Technology moves fast. Governments do not. Those in the know are not in the least surprised that ContactPoint has been halted. The Government’s databases are in a mess.

A scathing report, published by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust yesterday, found that the most of the Government’s databases have “significant problems and may be unlawful”. ContactPoint was one of the systems said to be “fundamentally flawed”. ContactPoint’s failure is a symptom of a wider disease.

The problem is that the Government is rarely at the forefront of technological advances and therefore is liable to be sold shoddy goods. The report stated: “One noticeable effect is that the UK public sector always appears to get sold whatever technology or methodology is just going out of fashion in the private sector.”

Why does this happen? Because Government departments don’t have the staff. The public sector has outsourced so many of its IT contracts that it doesn’t have the experts to spot potential glitches.

A classic example was the failed Child Support Agency database. A damning Public Accounts Committee report in 2006 showed how the agency had handed over the project to its contractor, EDS, and failed to keep a close watch on it. This was in part because it did not have the in-house knowhow, because many of its IT staff had gone to work for EDS.

All of this will continue to happen as long as the Government continues to think that IT contracts and databases can be fully effective and 100 per cent secure. Some problems cannot be fixed with computers. The Rowntree report has the following advice for ministers: “If you think IT is the solution to your problem, then you don’t understand IT, and you don’t understand your problem either.”

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