House of Commons Administration Committee Information and Communication Technology Services for Members Second Report of Session 2006–07 Report, together with formal minutes and written evidence Ordered by The House of Commons to be printed 24 April 2007 HC 498 Published on 8 May 2007 by authority of the House of Commons London: The Stationery Office Limited £0.00 The Administration Committee The Administration Committee is appointed by the House of Commons to consider the services provided for and by the House and to make recommendations thereon to the House of Commons Commission or to the Speaker. Current membership Mr Frank Doran MP (Labour, Aberdeen North) (Chairman) Mr Bob Ainsworth MP (Labour, Coventry North East) Janet Anderson MP (Labour, Rossendale & Darwen) Mr Simon Burns MP (Conservative, Chelmsford West) Mr Christopher Chope MP (Conservative, Christchurch) Derek Conway MP (Conservative, Old Bexley & Sidcup) Frank Dobson MP (Labour, Holborn & St Pancras) Mr Brian H Donohoe MP (Labour, Central Ayrshire) Mr Neil Gerrard MP (Labour, Walthamstow) Helen Jones MP (Labour, Warrington North) Mr Kevan Jones MP (Labour, Durham North) Mr Greg Knight MP (Conservative, East Yorkshire) David Lepper MP (Labour/Co-operative, Brighton Pavilion) Mr Andrew Robathan MP (Conservative, Blaby) John Thurso MP (Liberal Democrat, Caithness, Sutherland & Easter Ross) Pete Wishart MP (Scottish National, Perth & North Perthshire) Mr Mark Harper MP (Conservative, Forest of Dean) was also a member of the committee during the inquiry. Powers The powers of the committee are set out in House of Commons Standing Orders, principally in SO No 139. These are available on the Internet via www.parliament.uk. Publication The Reports and evidence of the Committee are published by The Stationery Office by Order of the House. All publications of the Committee are on the Internet and can be accessed via www.parliament.uk/ac. Committee staff The current staff of the Committee are Steven Mark and Rhiannon Hollis (Clerks), Ameet Chudasama (Chief Office Clerk) and Jane Lauder (Secretary). Contacts All correspondence should be addressed to the Clerk of the Administration Committee, Committee Office (Palace of Westminster), House of Commons, London SW1A 0AA. The telephone number for general enquiries is 020 7219 2471; the Committee’s email address is [email protected] Administration Committee – Information and Communication Technology Services for Members 1 Contents Report Page Summary 3 1 Introduction 5 Background to the inquiry 5 Current service provision 6 Previous work 8 2 Establishing best practice and identifying possible comparators 10 Specific examples 10 Possible comparators 11 3 Departmental structure and goals 12 Formal channels of communication 12 Strategy and roadmap 13 4 Stability v flexibility 15 Members’ views 15 PICT’s view 15 Professional views 16 A way forward 17 Alternative ways of accessing parliamentary services 18 5 Constituency provision 19 Virtual Private Network service issues 19 Options for improving the constituency service 20 Support for applications used in Members’ constituency work 23 Testing and development 23 6 Customer service 24 7 Providing IT equipment to Members 27 The 2005 roll-out of equipment 27 Future roll-outs 28 Quality and cost 29 8 New services 31 Audio-conferencing 31 Wireless and mobile computing 32 Online services 33 Improvements to existing services 34 9 Conclusion 36 Conclusions and recommendations 37 2 Administration Committee – Information and Communication Technology Services for Members Annex: Committee discussions 42 17 October 2006: Opening discussion with Director of PICT 42 21 November 2006 42 Opening discussion with Mr John Milner and Professor Jim Norton, Specialist Advisers to the Committee 43 Informal discussion with Chris Montagnon, external member of the Joint Business Systems Board (JBSB) 44 Informal discussion with Michael Fabricant MP, Alun Michael MP and Andrew Miller MP 45 Concluding discussion with the Specialist Advisers to the Committee 47 5 December 2006: Informal discussion with Richard Allan 47 12 December 2006: Informal discussion with Andrew Hardie 50 30 January 2007: Concluding discussion with Director of PICT 51 Formal minutes 53 List of written evidence 55 List of unprinted written evidence 57 Administration Committee Reports in this Parliament 58 Administration Committee – Information and Communication Technology Services for Members 3 Summary The Parliamentary Information and Communications Technology Department (PICT) was established in January 2006, bringing together ICT staff and other resources from across both Houses of Parliament into a unified organisation. Our focus in this Report is on those services provided for Members of the House of Commons and their staff. In the context of a significant undertone of dissatisfaction with these services, we want to ensure that processes are in place to enable Members’ services to be delivered efficiently and to an agreed standard, and to manage Members’ often divergent ICT preferences. In this Report, we describe how ICT services are currently provided and outline the work undertaken by Members and others in the recent past to create the current system of provision (Part One); and we seek to identify best practice elsewhere and possible points of comparison with the way services are provided in Parliament (Part Two). We then look at how Members’ emerging requirements can be plugged into PICT’s strategic planning, and how PICT could make itself better aware of Members’ evolving use of ICT, in part through a new forum for investigating possible improvements to the existing service (Part Three). We then go on to tackle the issues of most direct concern to individual Members: the tension between providing consistent, stable services and meeting Members’ varying requirements (Part Four); extending services in the constituency so that they are comparable with those on offer at Westminster (Part Five); providing professional and reliable customer service with clear escalation procedures (Part Six); and providing up-to-date, good-value ICT equipment to Members that meets their requirements in a timely way (Part Seven). Finally, we investigate new services from which Members would be likely to benefit, either in the very near future or in the slightly longer term (Part Eight). PICT’s first priority must be to optimise existing services, starting with stability issues and connection speed, especially in the constituency, and ensuring that future roll-outs of new equipment are seamless and well-managed. But there is a strong expectation that new services, including wireless networking, will also be provided very soon—and the speed of technological development demands it. At the same time communications between PICT and Members need to be significantly scaled up. Real ongoing consultation is required for PICT to understand and meet Members’ needs and to measure demand for services. This will require dedicated PICT staff responsible for developing relationships with Members and their staff, and a separate Members’ customer forum, also involving Members’ staff, to help to develop strategies and service levels. We want to ensure that PICT has a better understanding of Members’ expectations, and that Members have a correct sense of what PICT can and cannot do for them. Members as well as PICT have responsibility for the ICT systems in their offices. We are sure that most Members would not welcome further limitations on their freedom to customise centrally provided equipment. However, Members’ freedom to install unsupported applications locally makes PICT’s task more costly and complicated than it would otherwise be. Until they can access the full range of Parliamentary ICT services securely over the Internet, Members will need to accept the existing restrictions on the equipment they can use and on how they can use it. In return, however, they have every right to expect a good standard of service. Administration Committee – Information and Communication Technology Services for Members 5 1 Introduction Background to the inquiry 1. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) services have become critical to the work of Members of Parliament, and this importance can only increase. Even the decreasing number of Members who do not use computers themselves rely on staff who do. 2. The Parliamentary Information and Communications Technology Department (PICT) was established in January 2006, bringing together for the first time ICT staff and other resources from across both Houses of Parliament into a unified organisation under a single accountable Director. This was a strategic response to the previously fragmented planning and implementation of ICT across Parliament, which involved numerous separately managed teams working on overlapping and often inter-dependent systems, without an overview of resources. 3. PICT provides services to the Members and staff of both Houses of Parliament. Our focus is on those services provided for Members of the House of Commons and their staff. Members of Parliament are not a homogenous body of people. They work in different ways and they have correspondingly divergent demands for ICT services. The feedback we have received from Members since we were appointed in July 2005 has made us aware of a significant undertone of dissatisfaction with the ICT services provided by Parliament. We want to ensure that processes are in place to enable appropriate Members’ services to be delivered efficiently and to an agreed standard.