Parliament's Public Accounts Committee has issued a scathing attack on the implementation of the National Offender Management Information System.
In a report on the programme, the committee describes it as a singular example of poor project management.
Rollout of the rescoped programme has only just begun after the initial project, scheduled for delivery in January 2008 at a cost of £234m, was stopped in August 2007 because the costs had trebled. A scaled-back version is now being promised for 2011 at a cost of £513m.
C-Nomis was originally designed as a single database for end-to-end offender management across the Prison Service and the National Probation Service. According to the report this was ambitious but technically feasible, but the National Offender Management Service (Noms) lost control. It underestimated the technical complexity and the need to standardise ways of working to avoid excessive customisation.
The programme also suffered from poor planning and financial management, inadequate supplier management and too little control over changes. Over the first three years there was no monitoring of costs or progress, in part because the senior responsible owner had no relevant training or experience. The project board, the Noms board and the Home Office senior management only became aware of the true cost and progress in May 2007, and even now Noms is unable to provide full details on where £161m spent up to October 2007 went.
Edward Leigh MP, chair of the PAC, said: "This committee has become inured to the dismal procession of government IT failures which have passed before us; but even we were surprised by the extent of the failure of C-Nomis, the ambitious project to institute a single database to manage individual offenders through the prison and probation systems.
"Noms, the body managing the project, was formed in 2004 from the merger of two complex and very different organisations. This placed a severe strain on senior managers' ability to deliver such a major project."
He added that "there was not even a minimum level of competence in the planning and execution of this project", and described it as a "shambles". Noms has told the PAC that it has implemented the changes needed to deliver the revised programme by 2011, but the report says there are significant challenges yet to address, including further contract negotiations with suppliers.
The replacement programme will create three databases with different information about an offender and limited data sharing. Among the report's recommendations is that Noms should assess the adequacy of its data-sharing capacity with partners and third-party providers, and carry out an assessment of the data cleaning effort that is needed.
It also says Noms should negotiate contracts that require suppliers to match expenditure against deliverables.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice, the parent department of Noms, commented: "We note the contents of this report and will respond fully in due course. The C-Nomis project was stopped when it was recognised that it was going to be over-budget and late. Steps have been taken to ensure that the mistakes made are not repeated.
"The work done so far has not been lost but is being used as the basis of the revised Nomis programme. This will support our commitment to ensuring that prison and probation service staff have improved access to the information they need to protect the public by managing offenders in custody and in the community.
"The prison element of the programme commenced rollout to public-sector prisons on 22 May, 2009 and is on schedule to complete in summer 2010."
