Greater Manchester Police has clawed back about £5m from the contractors who built its discredited iOPS computer system, Andy Burnham has said. The Greater Manchester Mayor revealed the figure during a heated Q&A where he was forced to deny a suggestion he had shirked responsibility for the IT scandal at GMP.
He said the contracts for the Capita-built computer system were signed in 2015, two years before he was elected mayor, and he stressed his role was to hold GMP to account rather than run the force on a daily basis.
Mr Burnham said he had been aware of problems at GMP from the moment he was elected in 2017, and insisted that once he learned of a damning report by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary in late 2020 he wielded the one power he had - to remove the then chief constable.
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Ian Hopkins was asked to leave his role as chief constable of Greater Manchester Police in December 2020 after the report revealed the force had failed to record an estimated 80,000 crimes in one year. The force splashed out £27m when it launched a new computer system called iOPS (Integrated Operational Policing System) which went live in July 2019, some 19 months behind schedule. Since then the cost of the project has mushroomed to £69.6m - and rising.
But one part of the system key to the day-to-day running of the force, called PoliceWorks, was plagued with problems from the start. Earlier this week the force announced it would be scrapped. Of the £69.6m splashed out on iOPS since its inception, some £23.2m of it was spent on PoliceWorks.
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Millions more will have to be spent on its replacement. The contract for the Capita-built iOPS system runs out in June 2023 - force bosses have decided to let it run down and then purchase one of two alternatives to PoliceWorks currently on the market. GMP won't sanction the building of a bespoke system, as it did with PoliceWorks.
Mayor Andy Burnham came under fire at a mayoral Q&A in Bolton where one member of the public suggested to him he had previously denied the damning police watchdog report in November 2020 was his responsibility. He was asked 'well what is is your responsibility?'
Mr Burnham said holding the force to account, not running GMP, was his job alongside his deputy Beverley Hughes. He told the audience: "The police is independent. Bev and I don't run the police. We don't tell them who to go and arrest or what to do.
"They are rightly independent. We don't live in Russia. This is a very different arrangement."
Mr Burnham mounted a robust defence of his role in overseeing GMP. He said: "Bev and I were raising issues pretty much repeatedly over the last five years.
"Within two weeks of coming into office, I commissioned an independent review into child sexual exploitation within Greater Manchester because I had major concerns about the way it had been handled in the past and actually it was the whistle-blowing of Maggie Oliver which led me to initiate that review, and that review is ongoing. It's had its first phase but further phases will be coming soon.
"Bev and I commissioned independent work looking at the implementation of the computer system. The point I'm getting to is our job is not to run Greater Manchester Police. It's to hold them to account. And when the HMIC said what they said in 2020, knowing what I'd known from the reviews I'd set up, I used the main power I have in respect of Greater Manchester Police and that was the change the leadership.
"At that point I acted and I brought in a new chief constable... That was directly my responsibility, to hold them to account for you. I believe I've done that and I believe Greater Manchester Police are now improving. But if they don't improve to an acceptable level then by all means hold me to account at the next election.
"I'm not ducking away from that at all. I inherited a police force in 2017 that had had massive cuts to its front line resources. It then had to deal with what we saw at the Manchester Arena. It was a demoralised, weakened police force which basically wasn't in any state that we would recognise as being the right one that we would want for Greater Manchester.
"Bev and I had to unpack that. We didn't always get the full story, it has to be said, from the previous leadership, but we did hold them to account. When the moment came when I had the evidence, then I acted and I changed the leadership.
"I believe that the chief constable that I appointed is now returning GMP to... basics, absolutely where the public want them to be."
He stressed two thirds of the iOPS system was working properly and only the PoliceWorks part had been found wanting. He said: "I think about £5m has been recovered from the contractors with whom we signed that contract in 2015.... but now we believe it will cost us less to go and re-procure that PoliceWorks element than to carry on with a system that isn't working."
Capita sold its Secure Solutions and Services business, which delivers the iOPS contract, to NEC Software Solutions in October.
