Roger Marshall on the Greater London Council’s County Hall mainframes, how Socitm benefitted from compulsory competitive tendering in the 1990s then helped deal with Y2K
I started as a graduate trainee at the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1969 at County Hall, almost across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament. The GLC had the largest IT department in local government and it was based on using mainframes. Much of the fourth floor of County Hall was occupied by big computer rooms, a data entry room with about 90 people in it and programming teams. There was over 400 people in the department and some – literally – heavyweight equipment. It was basically an IBM shop but because of government policy the GLC was told to buy British, which involved getting an ICL System 4 mainframe which was IBM compatible. That was the machine I started on.
I stayed at the GLC for 10 years, learning how to program in a low-level language then working as an analyst and a team leader. My work was partly on GLC systems but my first project was developing the London Borough of Havering’s rate collection system, the equivalent of council tax. Havering didn’t have its own computer at all at that time so outsourced the function to the GLC. We sat down from scratch and wrote a rate collection system with some quite nice features including optical character reading on the paying-in slips, which was quite advanced for that time.
My next job was computer development manager at the London Borough of Bromley, where I live, for about four years. I then became IT director for the City of London Corporation in 1983 and stayed there until I retired in 2010.
While I was at Bromley, my director was having difficulty recruiting for the computer division given pay levels – he had to make a special case to get supplemental higher grades for IT staff to recruit and retain them. He kicked off a survey among London boroughs of what they were paying and handed it over to me, so I established contact with IT directors and deputies across London. It was logical to set up a group to discuss wider issues so that is what we did, establishing the London Local Authorities Computer Managers Group. This was before Socitm started, but once it did we had a regional set-up that slotted into the Socitm structure.
The other leading players in setting up Socitm were mostly county IT directors, as they had a bigger function than a typical London borough would have had at that time. My boss at City of London, the chamberlain (effectively the finance director), had been finance director at Oxfordshire County Council. Mike Barkway, one of the people who set up Socitm, was his IT director there so my boss was quite supportive.
Compulsory competitive tendering and Socitm
I was president of Socitm from 1993 to 1995. The Conservative government of the day decided it wanted to extend competitive tendering for local government services and make it compulsory for local authorities to put out to tender various functions. They started with manual worker services then eventually extended to what you might call the core professional services, which were personnel or HR, finance, legal and IT. That process started about the time I became president and the target at the time was to get it into place by 1995, the time I ended as president. So myself and others were in this position of helping to design a compulsory competitive tendering regime.
We were actually very well qualified, compared to the other professions, to do that because traditionally IT had been outsourced. I mentioned Havering with the GLC, which was just one example, but some authorities had totally outsourced their IT functions. We all bought, competitively, hardware and software as a large proportion of our budgets. So that gave us a head start in how do you do that – the client-contractor split, all that sort of thing.
We also had a very co-operative attitude, because we were the new kids on the block at that time – Socitm had only just started and was establishing itself. The third thing, last but not least, was that we had very little difficulty in meeting the government’s target, which was expressed as a percentage of your total budget. If you’re an HR department with everything in-house then that is going to be quite a problem for you, but we already spent a lot of money as a proportion of our budgets in the private sector. So the experience of working with the other local government associations and central government at that time was really good, in that it helped establish our position with those bodies.
Handling Y2K in local government
What then happened was that there was a change of government in 1997 and Labour decided that compulsory competitive tendering would no longer be obligatory, putting something called Best Value in its place. But the Year 2000 or Y2K problem arose that year, which IT departments were absolutely central in addressing. So we had two major business changes to deal with during the period when I was president and soon afterwards.
As IT director for the City of London I was located in and lived in London so it was very easy for me to attend meetings. The government set up Taskforce 2000 headed by Robin Guernier and I was the local government person on it, so although I was no longer president I maintained a leading role within Socitm on Y2K. I think local government responded as well as anybody on this. The manufacturers of hardware and embedded systems, where you couldn’t really get into them to check out if they were going to work or not, made a bit of a killing as they forced upgrades on organisations that probably weren’t necessary. However, across the whole of local government I don’t remember anyone actually having system failures on 1 January 2000.
I only ever worked for three organisations, the last one for 26 years, and it was all local government IT. When I started it was all mainframe-based – you either had your own mainframe if you were as big as the GLC and most counties, you got together in a consortium so you could afford one or you outsourced work like Havering did to the GLC. Your negotiations were with big firms like IBM and ICL who had a tendency to over-promise and under-deliver. The proportion of your costs going on hardware and its maintenance was enormous – it would be more than your staff budget and certainly more than you spent on software, which might be given away by another authority or provided free with the hardware. It was a very different world.
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