Recommendation 9

One of the critical success factors for the programme is having the right people in place to deliver it. The programme depends on access to the PNC team but that team lacks capacity to support other programmes as well as manage the PNC, and this issue has caused delays.17 Key staff on the PNC team are approaching retirement, while the specialist skills and knowledge required to maintain the PNC make it difficult for the Department to recruit and train replacements.18 The Department emphasised the difficulties of finding people with the niche skills required, such as working with coding language from the 1970s. It pointed to having carried out various recruitment activities, recent and ongoing, and to having restructured the programme team over recent months.19 We registered our concern that it had taken the Department so long to be getting to grips with an issue about the skills needed to deal with an old legacy programme, when the need to do so should have been clear from the start.20 Poor decision-making about the programme