Catalogue description Manpower Services Commission: Employment Service Agency and Division: CAPITAL Project Papers

CAPITAL (Computer Aided Placing in the Area of London) was an on-line computer system developed in the 1970s by the Employment Service Agency for use in its new style Jobcentres. This pioneering system aroused international interest, and received the British Computer Society Award for 1979 for the system of the year offering the most significant benefit to society. It offered a VDU service in a front-office environment open to the public, and thus posed a host of new problems for a government department whose previous ADP experience was largely confined to batch systems for payment and national statistics. The system was designed, built and run as a pilot for a number of Jobcentres and Employment Offices in the North East of London. The processing and data storage was carried out on a rented Honeywell configuration in Acton using GCOS, IDS, TPS and COBOL.

The system was designed to capture and process details of jobseekers, employers and their job vacancies, and associated recruitment business, and to 'match' jobseekers against job vacancies so as to provide both employer and jobseeker with a better and faster service. One major benefit was the saving in staff time which accrued from the greater efficiency of the mechanisms for vacancy recording and circulation to neighbouring offices. Another major benefit was the saving to the national economy through the extra productivity which resulted in getting vacancies filled faster, and thereby people into productive work

The project put significant effort into the involvement of users in transaction and job design, and of training, and the resulting system proved very popular with both management and staff. It was also a technical success.

It was planned to procure equipment for the expansion of the system throughout the rest of London and into other conurbations. However, the extra cost and technical problems posed by larger configurations and the changes in the economy which reduced the benefits led, along with a number of other factors, to the decision to reject the proposed expansion and to adopt a back-office KSR system for vacancy recording and circulation (VACS). It took seven years for a front-line VDU service to reappear in Jobcentres (SUPERVACS).