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."

Comments

To paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke the Younger

[smittyoneeach]

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.