The Support Services of the PTO have both suffered from and contributed to its operational difficulties. An organisation of this size and complexity trying to operate without a full Board that includes the requisite level of professional skills and experience (particularly in the areas of finance, HR and IT) will inevitably experience significant problems. Without this capacity at the top, when major change, innovation and performance improvements are required, no matter how much commitment, enthusiasm and dedication some of the supporting staff possess, fundamental deficiencies are bound to emerge sooner rather than later.
This Review has established that with Finance, HR, Business Planning and IT development all underpowered at the top and under-resourced, these corporate support functions could not help drive the PTO through the challenges it has faced, particularly over the last 18 months. Existing Directors and the Chief Executive have had to concentrate on immediate business challenges and inevitably the managers and staff operating in support service functions have felt powerless to either push things to a required conclusion or maintain essential disciplines that hardpressed operational colleagues can view as irksome in their need to get short term results.
There are many obvious examples that include:-
The absence of robust business planning preparations for 1999/20;
the absence of a full Action Plan run on established project control lines to implement the latest Comptroller and Auditor General's Report;
a weakening of personnel disciplines so that line managers recruit casual staff autonomously without central control or monitoring and can effectively dispense with direct-entry EO recruitment;
IT providers trying to produce solutions for operational difficulties to the best of their knowledge and ability without essential contributions from users;
accommodation issues being tackled on a short term basis so the need for longer term work on accommodation needs, location and development has had minimal attention; and
a management and financial information system that is recognised as being inadequate throughout the Agency and has attracted criticism from the Comptroller and Auditor General and the Public Accounts Committee.
This stark assessment must not be taken as a criticism of Support Services managers and staff; they have been working as hard as they can in very difficult circumstances. The frustration amongst the PTO's Support Service providers, who could see the implications of their lack of corporate focus, capacity and senior input was obvious during this Review. Many operational staff sympathised with the difficulties their Support Service colleagues faced while bemoaning their inability to deliver what was needed.
It is recommended that, as a matter of urgency, an appropriately qualified and experienced Resources Director is appointed to co-ordinate and champion the efforts of the Finance, Business Planning, Human Resource and IT teams to support and improve operational performance. It is also recommended that the Director of Change instigate a review of those basic corporate support areas that need urgent remedial attention; the main ones are office accommodation, training, recruitment and typing. Some dedicated, authoritative direction should soon pay dividends; in some instances improvements could be achieved by changes in operational areas' practices. These two proposals should allow the other 3 Executive Directors to devote all their attention to their own important operational areas. They would also improve financial and corporate governance disciplines and free up the Chief Executive for her monitoring, strategic development and Accounting Officer responsibilities.
Of the Support Service areas' fundamental weaknesses the shortcomings in IT are perhaps the most significant in their direct effect on the PTO's performance. Staff and managers at all levels invariably referred to the limitations placed upon them by a lack of information systems that could support their operations, inform their planning and allow them to give the standard of service their various clients had every right to expect. Internal customer service standards within the PTO and between it and LCD HQ have also been severely hampered by the absence of the necessary IT-based support: the most obvious example is the facility to produce essential management and financial information quickly and accurately as a matter of routine.
More immediate business and resource pressures have meant that the PTO Board has not been able to produce a corporate IT strategy. Obviously, an Agency business development plan would be a pre-requisite of a comprehensive version because IT development would be an integral component of this, not a separate piece of work. But a basic shared IT platform would be a common starting point and, despite some commendable progress by the Agency's Information Systems Directorate in the last year, this has not been established.
Assuming that the partnerships envisaged in this Review can be achieved with the Law Society, the Inland Revenue, the private financial services sector and the Benefits Agency, it is recommended that an IT strategy be developed that concentrates on allowing PTO staff to regulate, monitor and analyse operations conducted on their behalf, wherever possible via the systems their delivery organisations will be utilising. This will minimise the need to create bespoke systems for the PTO (with all the costs, pitfalls and shortcomings these can bring) and allow common access and standards between all parties involved in an area of work. For example, the basic database for Protection and Receivership work might be the Inland Revenue's one for issuing and controlling annual accounts: visiting control could be a simple subset of this. The visiting control system might be shared with the Benefits Agency (on the assumption that they would do much of the Court's visiting programme) though it must accommodate or make allowances for systems used by the voluntary organisations and Local Authorities who will also be partners in visiting work. Plenty of progress has already been made in the development of these two databases already, so the PTO is advanced in understanding their user requirements.
As explained earlier, external financial services providers must make their own IT systems available to the Investment Division of the PTO for monitoring purposes. However, the Trust database is an extremely antiquated one with insufficient backup facilities at the moment. Trust caseload is not large and its existing rate of decline can be greatly accelerated, so a user requirement for the purpose of monitoring professionals doing Trust work under contract should not be a huge undertaking. It is recommended that this, and any other IT needs that are not already funded or going to be met by partnership arrangements should be tackled on the assumption they will be met through PFI-type sources.
The Court Service is currently doing a lot of constructive developmental work with its main IT services partner. It could well provide the professional assistance and expertise required to help Trust, Protection and Receivership Divisions get the essential information systems support that they need, including fee charging and collection, operational controls and management and financial information systems. It is recommended the Director for Change explores the scope for liaison with the Court Service and its service partner on IT strategy development, bearing in mind the recommendation that the Court Funds Office might be coming under its jurisdiction.