MR ANDREW ROLLERSON

7 MARCH 2007

  Q261 Chairman: Good afternoon. Welcome to the Committee of Public Accounts where we have two sessions today, first, on The National Programme for IT in the NHS and, secondly, the Assets Recovery Agency, which we hope to start around 4 pm. This is the second hearing we have had on The National Programme for IT in the NHS and we have summoned to this hearing Mr Andrew Rollerson, who was formerly practice lead healthcare consultant with Fujitsu. The reason why we have summoned him is that there were very widespread reports in the national press based on an article by Tony Collins of Computer Weekly on 13 February, in which, Mr Rollerson, he attributed various remarks to you. In fairness to you, this Committee does not take evidence from newspapers, because not everything we read in the newspapers correctly reports people, so it is only fair to you that we should give you a chance briefly to come along here and for us to ask if these reports attributed to you are correct. I suppose the first question I am going to ask by way of introduction is about your qualifications to speak on this programme. What was your involvement in it?

  Mr Rollerson: I have been with Fujitsu approximately 10 or 11 years, joining in 1996 as a managing consultant, and was assigned in the middle of 2003 to work on the Fujitsu response to the tender for the national programme. I took a fairly leading role in that process, leading one of the workstreams and also following through, and leading one of the negotiation streams in Leeds which, clearly, led to the ultimate success of Fujitsu in the bid.

  Q262  Chairman: Could I stop you there. Presumably at that stage, because you were involved in the bid process, you believed in this programme?

  Mr Rollerson: Absolutely. It was a gradual process of coming to believe in it, but very quickly I bought into the vision and, in fact, helped to engineer a response from Fujitsu which was very much, in my view, aligned with the vision of the programme. As a result of Fujitsu's success, I was given the position of Head of Change Management, being a management consultant that was an appropriate appointment, and had the responsibility, therefore, for providing consultants for each of the deployment projects who would assist the NHS trusts in the changes they would have to make in order to make the technical deployment successful, so, in other words, the process for redesign, the organisational restructuring, the benefits realisation and so on and so forth. I built a team, a very significant team in fact, in order to do that and spent the next year and a half to two years leading that team. Then in the middle of last year I was transferred to a different part.

  Q263  Chairman: So I have to ask you, are your views up-to-date?

  Mr Rollerson: I believe my views are up-to-date. In terms of knowledge of what is happening on the ground day-to-day, I would say no, but given that I built a team of 40 consultants, all of whom are still deployed and with whom I still have regular contact and regular discussions about the programme, I would say, yes, my knowledge is broadly up-to-date.

  Q264  Chairman: Of course, you are speaking for yourself, you have been summoned to the Committee. You are speaking personally, it is purely your view, it is not the view of Fujitsu. We have received a letter from Mr Peter Hutchinson, who is a managing director at Fujitsu, saying that you are expressing your personal view.

  Mr Rollerson: That is correct.

  Q265  Chairman: Before I bring in my colleagues, in all fairness to you, I think we had better then investigate whether this widely reported story is correct. It says here that you said at this meeting there was: " . . . a gradual coming apart of what we are doing on the ground because we are desperate to get something in and make it work, versus what the programme really ought to be trying to achieve". Correct?

  Mr Rollerson: Yes, that is correct.

  Q266  Chairman: You said: "The more pressure we come under, both as suppliers and on the NHS side, the more we are reverting to a very sort of narrowly focused IT-orientated behaviour. This is not a good sign for the programme". Did you say that?

  Mr Rollerson: I did. In fact, to save you reading them out, yes, the quotes are correct.

  Q267  Chairman: Did you say: "What we are trying to do is run an enormous programme with the techniques that we are absolutely familiar with for running small projects. And it isn't working. And it isn't going to work"?

  Mr Rollerson: Yes.

  Q268  Chairman: Did you say: "Unless we do some serious thinking about that—about the challenges of scale and how you scale up to an appropriate size—then I think we are out on a limb"?

  Mr Rollerson: Yes.

  Q269  Chairman: So what does all this mean then?

  Mr Rollerson: If I may take one step back, the conference itself, the Eyeforhealthcare conference, was called "Successful Implementation of NPfIT" and, therefore, was a conference organised in support of the programme. I was invited to speak—this was the third time I had spoken—and, in fact, I gave a talk in support of the programme. That was my intention, to support the programme, and I think the transcript will bear that out. The quotations attributed to me, which are correct, are lifted—some of them are partial sentences, some of them are whole sentences—completely out of context where I was seeking to demonstrate that unless certain aspects of the programme were addressed then the programme would not succeed, so I was seeking, therefore, to say we must address these things, all of them.

  Q270  Chairman: Now is your chance to put these things in context.

  Mr Rollerson: Yes.

  Q271  Chairman: So go ahead, briefly.

  Mr Rollerson: Briefly?

  Q272  Chairman: Let me put it this way, you believed in this programme. Do you believe in it philosophically and intellectually; in other words, it is the right thing to do as a concept, or do you believe in it as the way it has been carried out on the ground, and what do you think and how can we make it a success? In our recommendations, we can advise the Government on the basis of evidence taken from you and the Permanent Secretary. We want to help the Government to make this a success, we want to point out what is wrong now and what we can do to make it a success so, please, help us.

  Mr Rollerson: I believe in this programme philosophically and intellectually, and have from a very early date, and have been very committed personally to doing everything in my power to make it succeed and, in fact, the talk I gave at the conference was aimed at assisting that process. I believe that there are certain elements of the deployment that could be done better but, given one cannot re-write history, the track we are going down can be made to succeed. It is a tremendously ambitious programme, it is enormously risky, but, having said that, the analogy I would like to use, if I may use another dramatic analogy, is of the American Space Programme. President Kennedy announced it in 1963, succeeded in aligning an entire nation behind it and its aims, including the academics, politicians, scientists and the commercial sector, the nation accepted increased taxes in order to pay for it and was euphoric when it succeeded. I believe that this programme is on a similar scale in terms of its ambition and vision. It is not about, in my view, a single patient record, which I believe to be a means to an end. I think the capability that this programme has the potential to unleash in this century for improved healthcare and the quality of service to patients is just—

  Q273  Chairman: We all accept that, but did you question whether the standard project and programme management techniques needed to be re-thought given the enormity of the programme?

  Mr Rollerson: I did.

  Q274  Chairman: Right. So how can we make this programme work then?

  Mr Rollerson: My view is that there is a natural tendency to apply the techniques that one understands in any given situation, so standard project management techniques, even relatively low level programme management techniques, are applied to programmes in general. This programme is on a scale beyond anything attempted before and I believe, therefore, requires some innovative thinking and some of the best minds to be applied in terms of structuring it so that it can succeed over the long-term. It is naive to assume, in my view, that because something may go well in the early stages when things are relatively simple, crossing the foothills, if you like, as you start to climb what is going to be an enormous mountain that those techniques will still work. Therefore, I believe this needs to be carefully thought out. If I may use another analogy, and it is one I used in the conference, it makes the point better than a thousand words could. It was when Boeing sought to replace the 707 in the late 1950s with a new aeroplane, they realised very early on that scaling it up to be a jumbo jet would not work because it would never take off, it would be too heavy. They had to go back to first principles and ask what is it that makes an aeroplane fly. Consequently, the 747 was a totally new design, totally different, but it works, of course, and it is highly successful. I believe we are in a situation where we need to be looking at the programme in that kind of light: what is it going to take in terms of project management techniques, in terms of vision and leadership, to actually make this work over the ten-year life of the programme. I do not think we are asking those questions yet.

  Q275  Chairman: We are not asking those questions. Finally, before I pass to colleagues, you said: "There is a belief that the National Programme is somehow going to propel transformation in the NHS simply by delivering an IT system. Nothing can be further from the truth. A vacuum, a chasm, is opening up. It was always there". Do you believe that?

  Mr Rollerson: Yes.

  Q276  Mr Khan: Have you got lawyers acting for you?

  Mr Rollerson: In this particular situation, no.

  Q277  Mr Khan: You have not retained lawyers in respect of your employment with Fujitsu?

  Mr Rollerson: I have not seen it as necessary at this point.

  Q278  Mr Khan: Are you facing disciplinary proceedings from Fujitsu?

  Mr Rollerson: There is an internal inquiry under way that may lead to disciplinary proceedings.

  Q279  Mr Khan: You have not approached any lawyers since you made this speech?

  Mr Rollerson: I have.