Data security concerns could scupper the transformational government agenda, a senior charity figure has warned.

David Harker, chief executive of the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB), has described how a major piece of e-government work has been delayed by the data security concerns that have haunted the public sector for 18 months.

“Just as we start to make progress, the anxiety around data security has made departments more risk-averse,” Harker told Civil Service World.

The project in question has involved CAB working with the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) to enable bureau advisers to help people use the proposed online application system for benefits such as jobseekers allowance and state pensions.

Planning and preparation, including a £21m grant to CAB to get its own IT system up to scratch, is ongoing, but in recent months the DWP has expressed concern about allowing CAB’s 6,000 staff and 14,000 volunteers access to the online applications system.

“I don’t know how much discretion [senior civil servants] have got,” Harker said. “There is such a high level of concern at the minute and the messages about this are coming down from above and making it quite hard.

“I think it needs serious debate, because the benefits are quite significant if we can make this work – it would make citizens’ contact with government fast and easier, and there would be cost savings.”

Harker fears that an additional level of authentication, over and above those involved when advisers log on to the CAB system, may prove unworkable for the charity and result in a whole swathe of people being excluded from the new service.

An online application system is “great for all the people well able to do these things for themselves” warned Harker. “If we can’t also find a way of the bureau doing that for other people, we are going to miss an opportunity.”

The project has been in preparation for the past six years, said Harker, because DWP has got “such complicated legacy systems in their IT and because, although everybody thinks it is a good idea, it is never the absolute and overriding priority”.

This situation is not limited to DWP, said Harker, and is the main reason why the ambitions of the transformational government agenda are proving slow to materialise.

“People like Sir David Varney said there should be citizen-focused services, but much of the time it does not feel like that to the people who are coming into CABs,” he said. “They feel they are being messed around by a system that is difficult to access, confusing and makes a large number of mistakes.”

At least some of the blame for this lies with politicians, Harker added, pointing to the example of tax credits where civil servants had warned that there might be problems with the system. “There is a lot of ‘initiativitis’, as opposed to letting us run the services that we have already got in the best possible way.”