Remember what Gordon Brown about being open in Government? About rebuilding trust and the end of spin? Few people really believe it and today Computer Weekly has reported on how Brown's assertions are as bent as a nine bob note.
Computer Weekly says that it has seen advice issued by the Treasury to the Office of Government Commerce stating that officials must destroy all "gateway reviews" of its IT projects. Gateway Reviews are used to ensure that a high-risk government IT project are on track and being run in an efficient and cost-effective way.
The fact that the Treasury is advising its staff to destroy these documents suggests that far from being "Mr Open, Transparent Government", Gordon Brown is the sceretive spinner that most think anyway. The question is, what documents have already been destroyed, and at what cost to the taxpayer did the information in them imply?
None of this, I imagine, will come as a surprise to the author Tom Bower, who's unoffocial biography, Gordon brown the Prime Minister has just been published, and notes that on past record he is unlikely to keep his promises of "new government" and "humbleness". His reliance on a secretive cabal of advisors has, says the author, resulted in a poor relationship with the Civil Service.
Stalin is back. This time in hardback!
5 comments:
Quite right - however I think you may need to revise your link to http://www.computerweekly.com/Home/..%5C/Articles/2007/06/01/224487/civil-servants-told-to-destroy-reports-on-risky-it-projects.htm,
Computer Weekly does something funny with its web addresses !
Does anyone know what the legal status of these documents is?
Would a civil servant to destroyed these documents be acting under the Civil Service code, or be undertaking a political act.?
Are we seeing Party, Government and State merging into one entity?
ianp, they are almost certainly records within the meaning of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
FOIA 2000 requires public authorities to establish disposal policies for classes of document (i.e. should be kept for X years, an can then be disposed of).
What is the disposal policy for the class of document which includes gateway reviews?
I don’t see how this affects the FOI obligations. According to the Computer Weekly article, two copies will be retained: one by OGC, one by the department that was reviewed. If copies still exist, the departments would have to release them, subject to FOI limitations.
Chief exec of OGC: John Oughton
If you want to find a record of failure, you could do worse than check up on John Oughton's performance as Deputy Chief of Defence Logistics, where he wasted hundreds of millions of pounds of our money on utterly shit IT and change projects. "Defence Supply Management System" (DSMS) was known to many as "Doomed System, Millions Squandered". Man in charge? John Oughton.
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