Following months of fiasco this year, however, such boasts are the perfect illustration of how quickly competent performance can turn to disaster for government agencies that failed to ensure the computer technology and call centres on which they depend can cope under increased pressure.
The extra demands came from taking over the payments to students in England from the local authorities. Despite the process being phased in over three years, the first year has left tens of thousands of students out of pocket and tens of millions of pounds in grants and loans still unallocated two months after the start of the academic year. A review of the problems faced by the SLC this autumn by Sir Deian Hopkin blamed technical, management and services failures for the chaos in which just 5% of calls to the helpline were answered at the peak of the problems, and many of those who did get through were given the wrong information and many students’ vital documents were lost.
As a result, the SLC’s ICT director and marketing and customer services director have now resigned, and the senior management of the company will be restructured. Nevertheless, that the chief executive, Ralph Seymour-Jackson, remains in place must be a cause for concern, given the scale of the failures and the fact that the difficulties should have been foreseen.
The extra work was planned and the company, which was already experienced in dealing with payments to students in Scotland, should have been able to prepare well in advance. In particular, the SLC should have been able to turn to advantage its experience of similar difficulties in 2004 when new software was introduced which was unable to deal with the volume of inquiries. Although the recession resulted in additional numbers going to university this year, which might reasonably have led to some delays, that cannot account for the scale of the chaos.
Its failures raise the question of whether contracting out services to arms’-length agencies produces the desired efficiencies and cost savings, when the official report found that the SLC’s call centres were “deliberately under-resourced”. That must seem the height of hypocrisy to the four out of five disabled students still to receive vital funding for specialist equipment and helpers from the Student Loans Company, which liked to boast of its help to them.
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