testimony from Sir David "Shifty" Normington to look forward to in the final report. But there is just the tiniest Hodge-shaped chink detectable in the armour.

What their lordships seem to be saying is that when we taxpayers hand over our £700 billion to Whitehall for their safekeeping every year, there is absolutely no way of knowing how it will be spent or wasted because no-one is in charge, no-one has a clue what's going on, not even our highly esteemed senior civil servants who are scarcely paid a bean for labouring away at the coalface of public service, it would be a breach of natural justice to expect them to and it's no-one's fault except possibly ministers, who are clueless, and would someone please rid us of Margaret Hodge, PDQ.

----------

Updated 16 February 2015

"... would someone please rid us of Margaret Hodge, PDQ". That was 2½ years ago. Now the magnificent Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee is standing down after five years and she has delivered a valedictory speech recording Whitehall's attempt to get the PAC closed down.

She likens Whitehall to a collection of Freemasons and accuses it of standing in the way of the high quality public services we want, need, deserve and pay for.

Long sections of her speech are published by the excellent Tony Collins – please read.

Whither the accountability of civil servants?

Lord Armstrong of Ilminster was Cabinet Secretary between 1979 and 1987. He's the one who came up with the phrase "economical with the actualité" in connection with the Peter Wright/Spycatcher business.

Great wordsmith that he is, he's done it again – here's his vintage encapsulation of Whitehall wisdom, a gem, one to treasure, quoted in yesterday's Times, Mandarins’ warning over Civil Service ‘politicisation’:

Lord Armstrong insisted that calling civil servants before committees to blame them for the failure of major projects would not accord with the principles of “natural justice”.

Francis Maude and the economies of scale

"A seven-year government efficiency programme has backfired and increased costs for the taxpayer by hundreds of millions of pounds, a public spending watchdog said ... Whitehall departments have spent £1.4 billion in an attempt to save £159  million by sharing "back-office" functions such as personnel and procurement ..." – Telegraph readers and followers of DMossEsq have known all about this since March.

Any 12 year-old management consultant can make the case that sharing services saves money. It stands to reason.

Except that it's not true.

And now the Public Accounts Committee have a few words of advice for Francis Maude and the Cabinet Office:

Committee chair Margaret Hodge said: "Shared service centres have failed to deliver the savings they should have. They cost £1.4bn to set up, £500m more than expected, and in some cases have actually cost the taxpayer more than they have saved. I welcome the Cabinet Office's ambitious new strategy for improving shared services. But unless it learns from the past it will end up making the same mistakes again."

Will Mr Maude listen to Parliament? Or to the agile 12 year-olds touting shared services in the G-Cloud?

Francis Maude and the economies of scale

"A seven-year government efficiency programme has backfired and increased costs for the taxpayer by hundreds of millions of pounds, a public spending watchdog said ... Whitehall departments have spent £1.4 billion in an attempt to save £159  million by sharing "back-office" functions such as personnel and procurement ..." – Telegraph readers and followers of DMossEsq have known all about this since March.

Any 12 year-old management consultant can make the case that sharing services saves money. It stands to reason.

Except that it's not true.

And now the Public Accounts Committee have a few words of advice for Francis Maude and the Cabinet Office:

Committee chair Margaret Hodge said: "Shared service centres have failed to deliver the savings they should have. They cost £1.4bn to set up, £500m more than expected, and in some cases have actually cost the taxpayer more than they have saved. I welcome the Cabinet Office's ambitious new strategy for improving shared services. But unless it learns from the past it will end up making the same mistakes again."

Will Mr Maude listen to Parliament? Or to the agile 12 year-olds touting shared services in the G-Cloud?

Whitehall's power without responsibility

On 12 June 2012, the Institute for Government hosted a seminar on leadership which consisted of a conversation between Sir-Gus-now-Lord O'Donnell (GOD) and his oppo in Australia, Terry Moran. They were due to discuss "the role of leadership in reform, the challenges of making change happen in public service and leading through crises".

Hat tip: Tony Collins, Timetable for HMRC’s work on Universal Credit is “challenging” says NAO:

Sadly it is no surprise that the NAO has found substantial problems with the HMRC’s accounts. This year has seen a litany of tax errors and scandals come to light with mistakes made at the most senior level from the Permanent Secretary for Tax downwards. The sheer scale of waste and mismanagement at HMRC never ceases to shock me. Without even mentioning the tax gap, in 2011-12 the Department wrote off a staggering £5.2 billion of tax owed, overpaid nearly £2.5 billion in tax credits due to fraud and error and underpaid around £290 million. In some areas the Department is moving in the right direction and has made progress to implement improvement plans. But the Department is still plagued by IT problems; limiting, for example, its ability to link together the debts owed by tax payers across different tax streams. With its long history of large scale IT failures, the Department needs to get a grip before it introduces its new real time PAYE information systems and begins the high-risk move from tax credits to the Universal Credit.

That was Margaret Hodge, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, commenting on the National Audit Office report on HMRC's 2011-12 accounts.

("Challenging", of course, means impossible.)

The event was reported next day by Sue Cameron in the Telegraph, Whitehall’s knights joust over public service reform:

"Private sector people who come into Whitehall get a big shiny star," remarked Gus O’Donnell, Britain’s former top civil servant this week, adding: "Ministers think they’re wonderful." He said it with a rueful smile. Lord O’Donnell reckons that private sector executives are not always as good as they are cracked up to be by some ministers. "I tried to bring in more people from outside and on the whole they did slightly worse than other civil servants," he told a seminar on leadership at the Institute for Government (IfG) in London. "Often they took very big pay cuts to come in. You’d see some of them and you’d think… what was all that about?"

GOD was in charge of Whitehall from 2005 to 2011. How well did He do? Take a look at Margaret Hodge's verdict alongside, "substantial problems ... litany of tax errors and scandals ... mistakes made at the most senior level ... sheer scale of waste and mismanagement ... wrote off a staggering ... overpaid ... underpaid ... plagued by IT problems ... long history of large scale IT failures ...".

She's talking about HMRC, just one of GOD's satrapies. Just one of His satrapies where perhaps He failed to show leadership in reform, where the challenges of making change happen seem to have been too much even for Him and the public are left to pay for the crises.

Smile ruefully. And next time someone alludes to His ability to walk on water, just ask them, what was all that about?

According to Ms Cameron, it's all about the plans to reform the civil service and particularly, the plans to outsource more policy-making to the private sector. Clearly GOD disapproves.

The reform plan is said to be the work of Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude and Sir Bob Kerslake, head of the home civil service. Sir Jeremy Heywood, the feline Cabinet Secretary, is quoted as saying of Sir Bob that he is "doing his best at a new level".

Who knows how the relationship between the knights will develop over the next few years? For the moment, "doing his best at a new level" looks more like scratch-your-eyes-out than jousting.

No doubt about the relationship between GOD and Bernard Jenkin. Having looked forward to an enjoyable assault on the capabilities of private sector executives, GOD's heart must have sunk when he saw Jenkin in the IfG audience:

At the IfG, Lord O’Donnell was asked by Bernard Jenkin, Tory chairman of the Commons public administration select committee, about the billions wasted on public sector projects, with nobody resigning or taking the blame and ministers and civil servants sheltering behind each other.

In Sue Cameron's account, by way of a response GOD started by raving about scope creep:

Lord O’Donnell said there was a “straightforward” way to cope with this. The reason major projects went off track was because ministers wanted changes.

Complete nonsense. Lazy thinking. There's nothing wrong with scope creep, it's the sign of a healthy and useful system in its prime, it just needs managing. GOD must know that. His normally smoothly functioning circuits must have been shorted by the languid Mr Jenkin's question.

That's where the jousting was taking place – between GOD and Jenkin, and GOD was unhorsed.

"Straightforward"? In the Whitehall temple to deviousness it's hard to imagine a greater insult for a permanent secretary, let alone a Cabinet Secretary.

The first thing any senior civil servant will tell you is that the minister wants what the permanent secretary tells him he wants (the masculine includes the feminine). And if the minister insists on wanting something else, then that will be sabotaged. Completely. While leaving no incriminating traces.

It's in the Sue Cameron article as well but the extent to which GOD was wrong-footed by Jenkin's question is clearer in PublicService.co.uk's article about the same encounter, "Only accountable if you're responsible":

The former Cabinet Secretary told an Institute for Government event on leadership and reform that he is not opposed to the idea of senior civil servants being held to account by select committees ... He said: "I would like to have the situation where we have public servants appearing in front of select committees for things that they are really responsible for, but to be really responsible you have got to have the power ..."

The only way this argument of GOD's works is if He believes that senior civil servants are not currently responsible. That their job is not a responsible job. That senior civil servants should not currently be called to account by Parliament because they are doing only a menial factotum's job.

He can't believe that. It's not true. And it's the opposite of what He would normally be expected to argue, viz. that the country is lucky to enjoy such a capable Executive branch of government, dominated by Whitehall. And that, in turn, means that the senior civil service must be accountable.

A bad day's work for Him, that IfG seminar was another nail in the coffin of GOD's chances of being the next Governor of the Bank of England.

That's His problem.

The public's problem, clearly and repeatedly identified by Margaret Hodge and Patrick Jenkin, is that our senior civil service wastes billions of pounds of our money. Whitehall's misfeasance in public office has already survived 30 years of outsourcing to the private sector and of recruiting private sector people and methodologies. More private sector involvement isn't going to solve the problem.

Neither is moving to cloud computing or using so-called "agile" software engineering methods or making public services digital by default.

That's all flannel. Whitehall has demonstrated for decades that it is quite agile enough to waste public money digitally, by default, in a cloud or anywhere else. The infantile fascination with technology offers no salvation, only automated misfeasance.

The solution, also clearly and repeatedly identified by Margaret Hodge and Patrick Jenkin, lies in accountability. More openness, earlier in the life of Government initiatives. Whitehall must acknowledge the supremacy of Parliament. They must be open with Parliament.

GOD must know that and like an old-style union baron he obtusely refuses to accept it. But He's gone now. He's retired, even if He doesn't realise it.

It's up to Sir Jeremy and Sir Bob. They're the leaders now. We don't want them jousting. Or hissing at each other. We want them to make Whitehall obey the Constitution. That will be good for Whitehall as well as the public. Sir Jeremy and Sir Bob must make Whitehall accountable. That is their duty.

Whitehall's power without responsibility

On 12 June 2012, the Institute for Government hosted a seminar on leadership which consisted of a conversation between Sir-Gus-now-Lord O'Donnell (GOD) and his oppo in Australia, Terry Moran. They were due to discuss "the role of leadership in reform, the challenges of making change happen in public service and leading through crises".

Will the ridge of high pressure over Whitehall blow away the G-Cloud?

For the moment Chris Chant is an Executive Director in the Cabinet Office, he is Director of the G-Cloud Programme and he is uniquely emphatic in denouncing the failures of government IT. Take for example his talk to the Institute for Government last October. The litany of unacceptable practices which he enumerates there makes uncomfortable listening for his fellow senior Whitehall officials and for the contractors supplying IT services to HMG.

That discomfort may soon be relieved. Mr Chant's retirement was announced on 13 April and at the end of the month he will be replaced, part-time, by Denise McDonagh who remains simultaneously Director of IT at the Home Office.

A passing acquaintance with the work of the Public Administration Select Committee, the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office will confirm that the problems identified by the G-Cloud team exist. The NAO give you the horrifying details. PAC remind you in their admirably trenchant style how much public money is wasted on government IT. And, with Whitehall and its favoured contractors comfortably and expensively under-performing, PASC keep asking how the quality of public administration in the UK can be raised.

The problems are known. The question is whether G-Cloud – the government cloud – is the solution.

Ms McDonagh divides the world into those in favour of G-Cloud, those against it and those who don’t know but insist on discussing it anyway. Before deciding whether we’re for G-Cloud or agin’ it, we proud members of the third group have a number of questions which remain currently unanswered. Here are just two of them:

• Firstly, as Tony “forces of reaction” Blair and David “enemies of enterprise” Cameron will tell you, parliament lost control of Whitehall a long time ago. The departments of state are impregnable satrapies where the permanent secretary, his or her chief executives and the aforementioned favoured suppliers nurse a pile of eight-, nine- and even ten-figure contracts that G-Cloud would upset mightily. How is Denise McDonagh going to succeed where parliament has failed?
• Second, even with a £1 trillion national debt and a flatlining economy the coalition government set aside £650 million for cybersecurity. Someone recognises the threat. The web is a dangerous place to be. The media treat us to stories of denial of service and the cybertheft of data every week. No-one is immune, including Whitehall. And yet that’s where G-Cloud would see all our data stored, in the cloud, on the web. How will Ms McDonagh keep control of it there?

When Chris Chant gave his “unacceptable” speech last October, was that the start of a latter-day Reformation?

Or was it the foreword to a 2015 NAO report on how G-Cloud is yet another government IT project that saw £x hundred million incinerated by Whitehall, and a PAC report asking what the point is of paying taxes if this is what happens to public money, and a PASC report on the uncomfortable question – are Whitehall capable of doing their job of public administration?

A version of this post is carried in today's PublicTechnology.net.

Will the ridge of high pressure over Whitehall blow away the G-Cloud?

For the moment Chris Chant is an Executive Director in the Cabinet Office, he is Director of the G-Cloud Programme and he is uniquely emphatic in denouncing the failures of government IT. Take for example his talk to the Institute for Government last October. The litany of unacceptable practices which he enumerates there makes uncomfortable listening for his fellow senior Whitehall officials and for the contractors supplying IT services to HMG.

That discomfort may soon be relieved. Mr Chant's retirement was announced on 13 April and at the end of the month he will be replaced, part-time, by Denise McDonagh who remains simultaneously Director of IT at the Home Office.

The whiff of cordite in Whitehall

Rt Hon Margaret Hodge MBE MP is making a speech today at Policy Exchange. This is the latest battle in her war to make Whitehall accountable to Parliament. Whitehall wastes our money with impunity, as it says at the head of this page. In the attempt to put a stop to this state of affairs, traditionally, Whitehall has always won hands down. Perhaps we should expect history to repeat itself.

Or perhaps not. Never has the ancien régime been led by a general as vulnerable as Sir Gus now Lord O'Donnell, the man to whom we owe the present parlous state of our national finances.

The whiff of cordite in Whitehall

Rt Hon Margaret Hodge MBE MP is making a speech today at Policy Exchange. This is the latest battle in her war to make Whitehall accountable to Parliament. Whitehall wastes our money with impunity, as it says at the head of this page. In the attempt to put a stop to this state of affairs, traditionally, Whitehall has always won hands down. Perhaps we should expect history to repeat itself.

Or perhaps not. Never has the ancien régime been led by a general as vulnerable as Sir Gus now Lord O'Donnell, the man to whom we owe the present parlous state of our national finances.

Less for more

First Katie worked for James and Ian. Then Ian left and so did Katie. When James left as well, Katie stopped working for Ian and went to work for James. Then James left and Sarah took over. There was no room for Katie so she went back to working for Ian. Until Christine left and now Katie finds herself working for David. Or is it the other way around? Will Ian's will prevail? Just how much are we paying CSC? And for what? How did the Daily Mail get themselves suckered? And where does Andrew come into it?

All of that and more – including Sir Anthony Blunt – in the latest edition of the long-running programme, Whitehall in control ...

Like a lot of people in Whitehall, Katie Davis used to be a partner at Accenture.

She left in 2005 to join the Cabinet Office, home also to Ian Watmore at the time. Mr Watmore, of course, is a former managing director of Accenture.

In 2007 she moved to the Identity & Passport Service (IPS), where she was appointed Executive Director of Strategy. After three years of her strategy, IPS imploded. They left their offices at Globe House and retreated to the Home Office mother ship in Marsham St. The Chief Executive, James Hall, previously a managing partner of Accenture, retired and was replaced by Sarah Rapson, never worked for Accenture, ex-American Express, MBA from the London Business School.

Five directors of the IPS board were cleared out at the same time and so it came to pass that Katie found herself back in the Cabinet Office with the title Executive Director, Operational Excellence, working for Ian Watmore's Efficiency & Reform Group (ERG, previously OGC). The quiet life of operational excellence there beckoned but was soon rudely interrupted when Christine left.

Christine Connelly was the Chief Information Officer at the Department of Health. She was for years the most articulate and impassioned supporter of NPfIT, the NHS's £11 billion+ National Programme for IT. In June 2011, she resigned.

There had been a few problems.

By this stage in the career of NPfIT, there were only two contractors left. Accenture had pulled out with losses of over $450 million. Fujitsu also had pulled out, and are still thinking of suing HMG for £700 million. Leaving only BT and CSC.

CSC – Computer Sciences Corporation – are an American software house. They took over Accenture's NPfIT contracts. As part of the deal, they inherited iSoft, the software house that developed Lorenzo, the package on which NPfIT depends.

iSoft got into financial problems. The market took a dim view of their habit of booking profits based on nothing more than vague promises that someone might at some stage in the future possibly buy a copy of Lorenzo or not. CSC had to take them over to keep them afloat.

Lorenzo continued to perform badly, causing CSC to miss certain important milestones in their delivery plan for NPfIT. What with that, and a minor misunderstanding in the US with the Armed Services Board which cost them $250 million, their shareholders were getting edgy and CSC asked Christine Connelly to sign a contract guaranteeing them £3 billion. They also offered a discount. How about we take 25% off the price, CSC asked, but only deliver 50% of the services?

Less for more. An attractive proposition as anyone would agree.

At least, Christine Connelly thought it was attractive and she was minded to sign. Not so fast, said Richard Bacon MP, a hero. Not so fast, said Rt Hon Margaret Hodge MBE MP, a hero. Not so fast, said, Ian Watmore, Chief Operating Officer of ERG, whose motto, devised by Lord Brown of Madingley, Chairman of ERG and previously Chairman of BP and the Gulf of Mexico, is "more for less".

Even David Cameron asked Ms Connelly to stay her hand. For months, it looked as though, with the support of her boss, Sir David Nicholson, Chief Executive of the NHS, she was going to tell the lot of them to take a running jump. A power which, it may come as a surprise to those who believe we live in a polity where politicians control Whitehall, she had. Then she was gone.

Had Ian Watmore at last managed to assert his authority over the Department of Health? Who knows. But one way and another, Christine Connelly was replaced by Katie Davis.

That was back in June. On 22 September 2011, the Daily Mail carried this front page headline:

£12bn NHS computer system is scrapped... and it's all YOUR money that Labour poured down the drain

Their heart was in the right place but the story was false. The Department of Health agree that NPfIT has a few problems (mutt) but according to Sir David Nicholson, to paraphrase, we all owe our very existence to the genius of NPfIT (jeff), which will go on. And on. Until we've spent all the money we're entitled to. And then we may need some more. Firm up on that one later.

This is Sir Gus O'Donnell's Whitehall. He has been head of the home civil service since 2005. He leaves at the end of the year. We shall miss his deft organisational powers. Public administration in the UK may never be the same again. With any luck. GOD retires from top job – to be replaced by a new trinity, as they say in yesterday's Times newspaper.

Talking of which, when the Times look at NPfIT, they say:

The history of the NHS computer system is one of criminal incompetence and irresponsibility

Whereas when Sir David looks at it, he says:

We spent about 20% of that resource [the £11.4bn projected total spend on the NPfIT] on the acute sector. The other 80% is providing services that literally mean life and death to patients today, and have done for the last period. So the Spine, and all those things, provides really, really important services for our patients. If you are going to talk about the totality of the [NPfIT] system … you have to accept that 80% of that programme has been delivered.

Sir Anthony Blunt was the world expert on Poussin. Standing in front of an obvious fake once, he declared it to be authentic. Why? Perhaps Sir David Nicholson could tell us.

The quotation immediately above is due to Tony Collins, the award-winning investigative journalist, one of the few people on the planet who know what's going on NPfIT-wise, and a hero. Andrew Lansley? Admittedly Secretary of State for Health but, when it comes right down to it, just a politician. Not sure. Katie Davis?  At least she's sort of a mandarin and a former Executive Director of Operational Excellence, but even so – not sure.

The sun never sets on Sir David's empire. Now a group of American investors are suing CSC in a class action. They clearly don't think Lorenzo is kosher either, any more than Richard Bacon, Margaret Hodge et al. Somehow, mysteriously, the shareholders have got hold of internal CSC reports going back to May 2008 saying that Lorenzo could never meet the NHS's requirements and that the package is on a "death march".

Not the sort of march you want a health service to be on. But then what has any of this £11 billion of public money got to do with health?

Less for more

First Katie worked for James and Ian. Then Ian left and so did Katie. When James left as well, Katie stopped working for Ian and went to work for James. Then James left and Sarah took over. There was no room for Katie so she went back to working for Ian. Until Christine left and now Katie finds herself working for David. Or is it the other way around? Will Ian's will prevail? Just how much are we paying CSC? And for what? How did the Daily Mail get themselves suckered? And where does Andrew come into it?

All of that and more – including Sir Anthony Blunt – in the latest edition of the long-running programme, Whitehall in control ...