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

no HP, IBM, Accenture and BT?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like it's going well then...

Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[Karganeth]

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

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[Viol8]

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. I actually worked for a small company that was subcontracted by a certain large telecoms company back in 2007 to work on a subsection of the DB side and we did our best , but unfortunately the powers that be at said telecom company just didn't give a sh*t. We'd send them new binaries which would then never get tested or if they did it would be months before we'd get an in the field report back. Utterly shameful.

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

I fail to understand how a centralised system for storing patient information, images and prescription information required the input of five (was it only five?) major contracting companies and countless sub-contractors. It's a database. I mean, yes, it's a LARGE database, combined with some encryption and an interface to it. Companies build systems like these all the time, and they do it for a lot less than £12b.

I always just assumed it was outright fraud.

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[Spad]

No, it was a terrible idea.

Rather than defining a common data standard for patient records and having a centralised lookup system that facilitated record transfer between locations, they instead created a dreadfully designed, poorly tested, feature-poor, monolithic system intended to replace the hundreds of clinical applications that everyone was already used to using.

"Here, now you have to use this application with a totally unintuitive interface that's totally different to your current system. It won't work properly on ~20% of the machines you install it on, despite basically just being a Citrix app. We won't import half the existing records and the ones we do can't include any mental or sexual health information because we didn't bother with fine-grained access controls. Oh and it's not finished yet and probably never will be so you'll have to continue using all your old apps in parallel anyway."

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[ImOuttaHere]

I wonder who wrote a contract that lacked close oversight of the program with verifiable test results at various delivery milestones?

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[queazocotal]

Suppliers are understandably wary of signing such contracts, when ministers regularly get 'good ideas' and start imposing new design requirements regularly during projects.
Is this the fault of 'fat cat contractors' - perhaps to a degree.
Does government have its own share - oh yes.

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[Joce640k]

Its just a shame the contractors smelt money

Smelting money is always a bad idea. The base metals are worth much less than the original coins and they're not even good metals for making tools, etc. (which could be sold for profit).

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[aethelrick]

it wasn't just a database. It was a database that had to incorporate and interoperate with a vast array of existing legacy software written in every language you can possibly imagine. Not only this, it was a stupid idea to start with, because MOST patients don't move around the country and a series of smaller regional systems would have made a lot more sense for MOST of the problems in communication that could be solved by interfacing computer systems.

The project was hampered by problems of patient confidentiallity, and who was reasonably allowed to access patient records at any given time. Data needed to be tied to locations that the patient was frequenting e.g. my GP is allowed to see my records, the doctor in the A&E I've just been admitted to is allowed to see my records but a doctor at the other end of the country doing a bit of record-surfing is not allowed to see my records. except when he is?!?!

The hospitals themselves pretty much (quite rightly) tried to keep the national system at arms length because it was not clearly understood or believed to be core to their day-to-day activities.

All-in-all the government of the day would have done much better to define a minimum data set and standards for interoperation rather than interferring and trying to control everything centrally. Given a decent interface and data set spec the miriad of small (cheap) software vendors already supplying the NHS would have all been motivated to implement it so they could interoperate with each others systems in a more uniform (read cost effective) manner. Communicating between hospital departments and between the hospital and the patients GP then would have been a much more simple affair and this would have solved most of the communication delay problems that happen in the real world on a day-to-day basis.

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[Viol8]

"We won't import half the existing records and the ones we do can't include any mental or sexual health information because we didn't bother with fine-grained access controls"

I hate to ruin your rant but - and I know because I worked on this - that the database records had various levels of encryption (by which I mean if you just did a SELECT from the DB on certain patient fields all you would see is garbage so even DB admins couldn't see it) which meant that - in theory - only the correct people could access certain parts.

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[thogard]

Unified medical record systems are killed from within once the coders start to understand just how bad of an idea it is to have universal access to medical records.

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[TheRaven64]

The correct way of doing this sort of thing would have been to define standard formats for all of the information and produce a set of open source libraries for manipulating this data, then require every local medical authority to be able to produce and consume these formats. Each local authority could then take the open source reference implementation and add whatever ugly code they needed to interface with their legacy system. It doesn't matter whether they use the new formats internally, or just provide a mechanism for importing and exporting. Most likely, they'd initially do the latter, but when they started to replace existing systems they'd want to make native support for the standard formats a requirement.

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[tubs]

> required the input of five (was it only five?) major contracting companies

I worked in the NHS at this time, and there were originally 9 companies I think all working on the same thing, but working in different geographical areas - the idea was that the failure of any single company would not cause a major problem - indeed it was accepted that it would probably whittle down to 5. Of course that also fell to 2 companies doing it, which in the end weren't actually doing anything other than sucking up large sums of taxpayer money.

These system though were replacing all of the hospital MIS systems, so they were having to compete with systems that had been in place for years and had improvements and improvements, and didn't actually do a lot of things that users wanted - so they were having to run dual systems. I worked in a trust that was two merged trusts - and they had a different MIS in each hospital site.

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[hawkinspeter]

The older US pennies were made from copper and are worth more than their face value. More recent ones aren't pure copper, so they're not worth melting down. Besides, it's illegal to melt US money.

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

"Given a decent interface and data set spec the miriad of small (cheap) software vendors already supplying the NHS would have all been motivated to implement it so they could interoperate with each others systems in a more uniform (read cost effective) manner. "

They did. They do. The NHS IT disaster wasn't the "spine", which worked pretty well (and still does AFAIK). That's the comms & standards that join care providers together and allows data transfer between different care providers software - pretty seamlessly on the whole. The NHS IT disaster was the Patient Administration System "Lorenzo" - on which a truly enormous amount of money was pissed, and which has never worked to an extent worth mentioning.

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[Vintermann]

The entire point of the buzzword "SOA" is that you aren't supposed to do that.

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[Joce640k]

Whoosh

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[Trouvist]

The next column in the database was probably the key for the RC4 cypher. Which was probably an MD5 hash of the original data, no less.

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[Big Hairy Ian]

Just don't understand why they didn't publish the requirements and offer a fraction of the money to the best entry voted on by end users and security experts. Could have saved a fortune and had system that actually worked!

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[Viol8]

Blowfish IIRC. And what was in the Oracle DB was just a key pointing to an encrypted hash DB elsewhere.

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

"smelt money"

Is that some kind of seafood allowance?

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[Xest]

But none of those problems you mention are insurmountable, the real problem is as it always is in the UK - the same old companies get hired time and time again despite failing over and over and the contracts are always so badly negotiated that the companies involved get paid regardless of whether they actually deliver.

Until government stops using the like of Accenture and so forth for these projects it's never going to see things turn out any differently. They pay way over the top for something they could get so much cheaper that corruption is the most likely reason.

Too many public sector workers allow contracts to be signed that award private sector companies to be paid even when they fail and then those very public sectors end up working at these companies when failure occurs. It's money for nothing and the payer foots the bill.

They just need to start hiring companies that actually want to do the job, rather than companies whose entire business model revolves around back-handers and getting paid for favourable contracts that award them greatly for not doing the job.

Look at G4S with the Olympics, they completely failed to deliver but rather than refusing all payment and recovering all funds paid to date for breach of contract the government spends months bartering over how many millions it should give them with spurious comments from the executives of the company like "We may have to take a loss on this" - no fucking shit? You failed to deliver, if it cost you that's not our fucking problem we still want our money back, though from what I understand they didn't make a loss on it in the end, despite failing to deliver.

As soon as reward for failure stops in British public sector projects, then failure itself will suddenly become much less common.

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[Stuarticus]

All sorts of unified data projects die because historical databases were poorly filled in and badly maintained, despite this project managers will come in and boldly insist that a few scripts and some magic fairy dust will make everything perfect.

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[Spad]

That may well be true, but I know that none of the 3 NHS Trusts in which I worked were able to import mental or sexual health records into the national system because they weren't able to stop people who had access to a patient's general medical record from also being able to see the mental & sexual health portions of the record if they were on the system.

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[Stuarticus]

Unless I'm mistaken I think it was actually worse than that and individual practices were using different systems with no-one there to maintain them.

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

I apologize for the nitpick, but "smelt" != "smelled".

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[scamper_22]

I worked for a company that dealt with health records. In Canada mind you, but our main customers were in the US.

From my view, there are basically 2 main goals for electronic health records.

1. So patient data is portable. People see different health professionals, they move, they show up at the ER...

2. So everything can be put into a code of some sort and easily used for data. Be it for research, insurance, statistics...

My problem with the whole this is you can get really bogged down in 2. I mean really bogged down with all levels of access and control and what to classify things as. It's a whole mess.

But as far as direct patient activity is concerned, only 1 is really of much use.

I always wondered why they didn't just have a simple container format to store everything and then gradually move to standard inner format.

In its simplest form for example of moving from a paper office to an electronic health record, the record could simply be a PDF scan of the paper notes and raw formats for medical images, diagnostic results... I want to emphasize, this would just be a first step... but insanely practical.

Confidentiality and access are of course issues. Only doctors would have access and their access would be logged. Perhaps another encrypted folder requiring your you or you family GP code/passphrase to access for sensitive things (Sexual...).

I think sometimes medical security gets a little too bogged down. Even today, vast numbers of health professionals can simply get your data. It's all in files. It just takes a phone call. What really keeps medical information private is the professionalism of the medical profession. There are legal consequences to such things.

As long as access is logged and patients have the right to see their data (and the logs), there are some pretty good checks in place.

All this attempt to make the system perfect for access is rather silly when in the end, medical professionals can do what they do now... which is call up their buddy or colleague and ask for the record.

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[Viol8]

Oh well - any system security can ultimately be defeated by poor configuration and/or granting certain access rights to people who shouldn't have them.

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[aethelrick]

Yeah, when I was working on healthcare software here in the UK my proposal was to simply store historic patient data in HTML as it was a jumbled mix of test results and notes in no particular format from a variety of software vendors. We had really good success in making simple plug-ins to eat data from a vendor and spit HTML that could be archived on web servers running on an intra-net accessible by all hospitals and gp's in a single health authority rather than a public website (for obvious reasons) this made finding stuff really easy for 99% of the people who needed the data because we indexed the pages google-style. Single search box to find everything by patient id or name or all the diabetics or similar. It was really cool. No managers or decision-makers wanted it because they didn't understand how it solved their problem, they were to intensly involved in modelling reality in paper-based forms and letters to GPs.

The people with the access control hang-ups and long list of other irrelevant requirements were suits representing patients rights and/or the government of the day, not actual patients or doctors, but theorists with no practical understanding of the NHS or the real world requirements for a healthcare system. They wanted to scrape all the data into a massive central national system designed by a committee that became the list of common factors from all the vendors i.e. crap with only the barest whiff of useful data, none of the good stuff that made the hospitals buy the software from the small vendors in the first place

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

I work for HP, God help them if their forced to use our ticketing system...someone could easily die while your tech is fighting with it trying to find something in it's knowledge management system. Everyone who if forced to use it hates it, it's built with Java and does it's own "tabs", the back button crashes it, no undo, no right-click new tab, 20-40 seconds per page load, search results are often different than what's on the actual page...

The best part is how my managers get mad because our phone calls are too long, then they get mad at us because I timed the pages and showed 20% of the time is spent fighting with the ticketing software. After a caller hung up on me because I spent 25 minutes fighting with it, then my lead getting "annoyed" at me because I was "ranting" in our internal chat...I even went to the level of going outside my management chain trying to fix it, only to get to the point where they basically refused to reveal who our admins are on the system so even the troubleshooting I had found was useless.

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[desdinova 216]

sadly the same pay for failure contractor stuff probably goes on here in the US as well,

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, it's illegal to melt US money.

In the US. Perfectly legal elsewhere.

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[bill_mcgonigle]

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

Naturally, just don't presume that the more benign outcome was the original goal. All of these big contracts are designed to transfer money from the working poor to the well-connected. Everything else is just window dressing.

When I see a government contract that is fixed-price with milestone payments and penalties for late delivery (with a fair change-order process, of course) then I'll change my mind.

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[hawkinspeter]

Yes, but it's trickier to get large amounts of coins out of the US to make it worth the cost of the flight. I wonder if they'd allow a shipping container full of coins out?

Re:Lets not hope it's like the NHS IT disaster

[Viol8]

Is English your second language? If its your first you should be ashamed at your ignorance of a basic past tense.

Really???

[Anonymous Coward]

Can it really get any worse???

Re:Really???

[AdamColley]

It certainly can!

Who do you think the losers will be?

Hint, not the people who wasted a fortune on a system that doesn't work.

Already people are being driven to food banks (much to the amusement of the Tories*, as seen in a debate on the subject) and that's just the few changes they've managed to get through so far.

When UC comes in it'll be a lot worse, homelessness will skyrocket as those who are unable to take care of their finances fall behind on rent (Currently rent is paid direct to landlord by the government, when UC comes in it'll be a single lower payment, all paid to the claimant with them being responsible for paying the rent, it's not hard to see that anyone with drug/alcohol/mental problems is liable to spend the rent)

This country is heading for disaster and the poor are being made to pay for the actions of the bankers etc. who got us into this mess in the first place.

* Laughing Tories: http://order-order.com/2013/12/19/shamed-pictures-of-mps-laughing-in-food-bank-debate/

Re:Really???

[AdamColley]

I do apologise, the MPs pictured in the link above are Labour, although the Tories were at it too, Guido and his selective reporting -.-

Re:Really???

[Bert64]

And why exactly should the government (ie those of us who pay tax) subsidise someone consuming drugs and alcohol?

The benefits system should provide an absolute baseline standard of living, ie it keeps you alive but you get absolutely no luxuries whatsoever. That means basic food nothing fancy, no car, no drugs/alcohol/tobacco, a room to sleep in with access to basic facilities, and access to education/training.

The benefits system is not there to provide a lifestyle, it is there to TEMPORARILY provide the bare essentials until you find another job. People should have to work if they want any kind of luxury items.

The amount of people on long term benefits, who have all manner of luxury goods is absolutely sickening. And i have yet to meet someone claiming benefits who doesn't smoke.

Re:Really???

[queazocotal]

I note Iain Duncan Smith has said of the rise of use of food banks. 'Well - it's free - of course people will use it' - implying people not in need use them.
And it's been made general policy for local DWP staff to avoid giving reasons 'late payment of benefit' when referring people to food banks.

This makes it harder for the food banks to collect proper statistics.
This has lead to the government reporting rises at food banks as 'anecdotal' - because they have to ask the person turning up why they were referred.

Re:Really???

[Anonymous Coward]

And why exactly should the government (ie those of us who pay tax) subsidise someone consuming drugs and alcohol?

Without the coping benefits of drugs and alcohol, someone who can't find work is more likely to smash your smug moralizing face in, that's why. It's in society's best interest not to give the idle poor a good reason to be cranky and belligerent.

Re:Really???

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, like a Victorian poorhouse? Hope you don't get ill or lose your job in your vision of the future.

Re:Really???

[aethelrick]

While I feel the same as you on this point I am forced to acknowledge my experience of living in a country with no state benfits, the up-shot is this. The bumholes that defraud the benefit system on a long term basis and drug addicts picking up their state-funded high in our country are the same type of people that turn to (often violent) crime in countries where an effective benefit system does not exist. The simple truth of the matter is that having good social welfare systems in place keeps crime down.

Go live in Johannesburg for a few months and tell me which you would rather have

Think of it as modern Danegeld. Either the state buys Joe Schmoes new flat screen TV or he's comming to take yours :)

Re:Really???

[AdamColley]

Why should we all have to sub the bankers?

These things cut both ways, the people at the top cocked it up and those at the bottom are suffering.

Also, kindly remember all benefits are not paid to people who won't get a job, some are paid to people who can't, for valid medical reasons, why should they be condemned to a workhouse style existence in a modern civilised society*?

Think about it...

* I realise I'm stretching things a bit here...

Re:Really???

[rmstar]

The benefits system is not there to provide a lifestyle, it is there to TEMPORARILY provide the bare essentials until you find another job. People should have to work if they want any kind of luxury items.

And if they don't find work, what then? Do you let them starve?

The amount of people on long term benefits, who have all manner of luxury goods is absolutely sickening.

This number is actually very small, and it constitutes the rare exception, not the rule.

Re:Really???

[Half-pint HAL]

Have you ever been unemployed? Even are a month of it, it's mind-numbingly boring. You've got the jobcentre staff warning you that you've got to be available for work at any time, so you're not allowed to go anywhere interesting. So on the one hand we've got Iain Duncan Smith telling us that looking for a job "is a full-time job", but on the other, we're being denied the basic rights of full-time employees to paid leave. You've not got the money for lots of interesting things outside of the home, and when you amortise the cost of those "luxury goods" (games consoles, home entertainment systems etc) over the amount of time you're stuck in front of them, they're actually one of the cheapest ways of distracting you from the dull emptiness of your life.

The first time I was unemployed (over ten years ago), I had a job coming up, so I wasn't afraid to spend what I had. I looked for temporary work locally, but not having found any, I bought a book on playing blues and boogie-woogie piano, and taught myself. I bought a bunch of wood and parts and built myself an electric guitar. And it was also summer. I enjoyed that unemployment. This time round, though, I'm stuck in a house in a small village, isolated from any and all fun activities, in the middle of an unusually wet winter. My only real opportunity for social contact is the village pub, and I occupy my mind with the internet.

I'm trying to build up my skillset with the aid of the internet, but you have no idea how time just drags when you've go no externally-enforced routine. One day I can spend 13 or 14 hours working on my Python project, and the next I do nothing, because there's no defined "start point" to my day.

I'm not a heavy drinker, I'm not a smoker, I'm not a gambler and I'm not on drugs. I am a cyclist. If I was told that as an unemployed person I had no right to own both a £1000 road bike and a £500 touring bike, I would be upset. If you took it away from me, I would cease to function. It's very difficult for an unemployed person to give up their only comfort and escape, so no matter how bad that escape is, don't begrudge it to anyone.

Re:Really???

[Pino Grigio]

Oh dear. The link you've posted shows LABOUR MPs laughing during the debate, not Tory MPs.

You utter fool.

Re:Really???

[Pino Grigio]

People started using food banks when food banks were introduced, which was years ago under Labour. The more food banks there are, the more people there will be using them to get free food. This is precisely what's happened. Given that the number of people using food bans rose under Labour too, was and still is simply a function of the number of new food banks being opened, it's a bit bloody idiotic for you to suggest it's Ian Duncan Smith's fault.

Re:Really???

[Bert64]

So don't allow them to be idle, if they're able to work then they should be working.. If they can't find a job through the normal channels then they should be required to study/train towards finding a job, or work community service.

Taxpayers shouldn't be paying for fit and able people to sit on their asses all day consuming drugs and alcohol. The rest of us don't have that much free time because we actually have to work!

Re:Really???

[Bert64]

Many of those taking drugs also turn to crime, even when they are claiming benefits. Either the benefits handout is insufficient to fund their habit or desired lifestyle, so they commit crime to supplement their handouts, or they commit violent crimes as a direct result of being out of their minds on drink/drugs.

As a taxpayer it makes little difference if the state buys him a tv or he steals mine, i end up paying for it either way.

Look at the arrogance of such people, they feel they have a divine right to have all these modern luxuries without having to work for them like everyone else does.

Re: Really???

[tleaf100]

ahh,nice to see how many /Âers have such a wide hands on experience of our wonderful benefits system. please show me a western country that does not have a percentage of its workable population as long term unemployed ? most folk who break into their rent payments do it for kids bills,such as new shoes,school trips,after school clubs and classes etc etc,you just hear about the scumbags,not the ordinary parents who have nowhere else left to turn in emergency with the end of crisis loans,which dwp allowed to be be very badly abused by a very small number of people as an excuse to just close the whole scheme,even though most folk paid them back. i suppose they could go the payday loan route and bankrupt themselves totaly,quicker. reminding folk again that high street banks still charge patday

Re:Really???

[queazocotal]

'The bumholes that defraud the benefit system on a long term basis and drug addicts picking up their state-funded high'.
The implication of this government has always been that fraud is high.

However, their internal checks have consistently failed to find numbers matching this rhetoric.
Illness and disability benefits when checked find about 0.5% fraud. And about the same amount of awards due to staff error.

The implication of benefit fraud is being used to excuse a 20% reduction in eligibility for one disability benefit.

Fraud on job-seekers allowance is higher.

Re:Really???

[Anonymous Coward]

Look on the bright side: at least you can write Python code for 14 hours a day voluntarily instead of being forced to meet someone else's arbitrary deadline, and you have the freedom to get plenty of rest the next day. Good to hear you've been keeping busy. Sorry you're not as busy as you'd like to be.

Re:Really???

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should you refuse to let someone eat and stay warm merely because it is possible they can consume drugs and alcohol?

Why should your employer subsidise your drug and alcohol consumption? They should not pay you wages at all!

Re:Really???

[Anonymous Coward]

I see. Your moral outrage stems from your own envy because you don't get drugs and alcohol for free. I suggest you flog yourself.

Re:Really???

[tubs]

So what you're saying, is that the only reason food banks are used, is that they are there?

Maybe the other way is more true? There was a need for food banks, so charities intorduced them, as more people need them, charities are introducing more?

Oh, and most food banks require a "voucher" that is given to the person from Drs, social workers etc, you can't just walk up yo a food bank and demand food.

Re:Really???

[Anonymous Coward]

Your are not allowed to study - you are supposed to do 40 hours job search a week , if your studying then your not available for work and they sanction IE stop your unemployment benefit. Once you could do voluntary work in the community to gain experience and contacts etc. now you cant.

They are willing to pay private 'training' providers money to send you on CV writing courses and basic literacy / numeracy tests every six months because the providers can claim back up to £400 a person for each test from the EU.

Of course these schemes are classed as being in employment and reduce the jobless totals but don't even pay the national minimum wage.

Being a none smoker , tea total and never used drugs I have no idea how much £70 a week buys of the above products but knowing how much tax they put on cigarettes and alcohol in this country, I'm guessing not much.

Re:Really???

[Anonymous Coward]

Your employer shouldn't have to pay wages as long as they provide you with free housing and free food. It'll be exactly like slavery, except we won't call it slavery because slavery is bad. We'll call it human resourcing!

Re:Really???

[Bert64]

We shouldn't sub the bankers either.

And sure, the system should be different for someone who has a genuine reason why they're unable to work...

Living with a genuine disability is very expensive, and yet the benefits available are being cut because there isn't enough money to go around. If you cut down on all the people falsely claiming disability benefits, and those claiming benefits because they are simply too lazy to work then a lot more help could be made available for those in genuine need.

Re:Really???

[Bert64]

And if they don't find work, what then? Do you let them starve?

Training (to make them more employable in the future) or community service.

It shouldn't be possible to sit on your ass doing nothing and get free handouts. If someone is able to work but unwilling to do so, then sure let them starve - thats their choice.

If you want money, wether you get it from an employer or the state you should be spending most of your time busy doing *something* (legal) in order to get it.

And plenty of those who "cant find a job", either make no effort whatsoever, or intentionally sabotage the interviews lined up for them by the jobcentre.

Re:Really???

[Bert64]

Incidentally, if you are physically capable of committing violent crime then you are physically capable of doing legal work too.

If such people want money they should be required to work for it. Either get a job in the normal way, or if you want state handouts you should be spending normal working hours (eg 40hrs/week) in training or doing community work for the state.

Think of the benefits system as a fallback job... You should still have to work and not just sit on your ass, even if your wages are coming from the state.

If you keep the jobless busy then they will have less time for crime and drugs.

Re:Really???

[tubs]

Yes, you would have thought that "education and retraining" should be the fundamental part of unemployment. But it's not, it's on job seeking.

Lets say you were a "coal worker" and you've been doing that for 25 years. When your pit closes the only thing you're good at is coal minining, but no other pits are open, so you now have a defunct skill set. Yet you still need to eat, pay rent, support a familiy so you no longer have a chance of retraining, but as you started working at 15 you don't have an education.

As your skill set is not transferable, the only jobs you can get are less robust ones - which means you'll be in and out of employment for the next 20 years until you retire, stacking shelves, picking fruit or whatever else you can get.

And capitalism itself needs a % of unemployment - if that unemployment isn't there then there is no opportunity to get new people in place.

Maybe you can wait until the people 10 years older than you retire - excepct there is no enforced retirement now so those positions that would have been forced open are no longer there, and even ifthey are why would someone employ an ex coal miner when they could get a straight out of school graduate that is at the same level as you ...

Re:Really???

[Vintermann]

And why exactly should the government (ie those of us who pay tax) subsidise someone consuming drugs and alcohol?

Ah, get over yourself. Why should they subsidize fuel, house ownership, exporting businesses and a ton of other things? Yet they do.

And i have yet to meet someone claiming benefits who doesn't smoke.

Hey, you are British, I assume? Look up this book of a countryman of yours, George Orwell. No, not the more famous book, but "Down and out in Paris and London". He does a good literary job of explaining why the poor smoke. It might even be able to get through to you, who've apparently never had a tough day in your life.

If you want a more experimental/scientific explanation of what Orwell describes, take a look at this classic NYT article.

Re:Really???

[Anonymous Coward]

However, their internal checks have consistently failed to find numbers matching this rhetoric.

Kind of like here in the US. Election officials "failed to find" voter fraud. Partly because they didn't look, partly because it turned out the election officials themselves are behind most of it.

Re:Really???

[Vintermann]

And sure, the system should be different for someone who has a genuine reason why they're unable to work...

The present mess is for a big part the product of generation after generation of self-righteous idiots imagining that they had the means to tell who the deserving poor were, and what would help for the undeserving poor. When will you realize that we all are recipients of lots of stuff that we don't deserve. Y'all need Jesus, I tell ya.

Re:Really???

[andrewbaldwin]

"People should have to work....." many of them DO.

A large proportion (possibly the majority - I don't have the stats to hand -- of those claiming benefits are in work but in low paid jobs.

Someone on minimum wage (or just over) cannot afford to live in large parts of the country. I know of a head chef who works 60 - 70 hours a week yet has no prospect of affording to rent [let alone buy] a small flat where I live -- and that even without food, heating, lighting..... Before we get the "free market will fix this, go and live elsewhere" arguments, without people doing jobs such as cleaning, catering... society would collapse.

Effectively the benefits system is subsidising those employers who pay low wages. However this argument is drowned out in the "reckless, lazy wilfully unemployed" messages put out (especially by some newspapers who could give lessons in propaganda techniques).

Re:Really???

[queazocotal]

They looked.
In depth - and did detailed examination of a random selection of cases.
A low level of fraud was found.

The problem is that it is politically convenient to state that there is a lot of fraud, because this gives an excuse to reduce eligibility, because 'they're all thieving bastards anyway'.
This is also great for the press, as it generates nice simple stories 'Look at this man, he claimed to have a bad back, and is running a marathon'.

The story 'Well, it turns out there are actually quite a lot of ill and disabled people' - is quite boring.

Re:Really???

[Vintermann]

I don't know about his country, but in my country you might get in trouble for that. If he codes python for 14 hours a day, they might deem it self-education, and as a student you're supposed to live on loans, stipends and savings.

They're so worried about students abusing the system, sneaking out of getting in student loan debt by registering as unemployed, that they'd rather a genuinely unemployed person sit at home with his Playstation.

Re:Really???

[queazocotal]

'Incidentally, if you are physically capable of committing violent crime then you are physically capable of doing legal work too.'

Really?

Violent crime requires no timekeeping.
It does not require you to work with others.
It does not require literacy or numeracy.
It doesn't need reasonable personal hygiene.
It doesn't need you to be predictable.
Nor reliable, or any other of the many things normally required by an employer.

Even leaving aside the issues of actual employability.
You have two applicants. One of which just came out of Wormwood Scrubbs for punching to death someone in a job interview because they asked too many questions. The other is fresh out of school.
Who gets the job?

Re:Really???

[Anonymous Coward]

Find a python project and finish it! Then put that in your resume as the only person to have every finished a python project and the jobs offers will roll in.

Re:Really???

[Pino Grigio]

How do you measure the "need" for something that is free? The arguments here are so tortuous they're insane. "I haven't got any money and I haven't got any food - give me a food bank voucher please". Who's going to say no? Give me all of your ... people who don't manage their budgets very well ...

Re:Really???

[tubs]

Is your real name Ian Duncan Smith? That's his argument - they're not budgeting correctly.

It seems that the argument "Food banks are available so people use them" is as tortuous an argument as any other.

But that's okay, it sounds like you're in the "I'm alright, Jack" crowd, so you're alright. As long as you're alright that's fine, well done and good luck.

Re:Really???

[benjfowler]

Any suggestion that I need pot, booze, fags, lottery tickets, etc to "cope" is fucking ludicrous.

I've been through some very hard, dark times, and never have I needed to "cope" using this shit.

What it says, is that poor people lack brains, self-control and mental strength. Most poor people are poor, and more importantly, STAY poor because of some kind of mental, moral, physical or cultural defect.

Re:Really???

[phantomfive]

Have you ever been unemployed? Even are a month of it, it's mind-numbingly boring.

Well, that's your fault, bro. Go to the library if you need to.

As my mum said, "Only the boring are bored."

Re:Really???

[benjfowler]

Why not? If you're a feckless, useless cunt, albeit an able-bodied one, then you should be forced to break rocks for your dole money. Nothing should be free in this world.

Re:Really???

[Anonymous Coward]

Either get a job in the normal way, or if you want state handouts you should be spending normal working hours (eg 40hrs/week) in training or doing community work for the state.

When should you actually work on looking for a job? You know, hunting through job adverts, writing & re-writing your CV, researching the company you're applying too, writing cover letters, applying, attending interviews. The things people need to do. The things that people think take five minutes but in reality take the majority of your time: if you're doing it right, writing your CV & cover letter should take about a day for every job you apply for, for example.

Have you ever actually been out of work for any appreciable amount of time? I.e. a month or more without an offer? I doubt it. I have: I was made redundant right in the middle of the economic downturn and spent 9 months out of work because everyone was on a hiring freeze.

Now I'm back in work and have been paying higher rate income tax for the past three years, which more than enough pays for any JSA I claimed, and I don't mind at all.

I think, really what I'm trying to say is: fuck you and your high horse.

Re:Really???

[Pino Grigio]

No, I'm not alright. I'm being taxed to death in order to pay for a welfare state supporting many people who're taking the piss.

Re:Really???

[Anonymous Coward]

And if they don't find work, what then? Do you let them starve?

Training (to make them more employable in the future) or community service.

You're assuming that there is any real budget for those things.

Re:Really???

[Anonymous Coward]

And why exactly should the government (ie those of us who pay tax) subsidise someone consuming drugs and alcohol?

Couldn't exactly disagree with you there, we should subsidize the substance abuse counseling. Of course, we should also cut out the subsidizing of production too.

But...I'm also a person disdainful of such conduct in general, so I'd favor deterring it.

The benefits system should provide an absolute baseline standard of living, ie it keeps you alive but you get absolutely no luxuries whatsoever. That means basic food nothing fancy, no car, no drugs/alcohol/tobacco, a room to sleep in with access to basic facilities, and access to education/training.

A car, where you live, may be something fancy, but in other places, it's an essential part of getting a job. Due to lack of public transportation and the environment I'm in, unless you expected me to work only low-level retail, I would need a vehicle to get anywhere worth working. Or possibly work online. But I suspect an internet connection and a computer would appear as a luxury to you.

As for your austerity idea, it's really not workable, as that's just justifying an ascetic life, which while I might agree would be good for more people, is not something I would seek to impose on others myself.

Especially since it presumes homelessness, as opposed to keeping others in the place they were already in before undergoing a turn for the worse.

The benefits system is not there to provide a lifestyle, it is there to TEMPORARILY provide the bare essentials until you find another job. People should have to work if they want any kind of luxury items.

The amount of people on long term benefits, who have all manner of luxury goods is absolutely sickening. And i have yet to meet someone claiming benefits who doesn't smoke.

I can understand some desire to moderate the excesses of many people, but I don't like people smoking period, so I wouldn't have them do it anyway. However any kind is going too far, is a game console too much? Access to a television? Radio? A newspaper can even be considered a luxury.

But if you're going to do this, I'm going to require you to find actual employment for them, even if it's just cleaning streets or taking care of old folks or the disabled, or sorting trash.

Though with the replacement of manual labor, I'm not sure how feasible that is.

Re:Really???

[dunkelfalke]

Free handouts my fat arse. I have paid in the unemployment insurance for years. Bugger it, if I am to be unemployed for a while, I expect to keep my dignity and not be insulted by puffed up self-important bigots.

Re:Really???

[Xest]

Where do you get your numbers?

From about 2005 to 2011 disability benefit claimaints increased by 30% even though there's no justifiable reason for this to be the case because the benefit hadn't really changed and there hadn't been any kind of mass reason for increased levels of disability in the populace.

When the government decided to reassess all claimants the initial figures showed that 37% were found to be fit for work which isn't too dissimilar to the unexplained increase, especially when you factor in appeals and so forth.

I've just found this:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/200001/esa_wca_summary_apr13.pdf

Which now states 27% of reassessments determined people were fit for work, so post-appeal this again isn't too different.

But even if you give some leeway and assume there's some bias, these figures are a long way away from your quoted 0.5% so perhaps the issue is that you're misleadingly referring to cases that were determined as outright fraud, rather than the government's reassessment which has avoided claims of fraud and acted somewhat as an amnesty.

Fundamentally though the point is valid, that there has been widescale unnecessary payments of incapacity benefit to people who simply were fit for work. Call it fraud, dishonesty, honest mistake, whatever you want, fundamentally, too many people were getting paid disability benefits unnecessarily so yes they absolutely needed to be cut.

This is of course before you factor in the work that has gone on in recent years to make workplaces more disability friendly such as mandating that all workplaces be wheelchair friendly. These sorts of things mean that incapacity benefit claims should be going down because there are ever less disabilities that outright prevent working.

I'm not a big fan of government, it rather sickens me that they do nothing to deal with benefits for millionaire pensioners who still get free bus passes and winter fuel allowances and so forth and other such stupid nonsense like that. I don't even pretend disability benefits should necessarily have been the biggest priority, but they were a problem, pretending otherwise is just dishonest and your 0.5% figure is grossly misleading relative to the 27% who were found to be fit for work when full reassessment was carried out.

Re:Really???

[Anonymous Coward]

Those days are gone . The jobcentre Do not line up interviews for you any more, that is the claimants responsibility .

  All the Jobcentre staff are there for when you are signing on is to check you are doing your Job search and met their required number of sanctions each week to keep their job which the minister denies exists but enough documentation has been leaked to show is official policy.

They have even removed all the job search terminals from the jobcentre

Oh and earn easter eggs as bonuses for doing so.

Re:Really???

[Xest]

Can I be honest? you seem to live in the UK, and you seem interested in software development. I have absolutely nothing against Python, I quite like it, but across much of the UK it's just not where the jobs are.

You may hate Microsoft or whatever else but if you want a software development job in the UK then C# and .NET is where it's at, there's just so many jobs floating around and not enough people to fill them. It's a gravy train right now, and .NET salaries have most definitely been on the up for a good few years now. Even here in Yorkshire where salaries tend to be lower the average starting salary of a junior .NET developer seems to have gone from about £18k up to about £26k in the last 5 years alone, even when most other salaries have been declining. If you can get through a book like C# in Depth and understand and be comfortable with most of it then you'll already be well ahead of most junior developers and in fact ahead of many non-junior developers. It's a decent book I recommend for people job seeking because it also seems to cover the things that come up often in interviews pretty well.

I sympathise if you don't want to say publicly what sort of salary you're looking for and whereabouts in the UK you are but I'd be intrigued to know, I could at very least give you a rough idea as to whether your expectations are reasonable.

I think it's well worth your while learning Python, as I say, it's a great language, but if employment is your goal then C# and .NET are the way to go. Of course, maybe things are slightly different wherever in the UK you actually are but when I've looked into it things seem fairly uniform across the UK bar London where Java and C++ become far more prominent because of it's large financial sector, but you can always figure it out for yourself - look for developer jobs in your area on jobsite or monster.com and count the number of listings for each language. Apologies though if this is obvious and you've tried all this!

One final question though, are you bothering with recruiters at all or just using job sites and the job centre? Some recruiters are better than others so don't be put off all of them if you've had some bad run-ins.

Re:Really???

[queazocotal]

The numbers above are somewhat flawed.
27% 'found fit' - this is before appeals.
For represented appeals - there is someone to help with the appeal - well over 50% succeed.
Of those not appealing, it neglects those not doing so because they go on to claim some other benefit - because they are caring for someone with disabilities say.

'Acted somewhat as an amnesty' - this is very, very much not the case.

The regulations for IB, and ESA are utterly different.
As one example, IB had to make some finding that there was work you could in principle reasonably do.
ESA does not.

The 27% is (neglecting appeals, which drop this figure considerably) not due to people misrepresenting their condition.
It is due to the government moving the goalposts.

Have their been reasonable changes - yes.

The rules do not assess complex disabilities well.
For example, take two people.

One has a sports injury, meaning they can't bend their elbows past 90 degrees, so can't place their arms in their upper shirt pockets, but is otherwise healthy with a university degree.

The other can slowly propel themseves 200 m in a wheelchairindoors a few times a day, cannot talk to strangers much of the time, has severe incontinence every few weeks, only understands the simplest of phrases, and can just about work a washing machine.

There are two groups - meant for the long-term ill with the severest disability, and one for those who may be helped into work.

The person with the elbow injury is placed in the most supported category with nothing expected of them. The second is found fit for work.

Claiming that the 27% (accepting that figure for the moment) were being 'let off' prior frauds is like claiming that people are let off past income tax fraud when the personal allowance goes up.

Re:Really???

[Xest]

"The numbers above are somewhat flawed.
27% 'found fit' - this is before appeals.
For represented appeals - there is someone to help with the appeal - well over 50% succeed."

So assuming you're right - I couldn't find any evidence for the figure you claim - but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, that's still going to be at least 10% of claimants that are taking the piss. That's still hundreds of thousands of people, that's still many millions of pounds of tax payers money down the drain just because people are lazy. It's still a far cry from the 0.5% fraud level you claimed.

But the document itself seems to state that that 27% figure is adjusted for appeals. Specifically, it says:

"Outcomes of initial assessments adjusted to account for outcomes after appeals for incapacity benefits claimants referred for reassessment between June 2012 and August 2012 show:"

So I'm afraid it looks like you're clutching at straws, your 0.5% figure seemed to be plucked from thin air, and your claim of appeals altering that number seems not to be true.

The new claimant stats are even more interesting, for new claimants 48% post appeals were determined to be fit for work which implies there are a lot of people trying it on too.

Even if half of the cases were unfair then there's still an awful lot of people who were on, or who have tried to get onto but were not in genuine need of disability benefits. There was still millions of pounds down the drain to people who neither needed, nor deserved the money.

I know there are many thousands of valid cases like the example you cite where people were fit for work, there were also unfortunately thousands of people with "bad backs" and so forth that are magically invisible to medical examination however whether you care to admit it or not. I think you need to accept facts on this one, the numbers are well published and transparent.

Re:Really???

[queazocotal]

Responding only to the new claimants point.
That number includes people who claim ESA, and then get better, and report they have done so before the assessment.
If you've broken both legs, you will normally be fit again before 13 weeks - as with most short term illnesses.

Re:Really???

[queazocotal]

Fraud and error statistics.
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/265788/nsfr-final-291112.pdf
In 2011/12.
0.7% of total benefit paid is paid due to claimant fraud.

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/222694/fem_1011_revised2.pdf

Page 17 DLA fraud 0.5%.
IB fraud 0.3%.
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/222694/fem_1011_revised2.pdf
The growth in cases of DLA is largely because there were no people claiming DLA over 65 when it came in, but people eligible would continued to be paid after that time.
So, the numbers grow.

Re:Really???

[HornWumpus]

Never pay danegelt.

The right answer is to kneecap any bum who tries to get physical. Then let him starve. Cricket bats are still legal in England?

Re:Really???

[HornWumpus]

Danegelt is _never_ a good idea. They always come back for _moar_.

Kneecap them instead. Some will starve, some will get jobs.

Re:Really???

[HornWumpus]

The problem is; it is illegal to prove voter fraud is happening. Collecting the data is covered by 'voter intimidation statutes'.

That is not by accident. Look at the reaction to voter ID laws. One party doesn't want this kind of vote fraud stopped.

Re:Really???

[Anonymous Coward]

There no point doing C# and .net at home, he'll have no experience. Employers are going to demand several years of each because the market is saturated with these skills. Likewise with any other major language used in business.

His best bet is to get up to speed on tablet programming. Not crappy store apps, but in-house software business are starting to want their own proprietary applications for field staff, basically replacing laptops for people out in the wild.

Re:Really???

[Anonymous Coward]

I was unemployed for six months in 2012. from late august to late feburary of 2013. I only had about a month of real search time in September, due to the elections making nobody want to hire in October and early November , then the holidays when there is only a two week period in December when HR departments are hiring. January I started getting some leads and then found a job in February.

I was bored out of my god damned mind as I had left the job I had before 'willingly' (I was stuck in a bad relationship and was making no money in a part of the country with 0 jobs in the high tech industry) to relocate to the city my parents lived in. So I didn't even have unemployment to go to, just some small amount of savings.

no money, no job, and no people other then family to spend time with is perhaps the most boring existence imaginable. Projects be damned there is scant little to do when you have no resources to actually do anything with.

Re:Really???

[Half-pint HAL]

I'm in Central Scotland. The reason I'm doing Python is because I have a personal project underway to develop language learning software. I chose Python essentially as a prototyping language, because its string-handling and list-manipulation features let me develop my algorithms quickly without fighting with a language and its libraries.

I'm planning to rewrite it in a "proper" language (my old anti-scripting prejudice just doesn't go away) once I've got it going, but if I start now, I'll be far less likely to refactor my code. (And besides, it's likely to end up as a web app, and I could just stick with Python on the server.)

I'm not really very employable as a coder, because I ended up going into desktop IT soon after leaving university, and a decade on, I don't have the CV for dev work. If I produce a world-beating learning app, though, people might start to give me a second look... ;-)

Re:Really???

[Half-pint HAL]

His best bet is to get up to speed on tablet programming. Not crappy store apps, but in-house software business are starting to want their own proprietary applications for field staff, basically replacing laptops for people out in the wild.

That's a skill I'll be needing to work on, certainly, as the teaching app that I'm working on will need a mobile client. (I'm quite unhappy about Apple's policy of demanding money even to start developing and testing on an iOS device, mind.)

Re:Really???

[Half-pint HAL]

Find a python project and finish it! Then put that in your resume as the only person to have every finished a python project and the jobs offers will roll in.

...unless I want to work on public sector projects. Finishing a project? Whatever will they think of next? (...aaaaaaaand we're back on topic ;-)

Re:Really???

[strack]

Im assuming, of course, that this work is at the minimum wage, right? cause workfare in the UK sure as hell isnt now. And its been replacing properly paid jobs too.

Re:Really???

[phantomfive]

no money, no job, and no people other then family to spend time with is perhaps the most boring existence imaginable. Projects be damned there is scant little to do when you have no resources to actually do anything with.

I'm sorry you're a boring person? What exactly do you want me to say?

Re:Really???

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol, you suck!!!

Re:Really???

[Anonymous Coward]

So lie on your resume.

Re:Really???

[Xest]

"I'm not really very employable as a coder, because I ended up going into desktop IT soon after leaving university, and a decade on, I don't have the CV for dev work."

Well maybe my story will give you a bit of encouragement then, I was never really good with school, I was too far ahead from self-learning in IT to care about the lessons, I got my GCSEs, all A - Cs but mostly Cs, and dropped out of A-Level Maths and Physics, barely finished computing with a D and went into IT support as a result too believing I didn't have the grades to go into software. I did 7 years IT support, 5 years through deciding to start a degree in Maths alongside work (I would've done Computing but I'd have been bored repeating stuff I knew so needed something challenging) but well before that degree was complete I decided I needed a new job and figured why not try for software dev jobs? nothing to lose. Within 3 weeks of starting to search I'd had 3 interviews and two offers and so I was gone. I finished my degree whilst doing that job and did end up doing another in comp. sci. I've switched jobs twice since and done some contracts on the side and salary has more than tripled since my desktop days in only 5 years.

I live in rural Yorkshire so not entirely highly populated or rich with jobs either. I do have to commute about an hour each way, we could move of course but I kind of like living rurally so we choose to stay when we are and accept the commute.

I accept it's possible some luck was involved but it was also right at the start of the economic crisis I got my first dev role.

But if I've ever regretted or kicked myself for anything it's not doing what I did sooner. I wish I'd stopped worrying about whether I could get a dev role telling myself I wasn't qualified much sooner because I sincerely believe I could've got one long before.

I was actually studying for my Microsoft developer certs at the same time as my degree and had an in progress section on my CV where I mentioned them and my degree, I never finished the MS certs, I couldn't be bothered to chase them in the end but employers liked seeing that I simply had qualifications in progress - don't be afraid to study something and have it on your CV even if it's not complete, I think employers always found that evidence of self-learning a really big draw, and given that I could tell them what I'd learnt so far at interview they didn't see it as just fluffing up my CV.

So I too had a CV completely useless for dev work given that I had zero commercial experience, but ensuring I was clear on my CV with a little section "About Myself" that described how I'd been programming in my spare time since I was young, describing what I'd done and learnt in my spare time, and a "Qualifications in Progress" section listing some qualifications relevant to the role that I was genuinely studying at the time and that was enough to get interviews and the interviews were enough to let me demonstrate my knowledge face to face and get jobs.

Perhaps you've tried all this and not been so lucky, but if not then I hope it helps, you'll get there!

Re:Really???

[Xest]

I've seen this said on Slashdot a fair bit but I've never seen any evidence of it in reality, that is, it's not that I haven't seen jobs where they demand years of experience, but I've never seen an employer that actually holds people to that.

I say this because I got a C# .NET job without any commercial experience and because when I've moved up the chain I've gotten "requires 5 years experience" jobs and job offers when I only had 2 years experience.

I'm not sure if this multi-year experience meme on Slashdot is a result of some American-centric practice, but it certainly isn't something that's universally, or even widely true in the UK. Even the companies that seemed braindead and staffed by annoying or awful people at interview time all seemed to have the pragmaticism to worry more about whether you could actually do the job rather than some arbitrary numbers.

I don't think most companies do mobile apps in house, I say this because my last employer made it's existence producing the exact sort of apps you mention for just about every industry going from the MoD through to the who's who of the automotive industries and just about every major business in the financial sector. This means you're going to be limited to the handful of companies that do do in-house development of mobile apps, or the handful that that development is outsourced to.

Re:Really???

[Xest]

But you're relying on a very tight definition there which is that the is legally classifiable as fraud. For example, someone claiming to have a bad back that prevents them working but who is then caught on camera by investigators doing some sports proving they're lying about their back would be taken to court for fraud. There can be many many more however who simply never get caught and because fraud has therefore never been proven against them even if they are acting fraudulently it cannot be factored into the figures.

Effectively the numbers you quote are for actual captured fraud, rather than the real levels of underlying fraud. That's why reassessment has thrown up such a disparity and why the 30% increase in claimants cannot be otherwise explained by anything other than increased levels of actual underlying fraud.

Their definition of fraud is explained in the very link you posted and explains this precisely - that it's only defined as fraud if the benefit stops as a result of review upon suspicion of fraud, this means that any case where fraud was failed to be proven (even if it's actually happen) and cases where fraud simply wasn't even suspected even if happening aren't including.

Or in other words, the numbers you quote are the numbers of successful fraud cases actually dealt with, rather than the underlying levels of fraud itself.

To conflate the two as you have done would require that fraud detection and prevention was 100% perfect and flawless, something we know for a fact isn't true, and something the reassessment has demonstrated couldn't in fact be further from the truth.

Re:Really???

[drsmithy]

And why exactly should the government (ie those of us who pay tax) subsidise someone consuming drugs and alcohol?

Because the cost of the management overhead to enact your petty vindictive moralising would be far more than any possible savings.

The benefits system is not there to provide a lifestyle, it is there to TEMPORARILY provide the bare essentials until you find another job. People should have to work if they want any kind of luxury items.

The assumption being there are jobs for them to find. Which, given the western world abandoned full employment as a social and economic policy goal decades ago, is quite possibly untrue.

The amount of people on long term benefits, who have all manner of luxury goods is absolutely sickening.

Not nearly as sickening as the things the super-rich waste their money on.

Re:Really???

[drsmithy]

Either get a job in the normal way, or if you want state handouts you should be spending normal working hours (eg 40hrs/week) in training or doing community work for the state.

Think of the benefits system as a fallback job... You should still have to work and not just sit on your ass, even if your wages are coming from the state.

Awesome idea. Let's build a society dependent on slave labour to function. It'll be just like the good old days !

Re:Really???

[drsmithy]

The bumholes that defraud the benefit system on a long term basis and drug addicts picking up their state-funded high in our country are the same type of people that turn to (often violent) crime in countries where an effective benefit system does not exist.

The simple fact of the matter is that long-term welfare frauds are a tiny, irrelevant fraction of welfare recipients.

Conservatives always go hunting for wide-scale systemic welfare fraud, and they never find it.

Sane people know that's because the proportion of people who would rather live bare subsistence on the typical welfare payment, vs a simple-yet-still-far-better lifestyle in a minimum wage job, is vanishingly small.

If conservatives were willing to go after the top 1% of people rorting the system as eagerly as they go after the bottom 1%, we'd all be better off.

Re:Really???

[drsmithy]

From about 2005 to 2011 disability benefit claimaints increased by 30% even though there's no justifiable reason for this to be the case because the benefit hadn't really changed and there hadn't been any kind of mass reason for increased levels of disability in the populace.

In Australia, there has been a significant shift of welfare recipients over to disability pensions, because the standard welfare payment has not increased in line with cost of living and is now woefully inadequate, while the disability pension is higher.

So welfare services workers at the coalface whose ethics and morals are still intact try to get recipients over to the disability pension if they can.

I expect the same is true in the UK.

Re:Really???

[Xest]

I don't think the staff really do that sort of thing here as it's upto the individual to apply for what they think they need rather than social workers or whoever to go around finding out what people need.

You're right that the disability allowance is higher, but that's because it's intended for people who outright can't work, whilst job seekers allowance is intended as a short term measure for people who can work but simply can't find a job - you're not meant to live off of it indefinitely. It is however bolstered by free training, access to apprenticeships and so forth to ensure that there's always at least some job you can get meaning not getting a job long term isn't really an excuse, but a choice.

As an aside our welfare payment have risen with inflation, so for example in 2012 when everyone's wages were going down, unemployment benefits saw a 5.2% rise because inflation was high in the month they determine payments. The government is changing this now to try and make sure unemployment benefits more closely mirror average increases (or decreases) in wage rather than inflation.

Really, here it was mostly just dishonesty because our Labour government simply made such benefits too attractive an alternative to work and too easy to get which is why a roughly similar number lost these benefits when the current government did a complete re-assessment of everyone receiving that benefit. They simply shouldn't have had them in the first place, and didn't deserve them simply because job seekers allowance has become a less reasonable option for simply choosing to be long term unemployed.

Re:Really???

[drsmithy]

You're right that the disability allowance is higher, but that's because it's intended for people who outright can't work, whilst job seekers allowance is intended as a short term measure for people who can work but simply can't find a job - you're not meant to live off of it indefinitely. It is however bolstered by free training, access to apprenticeships and so forth to ensure that there's always at least some job you can get meaning not getting a job long term isn't really an excuse, but a choice.

There's NOT "always at least some job you can get". That's the problem.

As an aside our welfare payment have risen with inflation, so for example in 2012 when everyone's wages were going down, unemployment benefits saw a 5.2% rise because inflation was high in the month they determine payments. The government is changing this now to try and make sure unemployment benefits more closely mirror average increases (or decreases) in wage rather than inflation.

And how does it look when you go back over the last 30 years ? My bet is inflation and wage increases have vastly outstripped the increase in the welfare payment.

Really, here it was mostly just dishonesty because our Labour government simply made such benefits too attractive an alternative to work and too easy to get which is why a roughly similar number lost these benefits when the current government did a complete re-assessment of everyone receiving that benefit. They simply shouldn't have had them in the first place, and didn't deserve them simply because job seekers allowance has become a less reasonable option for simply choosing to be long term unemployed.

People who "choose to be long term unemployed" are a vanishingly small percentage. Always have been, likely always will be.

Re:Really???

[queazocotal]

Fraud - as defined in those numbers - is not 'We assessed this person, and had enough proof to criminally convict them'.
It is 'on the balance of probabilities' the person intentionally mislead on their application, and we have stopped their benefit, and they have failed to prove we are wrong'.
Even if you assume that 'claimant error' was 100% malicious,- you still only get to about 1.5%.

The 30% figure is due to:
People getting better (people did not stay on IB forever and some will improve around their assessment for ESA).
Significant changes in the criteria.

Re:Really???

[sgbett]

Not to mention that stills are the holy grail of 'out of context' editing - whilst the pictures may be accurate, video would be much more compelling.

These guys are bad enough without over egging the pudding. These techniques are how those in power influence the weak minded public. We should not stoop so low as to become their bedfellows in this respect.

Given enough rope, those in power will hang themselves. They seem to be doing a grand job of it. I don't mean to trivialise the unfortunate side effects of this process, but I do think they are somewhat unavoidable. So begin outraged is a little like shouting at the wind. You just have to try and do what you can in your little corner of the world to make things better for you and those around you. However big your corner might be.

Re:Really???

[Anonymous Coward]

@phantomfive
That's what's known as a mind game - she said it to stop you complaining about being bored, because she didn't want to know.

Re:Really???

[Xest]

"There's NOT "always at least some job you can get". That's the problem."

Really? Can you give an example? Here in the UK there are always warehouse, fast food, or shop jobs, if you accept the free training then you have options ranging from IT support to plumbing. There's plenty of options - this isn't a country where you can only retrain if you stump up the money yourself, in places of high unemployment there are well funded learning centres offering a range of courses, but if you live more remotely then online options are available. You can even do a full on degree remotely using a special loan if you're willing to pay it back once your earnings are at about the national average, or never have to pay it back if they never reach that level meaning you get it for free. It's risk free, you're completely protected.

The only way there isn't a job in the UK is if you intentionally place artificial reasons in the way like "I can't be bothered to commute that far", "I don't want to do that job", and so forth, but all of these are choices, not impairments.

"And how does it look when you go back over the last 30 years ? My bet is inflation and wage increases have vastly outstripped the increase in the welfare payment."

It's pointless to go back 30 years because different benefits have come and gone in that time, or been drastically altered, but as I say in general they've been tied to inflation so have generally done worse than average earnings in boom times but much better in bust times. Overall it tends to balance out though and they do as well as average earnings increases for workers as a result.

Re:Really???

[Xest]

"Fraud - as defined in those numbers - is not 'We assessed this person, and had enough proof to criminally convict them'.
It is 'on the balance of probabilities' the person intentionally mislead on their application, and we have stopped their benefit, and they have failed to prove we are wrong'."

You're making stuff up now, the very link you provided conflicts with what you say:

Fraud:
This includes all cases where the following three conditions apply:

- the basic conditions for receipt of
benefit, or the rate of benefit in
payment, are not being met;

- the customer can reasonably be expe
cted to be aware of the effect
on entitlement; and

- benefit stops or reduces as
a result of the review.

Those are the conditions required for it to be criminal, they have to be able to determine that it was an intentional act to mislead for financial gain which is the very definition of criminal fraud. You're still ignoring the fact that this doesn't cater to those claims that were fraudulent but that were never even detected, let alone investigated. We already know full well that existing methods of detecting and dealing with fraud were insufficient, hence why you're cherry picking numbers from 2010/2011 when Labour era government ineffective methods were still in place. That's why it's very different now, why the real numbers are now coming to light in reassessment.

"The 30% figure is due to:
People getting better (people did not stay on IB forever and some will improve around their assessment for ESA).
Significant changes in the criteria."

This is a different excuse to what you used previously but still makes no sense. You're saying that between 2005 and 2011 30% more people mysteriously were incapacitated for work purposes then in just a year or so, half a million people magically all healed up with no other people becoming incapacitated at the same time across the whole country? You realise how absurd that argument is? It makes literally zero statistical sense. We don't get magical mass-healings and cures against incapacity across the rest of the population like that. The only thing you're right about is the criteria, yes it has changed to close loopholes so that people who are actually fit to work do not receive these benefits, which is kind of the point and precisely what was going wrong with the old system - you could claim to be unfit for work and not be required to submit reasonable medical evidence of the fact to get these benefits.

Yes, these people are getting found out under the new criteria that require proof, that's exactly what I've been saying all along.

Re:Really???

[drsmithy]

Really? Can you give an example?
Uh, practically the whole world, right now ? Indeed, pretty much since the whole sadistic idea of NAIRU gained acceptance ?

I believe your unemployment rate is higher than 0% (or the effective 0% to allow for brief periods between jobs). That pretty much means there's more job seekers than jobs by definition.

I don't really follow the UK that closely, but a quick Google on the topic pulled up this blog that has some facts and figures. 463,000 jobs, 2.68 million job seekers. That's 2 years old, but I doubt the situation has changed dramatically (either in the 2 years since or the decade before).

Note also that official unemployment figures almost certainly vastly underestimate real unemployment, since the definition of "employed" (usually something like a few hours of paid work in week) and "unemployed" (must be actively searching for work) have been comically gamed to try and make the under- and unemployment problem look much less worse than it actually is.

The only way there isn't a job in the UK is if you intentionally place artificial reasons in the way like "I can't be bothered to commute that far", "I don't want to do that job", and so forth, but all of these are choices, not impairments.
This is just more blinkered conservative moralising bullshit.

If the only job available to you requires a three-hour commute in each direction and you have a young child that goes to school, then that job is not a feasible option. That's not a "choice", that's reality.

It's pointless to go back 30 years because different benefits have come and gone in that time, or been drastically altered, but as I say in general they've been tied to inflation so have generally done worse than average earnings in boom times but much better in bust times. Overall it tends to balance out though and they do as well as average earnings increases for workers as a result.
I'm glad you agree that it might have gone up quicker than wages in recent times doesn't matter because it all balances out over the long run, even though I sincerely doubt it hasn't balanced out at all over the last 30 years (it would certainly be unusual if it had, because it certainly hasn't in the other countries of the Anglosphere). Now, what was your point again ?

Re:Really???

[ybanrab]

In most of the UK £10 a day is a pack of cigarettes and a couple of cans of cheap lager. I'm in London and cigarettes here are £8+ per pack.

Re:Really???

[Half-pint HAL]

Have you ever been unemployed? Even are a month of it, it's mind-numbingly boring.

Well, that's your fault, bro. Go to the library if you need to.

The library isn't free if you're not within walking distance (and libraries are closing across the UK at an unprecedented rate anyway). And besides, it's not about lack of opportunity (I own plenty of books and DVDs) -- it's about lack of routine. There is practically nothing regular to give structure to your week. I'm sure it's easier if you're devoutly religious (morning prayers, visit the church/mosque/synagogue on the designated day, etc) but I'm not, and there's not enough decent stuff on TV to build a routine around.

If we had an open fire, I'd at least be able to make a routine out of chopping wood. About the only thing I've got to peg time to is the weekly bin collection.

As my mum said, "Only the boring are bored."

Who did she say it to? You. Why? Because you were bored. Does that make you boring? No, it makes you normal. I'm guessing that you heard it most in the summer holidays, as you didn't have the routine of school to structure your existence around and there was no external motivating factors forcing you into action. Human beings are pack animals, and most of our daily lives are dedicated to fulfilling a function within the pack, not choosing our own individual path.

Re:Really???

[phantomfive]

and libraries are closing across the UK at an unprecedented rate anyway)

Um, the UK is lousy?

it's about lack of routine.

Seriously bro? You can't create a routine for yourself? I mean, really?

Who did she say it to? You. Why? Because you were bored. Does that make you boring? No, it makes you normal.

But I learned to not be bored. Apparently that's something hard for you, even though a 6-year-old kid managed to do it.

Re:Really???

[Half-pint HAL]

Seriously bro? You can't create a routine for yourself? I mean, really?

Re:Really???

[Half-pint HAL]

Seriously bro? You can't create a routine for yourself? I mean, really?

Anyone can "create" a routine, but very few people can stick to a routine without some kind of positive or negative feedback. Turning up for work at 9am, 5 days a week is easy, because there are easily anticipated negative consequences if you don't. Getting your weekly shop on a Sunday is easy if the alternative is running out on Wednesday and having to rush out and grab something.

But getting up at a regular time when there's no comeback? Doing something on a specific day when you could do it whenever? It's very, very human to just Not See The Point. It's also very human to climb up on your high horse and look down on people who are going through a rough time and tell them why it's all their own fault. Perhaps this is simply denial -- perhaps you don't realise that you didn't get where you are today based on hard work and dedication, but on luck. I didn't get made redundant because of a lack of skill, effort or dedication; I got made redundant because the company decided they didn't want people doing my job in Scotland, they wanted them doing it in Wales. Pure arbitrary logistics -- it could happen to you. And then people like you will spit on you and say it's your own fault.

Re:Really???

[phantomfive]

And then people like you will spit on you and say it's your own fault.

Yeah, you've basically spent the last few posts telling me how incompetent you are.
Maybe it's not your fault, maybe you were born with the IQ of a frog, then it's not your fault.
But I don't think you have the IQ of a frog. I think you are smart. So yeah, it's your fault. Pick yourself up and do better.

Re:Really???

[Xest]

"I believe your unemployment rate is higher than 0% (or the effective 0% to allow for brief periods between jobs). That pretty much means there's more job seekers than jobs by definition."

Right, but it doesn't mean there aren't jobs. You can be a job seeker willingly - opting to hold out for the job you want, rather than any job you can get, this is a conscious choice to be unemployed and it's one I'd make if I were in that situation too because I have enough savings to get by so that if I did become unemployed I'd be able to do that, but it doesn't change the fact that many people are unrealistic about what they can hold out for or, how much they have in savings to be able to hold out for something they're never going to get and simply can't afford to be choosy. If my cash reserves ran out I'd stop being choosy and take one of the many other options available.

So yes there are people unemployed, some reasonably so just waiting a little longer to get what they both want and know they can get, others not so reasonably so holding out for something they couldn't get even if they were employed, or simply not wanting to work at all.

"Note also that official unemployment figures almost certainly vastly underestimate real unemployment, since the definition of "employed" (usually something like a few hours of paid work in week) and "unemployed" (must be actively searching for work) have been comically gamed to try and make the under- and unemployment problem look much less worse than it actually is."

That's an American thing. It doesn't apply globally. Here we have two figures, the claimant count which is those taking unemployment benefits and so excludes housewives and working age teens and early 20s still in education and the actual unemployment levels which you quoted. For what it's worth it has changed quite drastically, unemployment has been falling non-stop in the UK, far faster than estimates expected.

"If the only job available to you requires a three-hour commute in each direction and you have a young child that goes to school, then that job is not a feasible option. That's not a "choice", that's reality."

But we're talking about the UK, there is no 3 hour commute. A 3 hour commute would get you from the North of England right down to London by train. We're not a large country, apart from an absolutely tiny handful (we're talking a few thousand at best) amount of people who live in the likes of the Scottish highlands an hours commute will get you to multiple major cities. I sympathise in America or Australia which are much more sparsely populated countries this may be true, but it's not true in almost the entirety of the UK.

"I'm glad you agree that it might have gone up quicker than wages in recent times doesn't matter because it all balances out over the long run, even though I sincerely doubt it hasn't balanced out at all over the last 30 years (it would certainly be unusual if it had, because it certainly hasn't in the other countries of the Anglosphere)."

If you really want to talk about benefits over the last 30 years and ignore the changes in systems that have taken place then they have drastically increased in the UK. This is a large part the reason we ended up with one of the highest levels of public debt in the world when the financial crisis hit. I was trying to keep things in your favour by referring to only the current unemployment benefits which have kept pace with average earnings increases, but if you really want to compare against what they replaced then they replaced much lower benefits meaning that factoring those in leads to a clear increase in the last 30 years which means your clinging on to this arbitrary 30 years number does you know favours, it destroys your argument completely. Sticking to current benefits at least allows you to argue that they've stayed roughly static in line with average wage increases. Or, to put it into context, they've stayed pretty much in line with a part time minimum wage job which isn't bad for doing nothing and that'

Re:Really???

[drsmithy]

Right, but it doesn't mean there aren't jobs.

Yes, actually, it does.

Unless you want to mount an argument that large numbers of people would prefer to live in abject poverty rather than work and live in relative comfort.

Further, even ignoring that, there are hundreds of thousands of available jobs, and millions of job seekers. More people than jobs. Lots more.

You can be a job seeker willingly - opting to hold out for the job you want, rather than any job you can get, this is a conscious choice to be unemployed and it's one I'd make if I were in that situation too because I have enough savings to get by so that if I did become unemployed I'd be able to do that, but it doesn't change the fact that many people are unrealistic about what they can hold out for or, how much they have in savings to be able to hold out for something they're never going to get and simply can't afford to be choosy. If my cash reserves ran out I'd stop being choosy and take one of the many other options available.

Yet apparently you think tens, hundreds of thousands of people would rather “hold out” and choose to be unemployed, living on the pittance offered by welfare ?

So yes there are people unemployed, some reasonably so just waiting a little longer to get what they both want and know they can get, others not so reasonably so holding out for something they couldn't get even if they were employed, or simply not wanting to work at all.

The former are accounted for in the “0%” I referred to. That’s why it was in inverted commas.

The proportion of people who choose to not work and live in abject poverty is vanishingly small. You’ve already stated you wouldn’t do it. I certainly wouldn’t, either. Nor would anyone I know. Yet you want to try and argue tens to hundreds of thousands do ?

Doesn’t even pass the laugh test.

That's an American thing. It doesn't apply globally. Here we have two figures, the claimant count which is those taking unemployment benefits and so excludes housewives and working age teens and early 20s still in education and the actual unemployment levels which you quoted. For what it's worth it has changed quite drastically, unemployment has been falling non-stop in the UK, far faster than estimates expected.

“A person is classed as unemployed if not only out of work, but also actively looking for work and available to start work within a fortnight.”

So unemployment stats don’t account for people who have given up looking for work, or who couldn’t start within two weeks.

Further people are considered “employed” if they work an hour a week. That means unemployment statistics don’t account for underemployment - people who want to work more but can’t because there aren’t enough jobs.

Real unemployment is _vastly_ higher than official figures. This is a worldwide problem. There is an under- and unemployment disaster that’s been building up in the advanced world for decades.

But we're talking about the UK, there is no 3 hour commute.

Anecdotally, I know many people living in London. None of them have less than a 45 minute commute door-to-door, each way.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2325262/Rise-super-commuter-Number-Britons-travelling-hours-day-work-soars-50-cent-years.html

That’s actually 3 hours in total, rather than each way, and I have no problem saying I picked 3 hours out of the air, but the overall point remains. It’s quite reasonable for there to be quite legitimate reasons for someone to be unable to take a job, as opposed

Re:Really???

[Xest]

"Yes, actually, it does."

Right, so if I quit my job now there's no other jobs available for me? Don't be so stupid.

"Yet apparently you think tens, hundreds of thousands of people would rather âoehold outâ and choose to be unemployed, living on the pittance offered by welfare ?"

Yep, that's exactly the problem, over a million of them are NEETS for starters, youths not in employment, education, or training. They can get away with it because they live at home and £90 a week is still plenty enough to pay for the latest XBox games.

"Anecdotally, I know many people living in London. None of them have less than a 45 minute commute door-to-door, each way."

What's the relevance of your anecdote exactly? It doesn't change the fact that 3 hours gets you from one end of England to the capital. I live in rural England where transport is far worse than that in London but an hours commute still gets me comfortably to the 3rd and 4th largest cities in the UK despite the fact I live in the arse end of nowhere. Of course if you live on one side of London and commute to the other and dawdle about walking slowly or happen to work or live far from a tube station then you're going to be able to get your commute up to 45 minutes but that still means they can get anywhere in the capital from their doorstep within 45 minutes which for a city with a population of over 7 million (think about the size of that) is not unreasonable.

"For a parent who has to drop off and pickup a child at care or school on the way to and from work, a commute could easily stretch to a couple of hours in each direction."

Except that's unnecessary because guess what? we also have publicly funded schemes to deal with those problems for parents. They also get the bulk of childcare paid for, and child tax credits which leaves them with a net profit for having a child. Soon they'll even have free school meals so they don't even need to fund the bulk of their kids food.

"No, that would have been the bank bailouts."

You're just showing you have no idea about the breakdown of UK finances, the amount of benefits available and so forth. Bank bailouts don't even get included in general spending figures as they're classed as one off costs. Some of those banks have been sold back to private investors and much of the money recouped now anyway.

"The kind of welfare benefits youâ(TM)re railing against are a small part of the UKâ(TM)s national expenditure (as they are in every other country). You could eliminate all of it tomorrow and public expenditure would be largely unaffected."

Incorrect. See above. You've no idea what you're talking about:

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/08/uk-benefit-welfare-spending#zoomed-picture

The sorts of benefits that are frustrating to hear about but that make a fraction of the budget include winter fuel payments for old folks even if they're millionaires, free bus passes for over 65s, again, even if they're millionaires, and that sort of thing. The things we're talking about are not included in that. The sorts of things we're talking about cost a phenomenal amount.

I think you just need to admit you're bitching about problems in your country and trying to project them everywhere. That's fine, you can do that, but it makes you wrong. I'm sure you may well be right about where you are, but you're completely wrong about the UK and the more you talk the more clueless you demonstrate that you are about the situation here.

Re:Really???

[drsmithy]

Right, so if I quit my job now there's no other jobs available for me? Don't be so stupid.

I’m not the one being stupid. I’m talking at a macro level. You’re nitpicking at an individual level.

There are ca. millions more people looking for work than there are advertised jobs. That doesn’t count all the people who could work but for whatever reason aren’t considered to be looking. That means there’s not enough jobs. It doesn’t mean arbitrary person Joe Blogs cannot find a job. Obviously individual people move in and out of jobs all the time.

If we pretend to be physicists for a second, and assume each job is a perfect sphere, and we could somehow match up every single vacancy with a willing applicant tomorrow, you would still have millions of people either without a job, or working less hours than they want to.

That’s because there’s not enough jobs.

Yep, that's exactly the problem, over a million of them are NEETS for starters, youths not in employment, education, or training. They can get away with it because they live at home and £90 a week is still plenty enough to pay for the latest XBox games.

Where is the evidence these people do not want to work ?

What's the relevance of your anecdote exactly?

That your argument because you can in certain situations drive from point A to point B in less than three hours means long commutes don’t exist is stupid.

Of course if you live on one side of London and commute to the other and dawdle about walking slowly or happen to work or live far from a tube station then you're going to be able to get your commute up to 45 minutes but that still means they can get anywhere in the capital from their doorstep within 45 minutes which for a city with a population of over 7 million (think about the size of that) is not unreasonable.

The _average_ London commute is something like 37 minutes each way.

You are arguing a 45 minute commute is unusual. In actual fact it’s common if you live in London.

I am not making any comment about whether or not that is “unreasonable”. I am making the point that it could be a reason that taking a particular job is impossible.

Except that's unnecessary because guess what? we also have publicly funded schemes to deal with those problems for parents.

You have a scheme that picks children up from their homes, takes them to childcare and returns them at the end of the day ? From anywhere ?

They also get the bulk of childcare paid for, and child tax credits which leaves them with a net profit for having a child.

A quick Google says the base tax credit is 500 quid. I know the cost of living there is a lot lower than Australia, but I still doubt that would be enough turn a profit on the annual costs of child rearing.

You're just showing you have no idea about the breakdown of UK finances, the amount of benefits available and so forth. Bank bailouts don't even get included in general spending figures as they're classed as one off costs. Some of those banks have been sold back to private investors and much of the money recouped now anyway.

Who said anything about a breakdown of finances and spending ? You said:

“This is a large part the reason we ended up with one of the highest levels of public debt in the world when the financial crisis hit.”

Incorrect. See above. You've no idea what you're talking about:

Actually that breakdown is the same one I found before commenting.

I was under the impression we were talking primarily about welfare frauds - people who could work but choose not to, and how much the welfare they receive costs.

I think you just need to admit you're bitching about problems in your country and trying to project them everywhere.

Actually everything I’ve read during this discussion has led me to believe you have exactly the same pro

Re:Really???

[Xest]

You realise it's also the case that nowhere near every job is filled too right? some are open indefinitely unable to get candidates, even some unskilled jobs? If it were the case that everyone wanted to work then every open position would be immediately filled but that is not the case.

"Where is the evidence these people do not want to work ?"

Where is the evidence they do? A long time ago when I'd finished my A-Levels I was a neets, I didn't want to work because it was quite nice being sat at home getting money in. When I grew up I learnt how bad a thing that was but try explaining to an 18 year old who lives at home and has never had an income why he shouldn't sit and enjoy it rather than work for an income.

"You are arguing a 45 minute commute is unusual. In actual fact itâ(TM)s common if you live in London."

You're making things up now. I've never argued this. But regardless, other studies including those directly from the ONS suggest that the vast majority of people in the UK have less than a 30 minute commute:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13627199

My commute has wavered between about 55 minutes and 1hr and 5 minutes everywhere I've worked for the last 6 years, I do not find this exceptional nor do I find it a reason not to work.

"You have a scheme that picks children up from their homes, takes them to childcare and returns them at the end of the day ? From anywhere ?"

It depends on the local council as to the details but yes there are many schemes involving the use of everything from private taxis to scheduled buses. Parents have a legal obligation to send their children to school but as part of that local councils are obliged to ensure parents can get them to school by providing help.

"A quick Google says the base tax credit is 500 quid. I know the cost of living there is a lot lower than Australia, but I still doubt that would be enough turn a profit on the annual costs of child rearing."

Er, I think you kind of missed the important part. The £500 is just for having children, you then get upto £2690 extra per child, double that again if the kid is disabled and another £1000 on top if severely disabled. This is on top of the standard child benefit which is around £1000 per year for your first child and around £700 for every other child after that. If you work and are on less than or equal to the national average salary you can get the full benefit, diminishing as you earn towards £50k a year (i.e. roughly double the national average salary). If you're working at least 16 hours a week you also get working tax credits on top.

So no, it's not just £500. Again you're demonstrating your complete lack of knowledge, you're way out of your depth in this discussion.

Welfare spending in the UK spiralled out of control because it could, because whilst the last government was turning a blind eye to the questionable practices in the financial sector they were also bloating welfare and benefits spending higher and higher off of the profits from doing that. When it all came crashing down we were suddenly left with all these welfare and benefits payments that were unsustainable in the face of a crippled financial sector.

Fraud is a problem because when we were all getting so fat and rich off the taxes pouring in from our financial sector it also didn't matter that people were taking the piss, because we could afford to ignore it. It became too easy for people to opt not to work if they couldn't be bothered. As I said to the other guy there's a reason why disability claimants rose by 30% in that period despite there being no statistical explanation for such a drastic increase in severe disabilities to go with it, and again, the reassessment that was done recently that weeded out 27% of claimants as not having a need for it is evidence of the fact that the vast bulk of it was fraudulent. As clampdowns on benefits

Re:Really???

[Half-pint HAL]

Yeah, you've basically spent the last few posts telling me how incompetent you are.

No I haven't -- you've spent the last few posts telling me I'm incompetent. What I have told you is a few details of my existence -- details which are common to a great many of the unemployed people I know. I haven't once mentioned the online courses I've been following. I haven't mentioned the book on natural language processing which I have been reading, or the world-class language software I have been writing with the knowledge I've gleaned from the book. I haven't mentioned the gardening, the home-made liqueur or the cheesecakes.

But despite all that, I find myself feeling detached and shiftless -- there is nothing concrete "grounding" me in day-to-day life. This causes low self-esteem and leads many into depression, and the cure for depression isn't "pull yourself together man."

All I'm trying to say is to have a little compassion for the unemployed rather than judging them. Which you do. Constantly.

Re:Really???

[phantomfive]

No I haven't -- you've spent the last few posts telling me I'm incompetent.

True, true. I've been telling you that you're incompetent, and you've been giving me the reasons why you're incompetent.

and the cure for depression isn't "pull yourself together man."

That's all you have, bro. No one else is going to do it for you.

Re:Really???

[Half-pint HAL]

and the cure for depression isn't "pull yourself together man."

That's all you have, bro. No one else is going to do it for you.

Indeed not, because people like you are going to keep bringing us down, while patting yourselves on the back for being superior, practical and helpful.

Dude, go away and learn something about human nature.

Re:Really???

[phantomfive]

Indeed not, because people like you are going to keep bringing us down,

Yes, yes, you blame other people for your problems; those ignorant people like me who don't understand human nature are keeping you down. How sad it is to be you. I have so much sympathy for you.

Re:Really???

[drsmithy]

I do not have the time to properly research this topic, so I'll leave it here.

But everything I've read so far convinces me the UK is little different to the US and Australia.

The fundamental problem is there's more people than jobs. It is unlikely to be resolved in the future due to both political (conservatives and their backers have no interest in pursuing full employment) and practical (within a generation or so robotics are going to render probably half the workforce obselete) reasons.

Thanks for the discussion.

point our crooked little fingers....

[Anonymous Coward]

free the innocent stem cells end the WMD on credit cabals restore our honor & integrity

Re:point our crooked little fingers....

[JustOK]

wouldn't expect to find u anywheres near honour

well this was

[Anonymous Coward]

totally unexpected! i mean, govt really does have better solutions and certainly knows best how you should conduct your life, such as what you should eat, who you should hire, where to get a mortgage, what type of light bulb you should use, what you should do with your trash, what you should learn in school, ad infinitum...

i'm shocked at this news - think of the children!

Re:well this was

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:well this was

[Anonymous Coward]

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").

Shocked! Shocked and Appalled!

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re: Shocked! Shocked and Appalled!

[tleaf100]

they do !!! it just never been known to happen..

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's hope it prevents all the sponging bastards in this country who have the life of rielly at others expense getting anymore of the honest, hard working, peoples money!

Scrap the UK benefit system and make the lazy cunts work or

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

It missed off my end themselves tag!

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume you include the sick and disabled under your "lazy cunts" label?

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, the people who lost their jobs because someone in the business embezzled everything

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Lean English, otherwise your earning potential will be much less than that!

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. They should all be terminated at diagnosis or birth!

Re:Good

[benjfowler]

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.

Re:Good

[benjfowler]

And this is not a joke; it's surprisingly common and I've seen it happen.

Wankers

[ciderbrew]

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.

Re:Wankers

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you know they're not lying about how reliable their spying technology really is?

Re: Wankers

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it was built in house not by the tax dodging likes of Accenture.
  It probably works fucking brilliantly.

Re:Wankers

[turp182]

They use US government technologies. We are very reliable, apparently.

Re:Wankers

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it was leaked.

Re:Wankers

[Xest]

That's because it wasn't outsourced to Accenture along with a contract that lets them get paid even if they fail to deliver.

deeper! deeper!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't pull out too soon! I haven't cum yet!!

Re:deeper! deeper!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Still?! Damn, girl, you's frigid.

not entirely correct

[CdBee]

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...)

Re:not entirely correct

[Anonymous Coward]

"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."

Citation needed.

And not a Daily Hate Mail opinion piece, please.

Re:not entirely correct

[CdBee]

Wouldnt dream of quoting that vile organ of bile - I'm well into the left of the spectrum, just more anti-gambling and anti-addiction than most liberals.

Re:not entirely correct

[Chrisq]

Citation needed.

And not a Daily Hate Mail opinion piece, please.

well its hard to have a citation before the event but parliament thinks it will be an issue.

Re:not entirely correct

[Half-pint HAL]

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

The situation is even worse than that. My sister is moving abroad temporarily, and is trying to get her flat rented out while she's away. She was personally quite happy to have the property let to benefits claimants, but none of the letting agencies she spoke to were willing to do it.

The problem isn't simply that they don't get the money, it's that the regulations make it very difficult to get an HB tenant to leave. If they leave the property of their own accord, then they're no longer at involuntary risk of homelessness, and therefore no longer eligible for housing benefit. This means that if the rent burden becomes too high through change of circumstances (eg if a child leaves home, leading to a spare room becoming available -> bedroom tax) then even if they can find a property that their housing benefit would cover, they can't actually move there.

There is only one way to move out without risk of losing housing benefit, and that is to be evicted by court order, a process which is very time consuming, and ends up leaving the landlord going 6 months or so without any rental income.

Note that this is not a malicious move on the part of the tenants -- it is their only option. Because the law is a bachelor (of Arts, from Christ College Cambridge) and the law is an ass.

Re:not entirely correct

[Alioth]

I've seen it happen. There is a small minority of people who really don't seem to understand that sometimes you have to keep money back to pay rent, or that any loans you take must be paid back, they just see a loan as 'free money'.

I knew someone like this and what was extremely puzzling was she was running her own small business profitably. But her personal finances were a disaster - she treated loans as if they were a lottery win and free money (took loans without ever considering that she would actually have to pay them back) and thanks to lending policies in the late 90s and early 2000s got unmanagably into debt. When her boyfriend baled her out, instead of paying off the loans she bought a Mercedes Benz and expensive jewelry. As far as I could tell she wasn't malicious, she just had no concept of future planning.

Re:not entirely correct

[Anonymous Coward]

No currently Housing benefit its paid directly to the Landlord UNLESS you are on the new universal credit which is the program being discussed.

I don't know what these would be called in the US but in the UK the benefits it is meant to replace are JSA ( jobseekers allowance) and ESA (employment support allowance ie deemed too ill to work) amongst others.

This scheme is so bad you are only currently placed on it if your claim is supposed to be straight forward. Despite the governments claim that over a million people would be on the new program it is estimated that around 300,000 are national and the staff are having to compute peoples payments by hand.

If your claim isnt straight forward you are still placed on Esa, Jsa etc.

The Government have been advised to scrap the entire thing and start again but for obvious political reasons are unwilling to do this as it was promoted as their Flagship benefits change policy so keep pumping more money into it.

Re:not entirely correct

[hawkinspeter]

That sounds to me like the same philosophy behind massive national debts. As long as people are willing to lend you money, just keep borrowing and spending. Eventually, the time will come to pay it back, but if the debt is large enough, you'll never have to pay it all.

Re:not entirely correct

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you're confusing Housing Benefit and Local Housing Allowance, an easy mistake to make since both are colloquially referred to as Housing Benefit.

Local Housing allowance is claimed by those living in Privately rented accommodation and the payments are usually made to the claimant, which can lead to the issues highlighted above.

Housing Benefit is claimed by those living in social housing and payments are usually paid directly to the landlord. However, with the introduction of the under-occupancy penalty arrears are rising in the social sector too. Whether one attributes this to fecklessness or to simply stretching a meager budget too far is another discussion completely.

Re:not entirely correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Citation needed.

And not a Daily Hate Mail opinion piece, please.

This is exactly what happened to me when my tenant was paid directly. I ended up having to write off best part of £2K. The tenant didn't even want to be paid directly, but the government knew what was best for them obviously.

Re:not entirely correct

[CdBee]

Incorrect I was unemployed for a month last year, claimed JSA and HB, both were paid direct to me every fortnight, separately. I am NOT in the experimental Universal credit area: You are wrong. This has been the standard for most claimants for over 2 years

Re: not entirely correct

[DigiShaman]

Oh, but society does pay for it, in inflation; hyper-inflation in some cases.

Alternative Summary:

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Alternative Summary:

[Bite The Pillow]

Otoh, commenters here have repeatedly called for in-housing it work rather than paying contractor overhead. I would expect many here to see this as a positive development and hope it proves them right.
The lesson would not transfer to other governments without existing it workers, but might suggest that the government might want to look into it. Or if it goes badly we learn a different lesson.
I certainly can see appropriateness without needing your level if cynicism.

Re:Alternative Summary:

[schnell]

who are major contributors to /.

Huh? Any, um, evidence for that? What does "major contributor" even mean?

If Slashdot had "major contributors" its owners wouldn't keep trying to unload it, and it wouldn't have been sold for peanuts to a marginal company like Dice that doesn't really have much strategic use for it other than a dwindling number of techie eyeballs.

I mean, not to get in the way of bashing Slashdot - the frequent "Dice-vertorials" are shamefully bad - but you may wish to have some evidence for your assertions rather than just assuming a story you don't like was posted there specifically at the wishes of the aforementioned Fortune 500 companies.

Launched by DWP

[Christianson]

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.

Re:Launched by DWP

[sa1lnr]

So it would be Iain Duncan Smith, for as far as I'm aware he has overall responsibility for the DWP.

Re:Launched by DWP

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry but you are wrong.

The Cabinet Office have repeatedly interfered: they have complete control of funding and they've repeatedly used that to dictate the direction of UC.

The Cabinet Office are responsible for 50% of the problems on UC.

The other 50% is down to the DWP and their utter inability to actually define a coherent and consistent set of requirements for what UC is supposed to do.

In both cases the root problem is that ministers think their job is to be constantly 'innovative' and that considering detail, how will their pie-in-the-sky ideas will be achieved, to be beneath them. The plebs will deal with the detail.

The devil is always in the detail.

information technology is technology failure

[Anonymous Coward]

In the post-IT world we will go back to using Post-its to track our welfare payments.

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.

Re:To paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke the Younger

[Anonymous Coward]

Rididng that hobby-horse again. Every other modern state has universal healthcare, mate, and it is working spectacularly. Read the article and the summary again and you'll see that that isn't the problem.

Re:To paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke the Younger

[Viol8]

Quite. The USA likes to see itself as a first world country yet if you get ill and you can't afford health insurance can basically go die in a corner for all they care. Even some 3rd world countries give more of a shit than that.

Re:To paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke the Younger

[Anonymous Coward]

How un-Christian of Americans to care so little. Aren't there supposed to be private charities for the less fortunate? Where is organized religion when it's needed?

Re:To paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke the Younger

[Anonymous Coward]

No ER or hospital in the US can turn you down.. Either you have the understanding of a child or you are willfully ignorant..

Re:To paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke the Younger

[coastwalker]

There is a reason why some USA detractors call it the Great Satan, some evil things are regarded as normal there.

Re:To paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke the Younger

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure where you're from but that statement is patently untrue. You're either ignorant or a liar.
Every state has some form of low/no income insurance program, in addition to the fact that hospitals cannot refuse anyone emergency treatment.
That does *not* however mean that you get to obligate the taxpayers with the cost of years of treating your self inflicted lung cancer or HIV infection.

Re:To paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke the Younger

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't get to force Christianity out of every aspect of public life and then still get to bitch about how they spend their time and money.

Re:To paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke the Younger

[Xest]

Does that mean the US has a method of testing for how people suffered an affliction?

How does the US differentiate between people who got HIV through carelessness and those who were raped? What about telling the difference between people who got lung cancer through smoking and others who got it because they had to take a bar staff job to be able to afford to eat and contracted it through no other choice than to suffer passive smoking?

Re:To paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke the Younger

[expatriot]

Or self inflicted hereditary disease or self inflicted chronic injury from a car accident or self inflicted random disease that can hit anyone.

Most state ER rooms will only stabilize a patient, they will not do long term treatments. Even if there is a drug that will treat their condition, it is not given freely.

The only people who can benefit from Medicaid (intended for poor people without insurance) are people who have nothing that can be reposses by the bankrupcy court.

All anyone need to know about public care in America is the large numbers of volunteer doctors (often from outside the US) who set up free clinics in different areas for a week and have people sleeping in the street to be inline for treatment.

Re:To paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke the Younger

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't you get the memo? The parable of the talents dictates that investment bankers get into heaven first. We threw that shit about camels and needles out a long time ago.

Re:To paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke the Younger

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, choosing your metaphor, huh?

What if the government contractor were the organ grinder, and they tried to buy a monkey, but were sold a gorilla, or a rabid mongoose? Who would you blame then?

The fundamental problem here, is that, for reasons of personal greed, contractors take advantage of the government, then whine about being persecuted when even the slightest demand is made upon them to fulfill their obligations rather than just swill down the trough of money they really want to get.

If government were as terrible as so many intone, then we'd have been doomed already.

Re:To paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke the Younger

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck are you talking about??
1. USA Provides; through government and charity; probable more then half the medical services in truly desperate countries.
2. If you're sick you can go to the emergence room or a free clinic/ Hell I know someone who makes more money then me and still uses a free clinc. Yes, There have been some problems for example a quadriplegic was released into a normal homeless shelter because the hospital did know what do with him. But I would also counter that under NHS a man was funding sustaining himself by drinking plant water.
3. Most states provide a Free Insurance type program and have for years. Hell, I know someone who fell off a ladder breaking his shoulder. When it came time to discus payment (He was admitted, stabilized first and waiting for his turn for surgery.) They help him fill-out all the forms for state insurance. He paid literately zero for the surgeries and rehabilitation. (CA 2011)
4. ER will even give you chemo for fighting Cancer for free. Yes, getting to the ER and waiting everyday would be hell but is possible, you can call 911 if you can't make it on your own. There are also many charities that can help in most situations.
5. African Americans(Americans Poorest Segment) have about 3,500 dollars more spending power then swedes(2005ish I believe.) This can also be seen on the cars and things African Americans are buying vs swedes. AKA, most Americans are buying Cars and other luxury goods instead of paying for Health Insurance.

Could we improve our handling of the poor in regards to health care? Yes, but it will cost more not because it has to but because people are too stupid to elect confident leaders or administrators.

Re:To paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke the Younger

[Anonymous Coward]

Untrue. If you're wondering why, just consider the likelihood that a state medical board is going to grant temporary licenses to large numbers of foreign physicians.

Re:To paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke the Younger

[Anonymous Coward]

The primary public use of "the Great Satan" to describe the US is from the Islamic Republic of Iran. If you wish to endorse that judgment I suggest you check how the laws and conduct of your country would compare to their standards. If you aren't amputating the hands of thieves, throwing homosexuals off of tall buildings or crushing them under falling walls, and stoning adulterers, you are not going to meet their standards. (And we haven't even got to drugs, alcohol, or blasphemy yet.) It is likely that yours is simply the "ignored Satan... for the moment". From what I hear, even in terms of Western morality it seems that not all evil has been banished from your lands.

Re:To paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke the Younger

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure why this disqualifies the USA from being a "first world" country. The government doesn't force healthy people to give up some of the money they earn to heal sick people. Instead, the people are supposed to exercise charity.

Re:To paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke the Younger

[Half-pint HAL]

African Americans(Americans Poorest Segment)

Segmentation fault. America's poorest segment is poor people. If you make your segments based on race rather than income, then you end up defining such people as Don King, Denzel Washington, Oprah Winfrey and the president of the whole bloody country in your "poorest segment".

Re: To paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke the Younger

[DigiShaman]

The US is also extremely multi-cultural. So if we collectively sound schizophrenic, it's because we are. Notice how some Euro nations and the Japanese don't have these problem? Now you know. "When in Rome, do as the Romans"

So they're drinking the agile pondwater?

[mysidia]

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.”

Re:So they're drinking the agile pondwater?

[Nerdfest]

Agile is hardly 'undisciplined'. There's also a lot to be said for 'fail early' when dealing with a project like this. That said, I would have thought they would have had a fairly defined and static set of requirements for a project like this, making waterfall a possibility.

Re:So they're drinking the agile pondwater?

[Anonymous Coward]

But you know the Governments implementation of Agile will be 'undisciplined' and they will need water to flow uphill at some point until the back pressure is sufficient to sink it.

Re:So they're drinking the agile pondwater?

[Rande]

Defined and Static? You've not worked for a govt project then?

Re:So they're drinking the agile pondwater?

[Vintermann]

They said from the start there was no hope of reaching the goals with anything but "agile". Sure, there was no hope of reaching them with agile either, but then you could at least blame agile.

Re:So they're drinking the agile pondwater?

[Xest]

Don't even try, most Agile detractors on Slashdot don't know the first thing about it, they just had a bad manager come in one day and tell them they were doing some Agile when they weren't, they were just doing some half-arsed hearsay version in a poorly implemented manner that they thought could just be shoe-horned in and somehow achieve results. They're completely oblivious that the likes of scrum is as well defined and disciplined as anything like waterfall.

Not to mention that waterfall has been behind hundreds of billions of pounds of IT failure in British government for decades now, so why not try a different tact regardless? If project management was the problem it's obvious that waterfall certainly wasn't the solution, though for what it's worth I think the problem is far deeper than just project management.

Most Agile failure stems from bad managers/developers viewing it as a tickbox buzzword and ramming some half-arsed implementation of it into their team overnight without truly understanding it. But just as getting waterfall right and dealing with the problems that stem from it's rigidity take some time to get used Agile is no different. But after these teams fail because they didn't properly invest in learning it, naively believing that running a project is something you can just wing now that they've changed project management paradigm they then whinge about how it couldn't possibly be them that failed and that people tell them they were doing agile wrong. No fucking shit? you were doing it wrong so of course people were going to tell you you were doing it wrong, them telling you you were doing it wrong doesn't make them wrong, it makes you wrong for doing it wrong and pretending you weren't the problem when you tried it.

I've never seen a team that's been professionally trained in something like scrum and that has taken a bit of time to get used to it and get it right ever have any real problems with it. It does what it does - it allows a project to continue as long as the client wants it to continue determined by the amount of funding they're willing to put in relative to the amount of features and level of quality they want. By definition the biggest cost you can have from Agile is the amount of sprints you're willing to accept before you declare failure. That's far better than doing a whole project and then determining it a failure which is far more costly.

Don't get me wrong, it has it's challenges, if you're doing an Agile project for a client then sometimes the client can be the problem and they wont get people evaluating your releases at each sprint like they should be, but this is still no worse than waterfall where it's only at the end of the project they find it wasn't what they wanted.

Re:So they're drinking the agile pondwater?

[mjwalshe]

So they are gong to employ people directly rather than pay through the nose for capita,IBM,Oracle "consultants" sounds like they are moving in the right direction

Re:So they're drinking the agile pondwater?

[PPH]

I used to work with a guy who repopulated the "spew" random headline generator with management/IT buzzwords. I don't think I could tell the difference between its output and the above quoted text if I tried.

Re:So they're drinking the agile pondwater?

[mysidia]

Don't even try, most Agile detractors on Slashdot don't know the first thing about it, they just had a bad manager come in one day and tell them they were doing some Agile when they weren't

And you doubt that's what is happening in the government?

Scrum can be useful for some projects, but you need managers and developers that fully understand how the methodology is supposed to work, and can do things in an appropriate organized efficient way.

More likely than not; the government won't have anything approaching a faithful implementation and appropriate use of the whole of it.

Re:So they're drinking the agile pondwater?

[Xest]

I don't know, but given that Waterfall has consistently failed them it's worth them trying anything at this point.

One thing public sector does spend a lot on is training (I worked public sector for 7 years) so it's actually possible that they will do a better job of this than many private companies. It's deeply ingrained within public sector culture if you're asked to do something out of your knowledge rather than to learn it yourself to demand training and you'll get it.

Whether the workers have the underlying competence to succeed regardless though is yet to be seen, my experience there was that you can't train laziness out of someone and demand for training was just an excuse for a day off their normal job or something for their CV. But sometimes, just sometimes in public sector you do get skilled competent teams, maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised.

Benefits

[Anonymous Coward]

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,

Re:Benefits

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

Oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

UK Benefits System In Deeper Trouble? Oh no - what will the niggers do?

Re:Oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

Eat the rich. Honkies taste like pork.

Re: Oh no

[tleaf100]

ha,if we are going for the rich,then i am afraid our black dealers round here have a very short life span... do negros taste like burnt pork ?

Re:Oh no

[Chrisq]

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.

Immigrants...

[Anonymous Coward]

Allowing millions of non-white immigrants into a previously all white country might have something to do with the problem of unemployment benefits too...

Re:Immigrants...

[Anonymous Coward]

You ignorant, inbread white-trash fucking idiot. Just blame it on immigrant
- submitted by a British, 2nd generation immigrant

Re:Immigrants...

[Half-pint HAL]

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...?

Re: Immigrants...

[tleaf100]

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.

"spectacularly"

[smittyoneeach]

As you say.

Benefit system ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Benefit for whom ?

The Western countries are being sapped dry by all the so-called "benefit" / "welfare" systems.

Because of the "benefit" / "welfare" systems, millions of immigrants have flocked into the Western countries, changing its demographics and its culture, while emptying the coffers of many of the Western countries.

Re:Benefit system ?

[xelah]

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.

Re:Benefit system ?

[Big Hairy Ian]

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.

Re:Benefit system ?

[captainpanic]

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.

Re:Benefit system ?

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:Benefit system ?

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:Benefit system ?

[Savage-Rabbit]

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.

Re:Benefit system ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Poles are very brown these days...

Re:Benefit system ?

[xelah]

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.

Re:Benefit system ?

[Shatrat]

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.

Re:Benefit system ?

[mjwalshe]

depends are you counting in-work benefits ie subsidizing low paying jobs with tax credits

Re:Benefit system ?

[Anonymous Coward]

So undocumented migrants can claim benefits?

Re:Benefit system ?

[xelah]

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.

Re: Benefit system ?

[DigiShaman]

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!!!

Re:Benefit system ?

[Ash-Fox]

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.

Re:Benefit system ?

[AxeTheMax]

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?

Re:Benefit system ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly! Compelling, isn't it?

Re:Benefit system ?

[Shatrat]

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.

Re:Benefit system ?

[Big Hairy Ian]

Then their claim was in breach of EU Legislation

Re:Benefit system ?

[Ash-Fox]

Then their claim was in breach of EU Legislation

Which EU legislation? How would I report them?

Re:Benefit system ?

[Anonymous Coward]

They must be, they are taking all the minimum wage jobs.

As usual

[Anonymous Coward]

Communism and socialism always fail. Why exactly dumb Britain should be exception?

Anybody here think they could do better?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Anybody here think they could do better?

[Virtucon]

there's not a programmer worth $1m/year we can get them from China and India and instead pay them $30,000/year and get over 3000 of them which of course means we'll need 300 middle managers/ 30 directors etc. It's all about hiring in government projects regardless of where the "jobs" actually are that way when it comes to election time we can point back and say "we put over 3000 people to work..."

Obvious troll article

[Anonymous Coward]

Obvious political troll article is obvious...

IDS vs. Tony Blair

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

As planned

[ThatsNotPudding]

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.

Better watch it.

[will_die]

Once the Americans wake up and start reading this you will be labeled as a racist.

Re:Better watch it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Silly racist, American's cant reed.

Re:Better watch it.

[ChunderDownunder]

Maybe it's just your spelling.

Seems reasonable?

[rabtech]

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.

Re:Seems reasonable?

[Anonymous Coward]

And you would be wrong.

The DWP imposed 'agile' on all of the suppliers.

Agile in DWP land primarily means never having to define your requirements.

Old school waterfall would have been the land of milk and honey by comparison.

Immigrants

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Immigrants

[Anonymous Coward]

There is only one person "harping" here and it isn't the person you replied to.

Re:Immigrants

[xelah]

Can't help thinking I'm feeding a troll here...

You keep on harping on the "EU immigrants" while avoiding talking about what is going in England.

You believe that EU immigrants only settle in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland?

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 !

As you no doubt know, race != nationality. This, I think, demonstrates why most of the mainstream parties like policies such as benefits clampdowns on immigrants and restrictions on student and marriage visas. It allows them to say 'we're like you, we're on your side' to racists and xenophobes, whilst not having to actually be (overtly) racist or xenophobic and putting off everybody else.

Most of those who are receiving "benefits" are people formerly from Pakistan or Nigeria or India.

42% of benefits are old-age benefits, mostly pensions. 2.57% is for the unemployed, who will also get a big fraction of the 21% low-income benefits (like housing benefit and council tax concessions). 18% goes to parents (not just poor ones, most/all parents get these). 16% is for the disabled and sick. So, Mr AC, which of these groups do you believe to be mostly people from Pakistan, Nigeria and India?

Also for those not following UK politics, almost all benefits are being attacked by the current government, except for the biggest part, old-age benefits, which are being protected despite pensioner incomes doing better than they have previously. This is for political reasons: old people vote more. Also, older people are more anti-immigrant and young (and more educated) people more pro-immigrant.

Re:Immigrants

[Chris Mattern]

You believe that EU immigrants only settle in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland?

Wales may have gotten its own assembly as part of the devoluion of powers, but it's still part of England, has been ever since Edward I conquered it.

Re:Immigrants

[philml]

Wales may have gotten its own assembly as part of the devoluion of powers, but it's still part of England, has been ever since Edward I conquered it.

No -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10

Re:Immigrants

[Anonymous Coward]

The deficit is of course very large and does need to be managed . However , no government will ever face the fact that pensioners ( not necessarily people who have contributed ; anyone above a certain age is a state pensioner) receive a large proportion of Direct Benefits ( Housing benefit , winter fuel allowance , travel passes etc) But more importantly , a disproportionate amount of Indirect benefits such as care home coverage . Furthermore , NHS spends far more on elderly care than it does on the rest of the population. The problem NHS will face pretty soon is that its supply of Doctors and Nurses from Asia ( India , Philippines ) is drying out.Sooner , rather than later , NHS will have to adapt the french model of requiring token payments at the point of service just to cut down on frivolous abuse.

    We need immigration ( of the right sort i.e. less Albanian Asylum seekers , more french professionals) badly.

Re:Immigrants

[Anonymous Coward]

Wales and England are both parts of the United Kingdom. Wales is not part of England.

And I've never seen it happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

What a mess

[Virtucon]

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.

No, no housing or food.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Funny you should talk about unemployment 'benefits

[Justpin]

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.

Completely false

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:Completely false

[xelah]

"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.

Maybe you should have pointed to some of the evidence, then?

The EU had a look for some evidence and didn't find any, and the UK government didn't present any when asked for it (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24522653 , http://ec.europa.eu/employment_social/empl_portal/facebook/20131014%20GHK%20study%20web_EU%20migration.pdf (page 163 onwards)). For working age benefits, 16.4% of working age UK citizens were claiming it compared to 6.7% of non-UK citizens: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/233032/nino-statistical-bulletin-aug-13.pdf . It looks like 2.3% of claimants are EU immigrants from that data....the best number I can find for EU nationals in the UK is 2.6% in 2009 (but that's the whole population not working age). Add to that the net fiscal contribution by EU migrants and, on the face of it, it looks like you can't just claim that it's 'obvious' and present no evidence.

Emigrating is really not an easy (or cheap) thing to do - new culture, long distances to visit family, new languages, new laws, cutting of social ties etc - and UK benefits are really not that generous or easy to access (~£70/$115 per week, plus low quality housing (which must be shared if you're under 35)). It'd hardly be a big surprise if most people who can be bothered to do it are doing it for work, not laziness.

Nope, you are the ignorant one.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Nope, you are the ignorant one.

[frog_strat]

On a recent TV show, reporters rode around in an ambulance in Los Angeles, CA. They picked up a patient and it took three times to find a hospital ER that would open it's door. I think the hospitals here have been going under so the ones that are left are burdened.

Stop the hyperbole

[Anonymous Coward]

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 is correct too.

[Anonymous Coward]

smelt == smelled.

Just different ways of changing the tense of the word "smell".

from someone who actually skimmed the article

[whitroth]

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"

GDS are 'experts' HAHAHAHA!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

thats a toughie

[Anonymous Coward]

Tricky, tricky..... am I as the interviewer recruiting for dubiously moral paramilitary organisation?

Upgrade the package

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh...I think to do those things you need to upgrade to Intellilink Gold package.