The man responsible for ensuring the MyGov mistakes aren’t repeated has told our elected representatives that they must hold him to account.
Boley Smillie met with deputies on Monday, shortly before meeting the media, where he went over the problems that he had uncovered which led to £21.6million being wasted on the MyGov project.
The States’ Chief Executive and Head of the Civil Service told Express that in his earlier meeting he had reminded our deputies that he is accountable to them.
“Deputies can hold me to account, and I’ve met with all of them, or the vast majority of them, this afternoon, and I made that exact point, not that they need reminding of that. That’s my job.
“My job now is to make sure that the actions and the findings that come out of this MyGov report are dealt with, and that we make sure nothing like this ever comes close to happening again. And I am ultimately accountable to making sure that’s the case.”
Mr Smillie’s report – published earlier this week – concluded that the now infamous MyGov project – intended to ‘deliver customer and workforce improvements’ – was beset with problems caused by ‘weak governance, poor financial control, and an over-reliance on external contractors’.
He found that “more than £21 million” was spent on it – more than £16m of it spent with Agilisys – “with no meaningful benefit to taxpayers”.
Mr Smillie found that while no one intended for it to go so badly wrong, the writing was on the wall from the start due to “poor leadership and a failure to act decisively when warning signs emerged”.
He has also said that governance arrangements became increasingly complex, with more than 20 boards and groups referenced in programme documentation, and that deputies were unable to provide effective oversight because of how the project developed.
Mr Smillie told Express that conversations taken “offline” meant political scrutiny was harder to maintain.
“From my analysis, the civil service and the structures that were overseeing this project, on occasions when difficult decisions needed to be made and when difficult conversations needed to be had it tended, not in all cases, but it tended to take conversations offline and try and take them kind of outside the governance process, with a view, I’m sure, to trying to rectify whatever was going wrong and get things back on track. But those decisions were not properly recorded and not properly aired in the environment that they needed to be okay.”
Mr Smillie has said this situation can’t be allowed to happen again.
One way he aims to keep to that pledge is by reintroducing Chief Officers who will work more closely with political committees “to ensure clear accountability”.
The role of Chief Officer started to be phased out within the civil service from 2012, in a wider bid to streamline the government’s work.
Mr Smillie said bringing Chief Officers back will help deputies and managers keep track of what is going on.
“Chief Officers is one component and I think it’s a really important component.
“The public sector as a whole is far from being one organisation,” he explained. “It is a collection, a kind of ecosystem of organisations, and they all need clear lines of accountability, responsibility, and leadership. We all need to know who is in charge, and that is the same for our political committees. They need an accountable officer that they can make sure is delivering the very best performance for the organisation, wherever it is, across the across the public sector.
“We genuinely have some brilliant people across the organisation, but to some degree they are most of the time operating with one arm tied behind their back, either through poor technology or through split and unclear responsibility and accountability that makes it very, very difficult for anyone to achieve success.”