£32k a Day For Birmingham Council Website

An anonymous reader writes "Birmingham Wired have uncovered that Birmingham City Council spend on average £32,000 a day maintaining a council website that has cost the tax-payer over £48 million to date, while councils nationwide prepare to say goodbye to 26,000 jobs due to budget deficits. Capita, a London based outsourcing company, states on their website: 'To date we've invested £48.4m in a combination of staff training, network upgrades, server replacements, hardware and software — and we continue to drive efficiency through innovation.'"

Comments

Shhhhh

[Lije Baley]

It's just this kind of nonsense that keeps us computer folk employed.

Re:Shhhhh

[sortius_nod]

I have a T-shirt from think geek that sums it up:

"Technical Support: Your ignorance is my job security"

I wonder if this is the employee uniform at Capita?

Re:Shhhhh

[SimonTheSoundMan]

I live in Birmingham, I know people that work in IT at the council.

IT was taken over by Capitia, they also have contracts for many other councils and government departments. I have never known a corporate company to be so wasteful and incompetent.

Biggest news last years was the re-write of the web site. Was first estimated to be cost jut over £600k, and was to be competed in March 2006. However, Capita over-run and completed it mid 2009 at a cost of £2.2 million.

http://www.birminghampost.net/news/politics-news/2009/08/04/cost-of-new-birmingham-city-council-website-spirals-to-2-8m-65233-24307674/

Re:Shhhhh

[SimonTheSoundMan]

Oh, the cost I stated above was for the redesign. I'm sure you can make your own mind up about how it was such a huge failure.

http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/

Re:Shhhhh

[Flossymike]

Very curious. Why all the white space in the page source?

Re:Shhhhh

[cyber-vandal]

They're called Crapita by Private Eye for a reason. However public service IT in the last 3 decades is a long story of waste, incompetence and stupidity. Hooray for privatisation - a worse service for a higher cost!

Re:Shhhhh

[hldn]

the source code is actually a program written in whitespace

Re:Shhhhh

[Hero Zzyzzx]

I'm betting they're building this in a framework (though "framework" may be too grand a word) that mixes the presentation and logic layer. All that whitespace represents branches in the code (conditionals, database queries, etc.) that weren't executed for that particular page view - or were executed and nothing was output to the screen in that line number. If you don't write your erb tags correctly in Rails, it'll emit spurious whitespace into the source, too. If you weren't writing your logic in your controllers or models (bad!) and not asking erb to collapse whitespace, yeah, you'd get a ton of empty lines.

Oh god. If that's true, this site is an untemplatted nightmare under the covers. Worst case: "Hey, can we change 'Latest News' to just 'news?'" "Sure - just edit line 6643, but don't throw in a syntax error or you'll break the *entire f'ing site.*"

Re:Shhhhh

[Tanktalus]

As always, capitalism only works when all sides are peers in the transaction. That means that the person, or, in this case, the government bureaucrat, who looks for private companies to tender on a contract needs to be aware of what they're asking for. They need to understand what the transaction entails, and they need to understand the alternatives (whether hiring someone to do it in-house, or it's simply the competition in the marketplace). Any time you are at an informational disadvantage, you open yourself up to being taken for a ride. There's a reason why government tenders generally include the clause "we reserve the right to go with any vendor, not just the lowest bid" or something like that: so that they can weed out crackpot offers.

It seems to me, then, that the person in Birmingham's city government who decided to go with this outfit was at an informational disadvantage and could thus be duped by incompetent and/or malicious corporations. They apparently took the lowest bid, not the best bid.

bad story

[teknopurge]

The summary is disingenuous: the cost is for their IT, not just a single HTML website.

Re:bad story

[Anonymous Coward]

not only that, but the 48m is the amount the outsourcer has spent on improvements to their entire operation, not how much the council has spent.

The whole article is at best, poorly informed, at worst, outright lies.

Re:bad story

[jginspace]

The summary is disingenuous: the cost is for their IT, not just a single HTML website.

Could be:
http://www.capita.co.uk/about-us/Pages/Birmingham.aspx

Service Birmingham is our joint venture with Birmingham City Council, Europe's largest local authority, established in April 2006 to provide the Council's information and communications technology (ICT) services. Substantial investment and innovation have created an all-new platform that underpins the Council's ambitious business transformation programme. To date we've invested £48.4m in a combination of staff training, network upgrades, server replacements, hardware and software - and we continue to drive efficiency through innovation.

The cost of the site itself was covered a few months back - excellent reporting from Heather Brooke and friends:
http://podnosh.com/blog/2010/05/27/the-report-on-birmingham-gov-uk-is-published/
http://helpmeinvestigate.com/investigations/49-when-can-we-expect-a-new-birmingham-gov-website

Re:bad story

[mabinogi]

If you're taking the article at face value, then you should take the fact that the 48.4m is the money to date Capita have invested in something as the truth.

The article is just a bunch of big sounding unrelated numbers thrown together to effect a sense of outrage.

I just took a look at their site

[Urd.Yggdrasil]

I just took a look at their site, which I thought must be amazing for that kind of money, and I found this: What exactly Birmingham City Council up to!? Perhaps the money is going someplace a bit more nefarious.

Re:I just took a look at their site

[mjwalshe]

that's an old name for the geo tags - you muppet,

Re:I just took a look at their site

[lenroc]

I just took a look at their site, which I thought must be amazing for that kind of money, and I found this: <meta name="ICBM" content="52.48002, -1.902805"> What exactly Birmingham City Council up to!? Perhaps the money is going someplace a bit more nefarious.

According to Google, that's Birmingham Town Hall!

Perhaps that's part of Capita's plan to ensure payment in full...

Re:efficiently...

[1 a bee]

filling their pockets, you gotta admire the chutzpah of the people who would actually get away with charging that sort of money

Apparently this same chutzpah caused the story to break in the first place. FTA:

Capita, a London based outsourcing company state on their website: To date we’ve invested £48.4m in a combination of staff training, network upgrades, server replacements, hardware and software – and we continue to drive efficiency through innovation.

ICBM Address

[jginspace]

Yes you're definitely on to something:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICBM_address

Re:At least they didn't use frontpage

[CdBee]

We're dealing with Brummies here, lets not pretend that spelling is the most important problem they face.... Vuuurrrrrrrrry noyce....

I'm going to call BS on this article.

[Anonymous Coward]

The 48 million number? Is taken out of context from a company's own website. Context that is lacking is timeframe, actual details of the spending...and you know what, that's enough that I don't feel like going any further.

These numbers may be facts, but they aren't a story. They're just being used to drive emotions.

I say we mod Article Down.

Re:I'm going to call BS on this article.

[damburger]

Yeah, this sounds like the kind of crap normally put out by right-wing think tanks to soften up the populace for brutal cuts to public services. Fact is, Birminghams a big city and its IT services are bound to be costly simply due to scale. The deficit hawks always exploit this fact to come up with big, scary sounding numbers to show government 'waste'. After all, which sounds worse, "Government spends £1 billion on X" or "Government spends £16 per person on X"? Both of course mathematically equivalent.

Massaging the numbers doesn't hurt either. Chav-baiter Jeremy Kyle recently whined in The Sun about there being a £192 billion welfare bill and then starts complaining about people without jobs basically being subhuman - as if the entire £192 billion were spent on jobseekers allowance - the reality is that only £2.9 billion is spent on it, and the vast majority of that bill goes to supporting children, people on state pensions, and the disabled. But don't let facts get in the way of scapegoating the unemployed, Kyle.

There is only one source of our current financial woes, and it lives in the City of London. Right-wing think tanks are constantly putting out this bullshit as a misdirection technique. The bankers want us to blame some defenceless underclass instead of marching on their bonus-bought mansions with torches and pitchforks...

Re:I'm going to call BS on this article.

[Anonymous Coward]

I obviously have to be careful what I'm saying for legal reasons but if the Toffs have their flash cars and big houses targeted, and some fat cat banker gets stabbed in the street I'm not going to get in anyone's way.

Yes Comrade, fight the power! I haven't worked to earn any of those things either, but damnit I can express outrage towards the people who have! Life isn't fair, so let's hurt other people! Wooo!

Re:I'm going to call BS on this article.

[Anne Thwacks]

The Labour Party manages to look worse than bad without any help from others.

In fact, the Labour party could not look other than bad: Old labour still believes Marxist economic theory is correct - despite the fact that it was proven stupid in theory and practice, while new labour: Blair was secretly negotiating with Mugabe!

There are NO redeeming features of Labour whatever.

However, if the bankers' "derivatives" ponzi scheme is not stopped soon, even the rich will be in the same situation as flooded Pakistanis.

Re:Mercenary

[Dan541]

Yep.

Re:bad story - I must agree

[Elvis77]

I love a "The Government are Idiots" story as good as anyone but this one just doesn't make sense. Last year the Birmingham Post (http://www.birminghampost.net/news/politics-news/2009/08/04/cost-of-new-birmingham-city-council-website-spirals-to-2-8m-65233-24307674/) stuck it to the council over a 383% growth in the cost of the website... it went from £580,000 to £2.8m. Where does the £48.4m come from? It comes from Capita's case study which IS NOT about the web site (http://www.capita.co.uk/about-us/Pages/Birmingham.aspx) Birmingham Council may or may not be doing the smart thing and Capita might be ripping off the good people of Birmingham... if it's like City Councils where I live then they are probably screwing up badly but this article is a load of crap

Re:bad story - I must agree

[julesh]

Capita might be ripping off the good people of Birmingham

Crapita never do anything without ripping off good people. Here in Coventry, they've installed voice stress analysis software to attempt to detect people lying when they claim benefits... of course the fact that VSA is essentially snake oil hasn't stopped them spending millions on the piece of software this paper was written about. Well worth reading if you want to know the kind of junk our councils spend our hard earned cash on.

Re:48 million pounds / population 1 million

[Concerned Onlooker]

Probably. I don't think a subscription weighs that much.

Re:Runs on Oracle stuff

[Hymer]

...plus presumably £650 for Oracle Enterprise Database Server...
I would like to know where you are buying your Oracle licenses 'cause I'm paying something like £20000 anually for my Enterprise license (for a quad core, single socket server)

Re:Runs on Oracle stuff

[MichaelSmith]

...plus presumably £650 for Oracle Enterprise Database Server...

I would like to know where you are buying your Oracle licenses 'cause I'm paying something like £20000 anually for my Enterprise license (for a quad core, single socket server)

650 BGP must be to run on a 386.

As a resident of Birmingham...

[greg_robson]

...I can say that we all waited ages for the site to relaunch, when it finally did we are shocked.

• Poor accessibility, basically the same content under a different template. It took them 2 months to get the "Pay your Council Tax online" feature working again.
• There was no consultation with the target audience (Birmingham City Council covers approximately 1.2 million people).
• All the features we were expected such as here's my postcode...
• • ...where's my nearest school/doctor"
  • ...who's my Member of Parliament
  • ...when do my bins (trash cans for those across the pond) get collected.
• ...were nowhere to be seen despite being common on many other council websites.

So bad is the situation, some local web developers have set up their own community built site:
http://www.bccdiy.com/
And while still in it's early days (design could be improved), it has the useful features and shows events that are taking place in what is a vibrant and modern city.

Re:efficiently...

[TheRaven64]

Probably because Yiddish is the best human language for expressing outrage. It even passes German in the ability to combine insulting someone with spitting on them.

Re:bad story - I must agree

[TheRaven64]

Crapita never do anything without ripping off good people

That's not fair. They do not practice any such discrimination, they're happy to rip off anyone - good or bad.

It runs on the most expensive software

[devent]

No wonder it's so expensive, it runs on the most expensive software out there. Windows Server 2003 and Oracle-Application-Server-10g/10.1.3.0.0 Oracle-HTTP-Server. . But the side is all wrong in FF3. The menu is in the middle of the side and the content is under the menu blob. Maybe next time they just using a Linux server with a custom Drupal or Wordpress.

Why the government always needs a site to be build from scratch? There are 100 open source CMS systems out there, where you have a) localization, b) forum, c) uploads, d) content management, etc, etc, all already developed. Just spend £1000 on a nice theme and another £3000 on customizing it. I don't think the side will have 10,000,000 visitors per day where you need an Oracle HTTP server with an Oracle DB and a highly specialized website.

Re:It runs on the most expensive software

[devent]

Why would you buy that? Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, etc. are all free and you don't need to buy a Windows server to run it. They also talk you into bying MSSQL server, where just MySQL or PostgreSQL are free.

Re:oops

[John Hasler]

> ...its Oracle...

Well, that explains the cost.

Re:Runs on Oracle stuff

[jeremyp]

That is £637 per named user. That's great if you are the only person going to be using the application, but if that's the case, you'd probably be better off using sqlite which is £0 per named user.

On the other hand, if your application is going to be used by say 500 people in a local council, it's going to be about £30K worth of named users.