Offender tracking plan 'a shambles'

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Officials in charge of C-NOMIS lacked even a "minimum level of competence", the Public Accounts Committee said.

The IT system was abandoned two years ago after costs trebled to more than £700 million.

In its report the committee set out a litany of failures that led to the project getting "out of control".

They found a "culture of over-optimism" among staff and a failure to subject it to "rigorous and sceptical challenge".

Senior staff lacked the experience needed to manage the project and underestimated both its size and complexity. They also "grossly underestimated" the likely cost and neither ministers nor senior management at the Home Office, nor even the project board, were aware of problems until May 2007, three years after it began.

Management was so poor that the National Offender Management Service, which runs prisons and probation, has no idea what £161 million spent before October 2007 was used for.

Committee chairman Edward Leigh 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.

"There was not even a minimum level of competence in the planning and execution of this project. This project has been a shambles."

C-NOMIS was intended to provide an "end-to-end" IT system for offenders, tracking them from the courts, through punishment, release and probation.