Management Consultancy and the British State by Antonio E. Weiss

Author:Antonio E. Weiss
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319998763
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Chronology of the Operational Strategy

In 1959 the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance (MPNI) became the first state department to use mechanical computers to automate social security tasks. The systems were developed in “batch mode,” meaning that information was held in large computers in central offices—based in Newcastle, North Fylde, and Livingstone—which could be retrieved only through physically printing out the required knowledge and manually transmitting it to whichever LO had raised a query. Information flowed into the computers in the reverse direction, with paper reports sent to the central offices where they were manually processed, usually overnight.93

By the mid-1950s, the social security budget constituted under £2 billion, and the infrastructure of the MPNI proved sufficient to cater for the dominant payments demanded of it: pensions. However, as the Welfare State, and expectations of it, developed throughout the 1960s, more and more benefits flowed from state to citizen. In 1961 the Conservatives implemented a graduated pensions scheme, soon modified by Labour in 1964; in 1966 national assistance—claimed by two million people—was updated as supplementary benefit; and in 1971, in response to fiscal retrenchment which accompanied Sterling’s devaluation in 1967, Heath introduced family income supplements.94 Each additional benefit compounded administrative complexities. Social security recipients could no longer easily be categorised into pensioners, sick, or disabled; growing unemployment meant claimants could easily be young, and receiving supplementary benefits, child benefits, and/or unemployment benefits. The nature of the batch system infrastructure meant each claim was held on a benefit-by-benefit basis, and had to be claimed as such. Personal data of individuals was held on average five times across different systems, which were unwieldy, inefficient, and error-prone in administration.95 This was hardly surprising given the sheer volumes of papers, tasks, and claimants involved: 8000 internal non-standard and 12,000 external forms were required to administer the entire social security operation for the state.96

In 1977, in the wake of Barbara Castle’s technically complex earnings-related pensions programme, the DHSS gave approval to commence the Computerisation and Mechanisation of Local Office Tasks pilot scheme (known as CAMELOT). The aim of the pilot was to automate the processing of supplementary and short-term benefits in LOs. The pilot was to be in Reading, the site of a previously failed project to computerise pension payments in LOs some ten years previous. The resources for the project were government computer experts based in Newcastle, who were held in high regard by their counterparts in London.97 Yet by 1981 it became apparent that CAMELOT was not working. Interoperability of disparate systems was the issue; the computer programmes written to connect the processes together simply did not integrate. At the behest of Michael Partridge, Permanent Secretary of the DHSS, consultants were called in to review progress on the project and judged it “fundamentally flawed.”98 By December 1981, the project was formally closed down, with a subsequent NAO report decreeing that after £6 million of expenditure, “CAMELOT as…concept could not result in a useful or operable system. The DHSS consider that the main cause of failure lay in the quality of computer programming.

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