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...
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
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.
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'
"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.
'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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
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.
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.
'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?
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.
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.
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