Slashdot Mirror
UK Benefits System In Deeper Trouble?
judgecorp writes "Two media reports suggest that the Universal Credit scheme to overhaul Britain's welfare programme is in trouble. The IT project to support Universal Credit was launched by the Cabinet Office, and it will be completed and run by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) — but the Guardian says the Cabinet Office has pulled out its elite experts too soon, while a different leak told Computer Weekly that the four original suppliers — HP, IBM, Accenture and BT — have been effectively frozen out in an internal change. It's the biggest change to Britain's benefits system for many years, and all the evidence says it's not going well."
Sounds like it's going well then...
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/
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.
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.
Currently, Housing Benefit (rent) is paid to the tenant by default; However, if the tenant falls more than 2 months behind then payments are switched to go direct to the Landlord.
This change was made under the last Labour government as a way of encouraging tenants to get some practice at budgeting for expenses; Naturally for a small and feckless proportion of the housing benefit recipients, the extra money paid direct was a windfall they spent on drink, gambling and drugs.
Should be added that for most recipients the total of housing benefit received is less than the total rent and they are expected to make up any excess from their unemployment or disability living allowance payments (where 'rents' include standing charges such as power, heating, council tax anyway) - so even if the landlord has a defaulting tenant and gets direct payments from the local authority, they only receive the element of the total rent that relates to actual rent, and must pursue the tenant for the rest.
this system has caused many UK landlords to refuse to rent premises to recipients on housing benefit (although of course if a tenant went from employed to HB and kept up the payments rather than defaulting, the landlord would never know, which is some shielding...)
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
4 major fortune 500 hundred companies who are major contributors to /. and the status quo have been marginalized by a government ministry's own in house IT staff, and therefore the major corporations are goings to demand that this disaster by put on the front page of /. /. will comply. We are in compliance with our corporate overlords.
The article summary is a bit misleading. Universal Credit has from beginning to end been the child of the Department of Work and Pensions. The Government Digital Service, the in-house IT design expert office, is technically part of the Cabinet Office, but that's only because it's a centralised IT design service meant to serve all branches of the government. Also, the summary skips over the critical part of the article: the GDS is pulling out because the project is being run in direct contradiction with their own recommendations. Looking at the situation, it's difficult to apportion any part of the blame for the project troubles to the Cabinet Office; it seems to lie entirely on the shoulders of the DWP.
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."
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.
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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).
No sig today...
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.
Defined and Static? You've not worked for a govt project then?
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.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
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.
"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.
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.
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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.
'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.
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.
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.
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> 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.
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
It is meant to be an abject failure so the Torries can dump it entirely and replace it with the issuing of bootstraps.
The Rand / Koch movement is not just for domestic US implementation.
For those who don't follow UK politics: 'Benefits tourism' is a big issue here, mainly because it's being pushed by anti-immigrant parts of the press and because various parties are competing to curb it as a vote-winning measure. It's especially brought up as an argument against the UK's EU membership, because the UK can't refuse to admit EU nationals.
There's very little evidence of benefits tourism actually taking place within the EU, and EU immigrants actually pay more in tax than they use in public services (for non-EU immigrants it's a little the other way round, but not very much). A quick Google suggests that EU migrants pay 34% more in tax, non-EU migrants 14% less and UK citizens 11% less. Numbers are rarely mentioned in this debate....I suspect that most parties like the idea of cracking down on it as a largely symbolic response and don't care if it makes any difference.
(It also looks like some Bulgarians complain about hordes of British tourists going to Bulgaria, getting drunk and relying on Bulgarian health care).
Personally, I think that, instead of complaining about the EU, EU governments should get together and decide that the citizen's previous country is responsible for benefits for a couple of years after he moves/pays taxes and then it switches over, or something along those lines. At least it might shut people up.
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.
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
I may be misunderstanding, but it appears that the existing contractors are using old-school waterfall. Gee, government contractors using a heavily-specs-oriented approach, when has that gone wrong?
The new idea seems to be having a team of smaller players use an agile approach to deliver the real system.
Any time you can get a group of smaller developers doing rapid iterations with the government it's a miracle... It is also vastly more likely to deliver something decent and on-budget.
Anytime I see HP, IBM, Agilent, et al winning a contract for some government system I automatically assume it will be an epic fail.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
When the politicians in the same government start bailing on a project and start to point fingers at each other, it's only a short amount of time thereafter that you'll see resignations and folks trying to distance themselves from the coming disaster. It's that rat instinct we all have and this project sounds like it'll completely blow up here shortly.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Ah, get over yourself. Why should they subsidize fuel, house ownership, exporting businesses and a ton of other things? Yet they do.
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.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Whoosh
No sig today...
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..."
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
"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).
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.
There is a reason why some USA detractors call it the Great Satan, some evil things are regarded as normal there.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Actually the UK Goobermints recent push to stop EU Imigrants from claiming benefits for four months was pointless posturing as this was already in place with EU legislation.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
'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?
Blowfish IIRC. And what was in the Oracle DB was just a key pointing to an encrypted hash DB elsewhere.
The sad part is this hurts British people the most, especially those with foreign spouses. I can't get a visa for mine at the moment. Essentially my country thinks I am some kind of scammer because I didn't choose to marry another UK subject. In the end it may drive me away from this country to live with her abroad, meaning the country will lose my skills, my contributions in tax and my business.
All this because the Daily Mail hates everyone, especially foreigners.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
Because Poles are very brown these days...
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.
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.
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.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
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.