GREATER Manchester Police is in crisis, with tens of thousands of crimes unrecorded and improperly investigated. 

Capita, an outsourcing giant with a top Tory on the board, has helped to create the crisis, but the national media is downplaying its involvement.

Last December HM Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) said Greater Manchester Police (GMP) had failed to even record 80,000 crimes in a 12-month period. 

GMP Chief Constable Ian Hopkins resigned as the force was placed in “special measures.”

Last month BBC Newsnight investigated the troubled GMP, with a very thorough, well-made report, interviewing officers who said the force was failing, and crime victims who had been badly let down.

The BBC reported: “Many have pointed to GMP’s new computer system, which went live two years ago, as the catalyst of some of the failings. Called the Integrated Operational Policing System (iOPS), it has been dubbed iFLOPS by many insiders.”

But for some reason the BBC’s otherwise detailed report said nothing about where iOPS came from. 

The £27 million computer system was installed by Capita, an outsourcer with a history of public-sector disasters. 

Newsnight’s otherwise very impressive report 20-minute report was backed up by a 1,100-word article on the BBC’s website and summaries on BBC news broadcasts — but among all these words, one word, Capita, never appears.

The Guardian followed up Newsnight’s report on the GMP crisis in June. It focused on the role of iOPS in GMP’s crisis, revealing the current GMP Chief Constable, Stephen Watson, was reviewing the computer system because “the information that I do have tells me that it doesn’t work.” 

Watson could scrap the multimillion-pound system. It’s a good story, but despite being all about a failing computer system, it never mentions who supplied the system: the 500-word Guardian piece doesn’t include the name “Capita.”

A £27m computer system is failing, and it’s screwing up the police, but the firm supplying it gets to stay in the shadows.

Manchester Police failure isn’t all down to iOPS: police can fail crime victims without a computer system. Many police forces have a history of being both oppressive and failing to take victims seriously — particularly women and those from disadvantaged groups. 

But iOPS has made a major contribution to GMP failure: it is made up of two Capita systems. 

The first, ControlWorks, a “command and control” system, manages deployment of police officers. The second, PoliceWorks, is a record management system. 

Police were especially unhappy about the latter, saying they couldn’t search police records properly, records migrated from previous systems are poor quality, login times bad and they were stuck with awkward “workarounds.” 

Without proper access to records of crime and criminals, officers say they can’t pursue or prosecute many offenders, who are running free, while victims face repetitive, confused investigations.

iOPS problems are well known. Back in 2019 Greater Manchester Police Federation emailed all its members with the stark assessment that “iOPS (current form) is an unsafe system of work.” 

A March 2020 inspection by HMIC was deeply critical of the system, saying: “Following the introduction of iOPS, the force saw a large increase in the backlogs it had across the organisation.”

Capita is a big consultancy relying heavily on government contracts. Capita is also well known for poor performance. 

Notably Capita works for the Department for Work and Pensions assessing disabled people for personal independence payment benefits. Its PIP work is widely criticised for being inaccurate and unfair on claimants.

Like other privatisation specialists, Capita hired political “insiders.” Baroness Lucy Neville-Rolfe, an influential Conservative peer and former Tory minister, has had a seat on Capita’s board since 2017.

There is a real media problem that “business” reporting is seen as specialist and separate from “political reporting.”  

Any reporting involving a major corporation is seen as “business news” and handed to specialist “business” reporters who often see things in terms of “business” success — whether firms make profits or increase market share — rather than their political influence or the failures of privatisation. 

Meanwhile “politics” reporters will look at outsourcing failures as political failures — mistakes made by the politicians, officials or civil servants who outsourced the services.

This means corporations with big political influence — through privatisation, lobbying, or deregulation — don’t get properly examined. 

I have seen big improvements in reporting corporate failure and corporate lobbying, especially since the 2008 financial crisis showed how crucial it is to pay attention to influential corporations. 

So, for example, the Manchester Evening News has been reporting the GMP iOPS scandal for years, thanks to its reporters and GMP whistleblowers, and has no problem naming Capita.  

But Capita’s absence from the BBC and Guardian reports shows some media still find it difficult to name “guilty players” if those players are corporations. 

Many times we see politically linked corporations get huge outsourcing contracts and deliver miserable results. 

But many times we also don’t see this happening because of a basic failure in reporting.

If you look at Capita’s website, you can see the danger of under-reporting its involvement in GMP’s failure. 

While the PoliceWorks part of its iOPS system is failing in Manchester, the firm is still busy promoting it.

As recently as this April, Capita put out a podcast presented by BBC’s Justine Green promoting its “digital policing” solutions, featuring its police tech salesman Matt Stagg, who, according to the firm, is “solutioning lead in Capita Consulting’s data & AI guild” and a man who “drives innovation and oversees the delivery of cutting-edge products.” 

Because the BBC and national newspapers are reluctant to name Capita, it has more of a free hand to push their product and claim that “PoliceWorks is a modern, flexible and modular platform supporting critical operational policing processes. 

“It can help transform a modern police force using a single data source to support all key areas of records management.”

So in the short term, Capita is given a free hand to promote a multimilllion-pound product with a very poor record in relation to public safety. 

And in the longer term, the general problem of politically connected poor-quality privatisers gets less exposure than it should.