Slashdot Mirror
UK Benefits System In Deeper Trouble?
judgecorp writes "Two media reports suggest that the Universal Credit scheme to overhaul Britain's welfare programme is in trouble. The IT project to support Universal Credit was launched by the Cabinet Office, and it will be completed and run by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) — but the Guardian says the Cabinet Office has pulled out its elite experts too soon, while a different leak told Computer Weekly that the four original suppliers — HP, IBM, Accenture and BT — have been effectively frozen out in an internal change. It's the biggest change to Britain's benefits system for many years, and all the evidence says it's not going well."
Sounds like it's going well then...
Let's hope the government didn't piss away another £12b on a failed IT system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health
Can it really get any worse???
Government IT project doesn't go to plan!
Can we start reporting on the IT projects that do come in on or under budget? Now something like that would be news!
but they seem to be able to get a system together to monitor our global communications and do things the rich want to protect their failing business model.
Currently, Housing Benefit (rent) is paid to the tenant by default; However, if the tenant falls more than 2 months behind then payments are switched to go direct to the Landlord.
This change was made under the last Labour government as a way of encouraging tenants to get some practice at budgeting for expenses; Naturally for a small and feckless proportion of the housing benefit recipients, the extra money paid direct was a windfall they spent on drink, gambling and drugs.
Should be added that for most recipients the total of housing benefit received is less than the total rent and they are expected to make up any excess from their unemployment or disability living allowance payments (where 'rents' include standing charges such as power, heating, council tax anyway) - so even if the landlord has a defaulting tenant and gets direct payments from the local authority, they only receive the element of the total rent that relates to actual rent, and must pursue the tenant for the rest.
this system has caused many UK landlords to refuse to rent premises to recipients on housing benefit (although of course if a tenant went from employed to HB and kept up the payments rather than defaulting, the landlord would never know, which is some shielding...)
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
4 major fortune 500 hundred companies who are major contributors to /. and the status quo have been marginalized by a government ministry's own in house IT staff, and therefore the major corporations are goings to demand that this disaster by put on the front page of /. /. will comply. We are in compliance with our corporate overlords.
The article summary is a bit misleading. Universal Credit has from beginning to end been the child of the Department of Work and Pensions. The Government Digital Service, the in-house IT design expert office, is technically part of the Cabinet Office, but that's only because it's a centralised IT design service meant to serve all branches of the government. Also, the summary skips over the critical part of the article: the GDS is pulling out because the project is being run in direct contradiction with their own recommendations. Looking at the situation, it's difficult to apportion any part of the blame for the project troubles to the Cabinet Office; it seems to lie entirely on the shoulders of the DWP.
I assume you include the sick and disabled under your "lazy cunts" label?
In the post-IT world we will go back to using Post-its to track our welfare payments.
Also, the people who lost their jobs because someone in the business embezzled everything
Are you sure there are jobs to be filled? Are you really sure? Honest hard working people would prefer to do real work, not pointless jobs that don't need to be done. Shuffling papers in an office all day is not real work.
To be fair a single NHS IT system is a very good idea. Its just a shame the contractors smelt money and decided to milk it for all it was worth rather than bother to deliver a working system.
No offerings from the Good Idea Fairy survive contact with reality.
The contractors always go under the bus, every time. As Mark Knopfler intoned: "They punish the monkey, and let the organ grider go."
The fundamental problem here is that, for reasons of political power, politicians ever asserted that having the government manage individual health was somehow a swift idea. If the politicians were as good at implementing systems themselves as they were at blaming the contractor (yet, somehow, re-hiring them at the next go-around) then Utopia would arrive with the sunrise.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Switching from large commercial providers using a disciplined time-tested development methodology, to a few (probably less-experienced) internal developers, using an ad-hoc "Agile" (probably undisciplined) software development methodology (that management probably just thought was cool). What could possibly go wrong?
To extend the current IT solution we will be using a standard waterfall delivery approach largely using existing suppliers and commercial frameworks, in order to de-risk delivery and ensure UC continues to have a safe and secure introduction. The end-state digital solution will be delivered using an agile, and therefore iterative, approach as advocated by the Cabinet Office with significantly less reliance on the large IT suppliers delivering the current UC IT service.”
It all depends upon what investment rate has been decided-upon. 0.5% is good enough for us plebes while 25% is good enough for credit card companies,
Agreed. I, for one, always trust our corporate overlords with what I should do, how I should look, act and eat. They have my interests at heart because I vote with my wallet if they d....
Sorry, couldn't even finish. How do you people live like this? The cognitive dissonance must be overwhelming.
As you say.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
wouldn't expect to find u anywheres near honour
rewriting history since 2109
Totally unexpected, because private industry (who were the ones hired to do the work) are paragons of efficiency and efficacy and are always and in all things better than government in any endeavour, since any failures mean that the company fails or the employees fired (impossible for civil servants on the "gravy train").
Eat the rich. Honkies taste like pork.
They have a budget of 2 Billion pounds.
You could hire 100 of the best programmers in the world and give them all $1M/year salaries, and you would be nowhere near the budget.
You do realise, don't you, that the history of non-white immigration goes back almost a millenium (first recorded instances in the 12th century) whereas the history of unemployment benefits basically starts with the Beveridge Report in 1942...?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Obvious political troll article is obvious...
Interesting to see iain Duncan smith leading this effort. He might be known to Americans who used to see him on Prime Ministers Questions on CSPAN back in the early 2000s debating Tony Blair. Both were fantastic debaters, and there was nothing more satisfying than watching those two engage in the debate version of mutually assured destruction. That was my favorite show on the TV during that time, and I learned a lot about British politics. I can only wish we had something similar in the US. The guys doing PMQ now are a joke compared to Duncan smith/ Blair. An even bigger joke are the American presidential debates.
It is meant to be an abject failure so the Torries can dump it entirely and replace it with the issuing of bootstraps.
The Rand / Koch movement is not just for domestic US implementation.
For those who don't follow UK politics: 'Benefits tourism' is a big issue here, mainly because it's being pushed by anti-immigrant parts of the press and because various parties are competing to curb it as a vote-winning measure. It's especially brought up as an argument against the UK's EU membership, because the UK can't refuse to admit EU nationals.
There's very little evidence of benefits tourism actually taking place within the EU, and EU immigrants actually pay more in tax than they use in public services (for non-EU immigrants it's a little the other way round, but not very much). A quick Google suggests that EU migrants pay 34% more in tax, non-EU migrants 14% less and UK citizens 11% less. Numbers are rarely mentioned in this debate....I suspect that most parties like the idea of cracking down on it as a largely symbolic response and don't care if it makes any difference.
(It also looks like some Bulgarians complain about hordes of British tourists going to Bulgaria, getting drunk and relying on Bulgarian health care).
Personally, I think that, instead of complaining about the EU, EU governments should get together and decide that the citizen's previous country is responsible for benefits for a couple of years after he moves/pays taxes and then it switches over, or something along those lines. At least it might shut people up.
it dont help with all the WHITE ones either. they all want our few jobs. eastern europeans have done far more damage to us in much shorter time,their smarter,more savvy and close to home and can easily pre plan and prepare fake ids,fake firms you name it,if its bent,they have a finger in it,cash goes out of this country very quickly,their here for three years and go home very well off.i watch them at it all day everyday round here.
Once the Americans wake up and start reading this you will be labeled as a racist.
Eat the rich. Honkies taste like pork.
You mean they'll just have to live on crackers!
Maybe they'll throw in the odd coconut for variety.
Or get a job ending cunts like you! Sooner or later your job will be next unless you can compete for some one is compelled to work for £1.75 an hour or starve
I may be misunderstanding, but it appears that the existing contractors are using old-school waterfall. Gee, government contractors using a heavily-specs-oriented approach, when has that gone wrong?
The new idea seems to be having a team of smaller players use an agile approach to deliver the real system.
Any time you can get a group of smaller developers doing rapid iterations with the government it's a miracle... It is also vastly more likely to deliver something decent and on-budget.
Anytime I see HP, IBM, Agilent, et al winning a contract for some government system I automatically assume it will be an epic fail.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
You keep on harping on the "EU immigrants" while avoiding talking about what is going in England.
There are so many immigrants in England that in maternity wards across England's hospitals you find *MORE* non-white babies than the white babies !
This is not about race either, since the *White Babies* could be of the Polish or Russian or Italian or Romania stock.
Most of those who are receiving "benefits" are people formerly from Pakistan or Nigeria or India.
Except where money not already assigned for rent, food, heating has already been put aside and things like clothes, holidays, medicine and non-essentials were put aside to pay for the addiction to cigarettes.
NOT ONCE was someone spending rent money on alcohol or cigarettes.
PS does your one claim support the contention that such actions (even if they took place) are an issue to be worried about for the DWP? No. There is an estimate that 0.5% of fraud is benefit fraud. cf banker fraud...
When the politicians in the same government start bailing on a project and start to point fingers at each other, it's only a short amount of time thereafter that you'll see resignations and folks trying to distance themselves from the coming disaster. It's that rat instinct we all have and this project sounds like it'll completely blow up here shortly.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Because you could "rent out" a room in exchange for drugs. And you could swap food for alcohol!
You should have to pay for them, but your employer must decide what you buy and must get the receipts and you cannot ask for more money.
Or transfer payments. Or whatever have a look into this: http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_welfare_spending_40.html You will find: UK JSA payments = 5.9bn Social exclusion NEC 28.8bn http://www.ifs.org.uk/budgets/gb2013/GB2013_Ch8.pdf States that this 28bn is welfare payments made to WORKING people, in the form of tax credits. From 2002 till about 2009 there was a scam going on, whereby if you worked less, the government effectively topped up your wages to almost but not quite the amount you would receive if you were working full time. As such from 2002-2009 there were tons of 16.5 hour jobs. A person working 40 hours vs 16.5hours the pay difference was £10 or £20. As a result millions of people went part time and their standard of living did not change. Working people can also claim housing and child benefits too. As a response corporations cut wages to the minimum realising that the state would top up the pay of its workers and very few jobs were more than 16.5h. This was intentional of course as the then government tried to create a client state.
Actually the UK Goobermints recent push to stop EU Imigrants from claiming benefits for four months was pointless posturing as this was already in place with EU legislation.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
So in the UK, you get hordes of handicapped or elderly immigrants?
I don't know much about the UK, but over here in the Netherlands, mostly young people seem to migrate into the country. They tend to be healthy and require very little healthcare.
"There's very little evidence of benefits tourism actually taking place within the EU"
With this relaxed immigration rules in the UK, you cannot make this statement.
Lean English, otherwise your earning potential will be much less than that!
Yes. They should all be terminated at diagnosis or birth!
The sad part is this hurts British people the most, especially those with foreign spouses. I can't get a visa for mine at the moment. Essentially my country thinks I am some kind of scammer because I didn't choose to marry another UK subject. In the end it may drive me away from this country to live with her abroad, meaning the country will lose my skills, my contributions in tax and my business.
All this because the Daily Mail hates everyone, especially foreigners.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
According to the papers we do have hordes of unwell immigrants seeking treatment for all kinds of things, but primarily HIV (because it can be spread to us) and babies (because pure British stock children are outnumbered by brown kids so their schools only teach in Polish now).
Handicapped immigrants are their favourite targets, because it combined two of their most hated groups: the disabled and immigrants.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The sad part is this hurts British people the most, especially those with foreign spouses. I can't get a visa for mine at the moment. Essentially my country thinks I am some kind of scammer because I didn't choose to marry another UK subject. In the end it may drive me away from this country to live with her abroad, meaning the country will lose my skills, my contributions in tax and my business.
All this because the Daily Mail hates everyone, especially foreigners.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill:
In politics xenophobia is a good starter but a bad sticker.
The British should heed that advice. The guy whom Winston directed the original quote at didn't listen and things ended pretty badly for him.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Because Poles are very brown these days...
I've seen this rather sad situation described as an immigration two-for-one offer for the government. The government publishes, talks about and targets net migration figures, not immigration figures. Kicking out UK citizens like this is a double-win for them - one off the figures for one immigrant not let in, another off the figures for a UK citizen leaving. I wouldn't even be surprised if that was deliberately targeted.
Ahhhh.
But many jobs, e.g. IT, are in the tradeable sector and are thus suceptable to outsourcing.
My Plan B, should the arse drop out of the IT sector, is to get an apprenticeship in something unpopular and non-tradeable (e.g. impossible to outsource). I am a software developer working in finance and are on the breadline. All the tradesmen I've ever met are rolling in it.
And this is not a joke; it's surprisingly common and I've seen it happen.
EU migrants pay 34% more in tax, non-EU migrants 14% less and UK citizens 11% less.
Wouldn't this only apply to documented working migrants that talk to the survey people? Seems like there must be a really strong sample bias toward the law abiding migrants.
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depends are you counting in-work benefits ie subsidizing low paying jobs with tax credits
So undocumented migrants can claim benefits?
Initially I took the figures from a BBC news article, which took them in turn from this: http://www.cream-migration.org/publ_uploads/CDP_22_13.pdf Table 5, panel B on page 41.
So, I should correct one thing: 34% (actualy 33.9%) is for EEA migrants (the EU plus a bit) arriving between 2001 and 2011. This is the period when large numbers Poles (and other eastern European new EU members) arrived, who seem to spark the most concern. Taking all EEA migrants it's much lower (4.5%), but still higher than the -10.6% for natives. I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised if a lot of taxes came from EEA migrants moving to work in British banks.
The methodology they use seems to be to assign all public expenditure to the UK/EEA/non-EEA groups, taking in to account what's known about benefits they receive whilst assigning average costs for things like defence. So, yes, it includes in-work benefits.
Hospitals can and do turn you down in the USA. The ER department is usually a different subsidiary.
And ER do and will refuse you if you turn up with something that isn't threatening your immediate extinction and they only have to stop you dying. Once you're no longer at risk of expiring on the doorstep, they can chuck you out.
If you were being taxed to death as you claim, you would be having to go to food banks so you can afford to feed yourself and stave off your pending death.
Since you appear not to use them, you cannot be being taxed to death.
Therefore you ARE all right.
smelt == smelled.
Just different ways of changing the tense of the word "smell".
Here in the US, my wife came over on a K1 visa. Form I-134 was just one of many required to be processed to apply for the K1. Anyways, I-134 states that my wife can't depend on food stamps or other forms of goverment assistance being I'm her official financial sponsor (I think for 10 years). The running joke is that had she just crossed over illegally from south of the boarder, it would have been easer and she would soon be able to vote (amnesty). Benefits and all. See what happens when you play by the rules? You get fucked, that's what!!!
Life is not for the lazy.
Right, I see: so they're going from a waterfall development where they've got something working, to an agile development system, where they'll make daily changes, esp. ones to support the Tories' agenda.
Yup. That's going to work better than healthcare.gov 1.0....
mark "why, no, I'm *not* an agile fan"
If that's the case, why do I know fresh EU immigrants on JSA in the United Kingdom?
Their claim was from the first day they came to the UK too.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
That's the first time I've heard the GDS called 'experts'.
Literally none of the people in the GDS that I worked with had *ever* had any experience of building a large system.
Their initial proposal for UC -a system to hand out billions of pounds worth of benefits and to hold intimate details of millions of systems- was to write it in Python!
What actually happened was that GDS demand the the DWP sack the experienced team they had co-ordinating across all of the suppliers.
They then demanded that they, GDS, be given complete control over the whole programme. Sensibly the Cabinet told them to fuck off.
So they picked up their ball and walked out in a huff.
It's no loss.
If they pay tax, they are documented, pretty much by definition. If they get benefits, they are also similarly documented. Seems fairly straightforward to me. Certainly there may be quite a few that don't pay tax, and some that don't get benefits, but is this really about them?
Exactly! Compelling, isn't it?
Tricky, tricky..... am I as the interviewer recruiting for dubiously moral paramilitary organisation?
I think it's absolutely about people who don't pay tax and do get benefits. I suppose all the high cost benefits require some kind of identification though.
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Oh...I think to do those things you need to upgrade to Intellilink Gold package.
Then their claim was in breach of EU Legislation
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Which EU legislation? How would I report them?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
They must be, they are taking all the minimum wage jobs.