The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has branded the government’s delayed and over-budget IT project to set up a single database to manage offenders through the prison and probation services a ‘shambles’, in a damning report published today.

Five years after the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) was set up, the budget for the C-NOMIS IT project has skyrocketed to over £513m. The information management system required to support offender management is still not in place, and NOMS is unable to say in detail what £161m of the budget was spent on.

In a report prepared after hearing evidence from the NOMS about why the project failed so badly, PAC chairman Edward Leigh said: ‘There was not even a minimum level of competence in the planning and execution of this project. The result has been a three-year delay in the roll-out of the programme envisaged, separate databases for prisons and probation instead of the original one – each with different information about an offender ¬– and a doubling of costs.

‘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.'

In 2003 Lord Carter's correctional services review recommended bringing together prisons and probation services and introducing 'end-to-end’ offender management. This change was designed to improve the supervision of individual offenders throughout their sentence by a single offender manager, whether the sentence was served in prison or in the community.

The C-NOMIS project, initially envisaged by the Home Office for delivery in January 2008 for £234m, was stopped in August 2007 because costs had trebled. The programme was revised and scaled back to three offender databases for £513m, for delivery by 2011.

The committee’s report said the original concept was ‘ambitious’ but ‘technically feasible’, but problems at every level sent the programme ‘out of control’.

It said the scale and complexity of what had to be delivered were underestimated, there was a culture of over-optimism, costs were grossly underestimated and there was a lack of capacity and experience among senior staff, with too much reliance placed on a few key individuals.

‘There was also poor planning, poor financial monitoring, inadequate supplier management and too little control over changes,’ it said. ‘Financial management was deficient to the extent that costs and progress were not monitored or reported for the first three years.’

Leigh said: ‘The NOMS has assured us that it has implemented the changes needed to deliver the revised NOMIS programme by 2011. However, there are significant challenges yet to address, including further contract negotiations with suppliers.

A Ministry of Justice spokeswoman said: ‘We note the contents of this report and will respond fully in due course.’

She said the C-NOMIS project was stopped when it was recognised that it was going to be over-budget and late, and steps have been taken to ensure that the mistakes made are not repeated.

‘The work done so far has not been lost but is being used as the basis of the revised NOMIS programme,' she said. 'This will support our commitment to ensuring that prison and probation service staff have improved access to the information they need to protect the public by managing offenders in custody and in the community.’

The MoJ said the prison element of the programme commenced roll-out to public sector prisons on 22 May 2009 and is on schedule to be completed in summer 2010.

The MoJ has also encountered serious problems with its courts IT project C-NOMIS and its electronic filing and document management (EFDM) project, as first reported in the Gazette.