Budget 2005 policy changes will take 15 months to reach CMS

The Jobcentre Plus (JC+) customer management system (CMS) has not been updated to reflect changes in benefits eligibility criteria, despite more than a year’s notice of this month’s deadline.

The savings limit increase from £8,000 to £16,000, which took effect on 6 April, was announced in the Budget in March 2005.

But despite a major upgrade to CMS3 earlier this year, the system will not include the benefits rules change until June, 15 months after it was announced.

Until then JC+ contact centre staff – who use the software to record details from new claimants and establish eligibility – are being told to ask a different question from that prompted by CMS, and add a note for an administrator to record the alteration on the claimant’s record.

‘We have to lie to the system,’ said one first-contact officer.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) says it has not ignored the change to the rules and CMS will be updated by June, with no impact on claimants.

But call centre staff warn of potential confusion.

‘This could cause problems because if we ask the questions wrongly then the benefits that the claimant is eligible for will not show up on the system,’ said the contact centre source.

Software experts say such a minor change would only take so long if the earlier rules had been hard-coded into the software.

Mike Davis, analyst at Butler Group, says government IT systems need a business process management architecture to allow sufficient flexibility.

‘Any government organisation is always at a political whim and in that environment rules changes can potentially happen very fast,’ he said.

‘Systems that are not driven by rules management processes are slow to respond to changes in policy,’ said Davis.

While the upgrade to CMS3 did address some problems, serious performance issues remain.

Figures seen by Computing suggest that more than half of all ‘pushes’ of information from CMS to legacy benefits processing systems still fail.

‘These levels are totally unacceptable,’ said Terry Rooney MP, chairman of the Commons Work and Pensions Committee, which reported on JC+ last month and is monitoring the performance on a monthly basis.