Slashdot Mirror
UK Government Tax Disc Renewal Website Buckles Under Pressure
An anonymous reader writes When you pay the tax on a road vehicle in the UK, you used to get a paper "tax disk" to affix to the inside of your car windshield. However the relevant records are documented electronically anyway, inspiring the government to replace the paper system with a purely online one. Unfortunately said system was still in beta when it launched today and predictably, it has broken under user demand. No alternative system is available. (The licensing agency actually ran out of the paper disks more than a month ago, and has been printing them out on normal office paper and asking vehicle owners to cut out the circle themselves.) The initiative is part of a larger "digital-first", restructuring of how the government provides services aimed at "meeting user needs".
Another goverment project fails?
They all do.
If one would actually work perfectly from day 0, taht would be news!
Save us, Norman Gates!
Shhhhiiiiit, Black April is already six years overdue.
Clearly, the subjects are at fault for lacking discipline and misusing the service, and should educate themselves.
Slashdot, as always.... very timely with its news. Only a day late on this one!
How about using the telephone, or calling in at your local Post Office? Both alternative systems and both available.
Why cant the UK or US?
We've had online registration and health care services for years. I haven't had to fill out a medicare form or go into a medicare office... ever. Not once in my adult life.
As for online vehicle registration. Thats state based instead of national (well we only have 7 states and 2 territories) my state, Western Australia did away with registration stickers that you would affix to your windscreen years ago... Before I got my drivers license in fact. Apart from a the tired whines of a few dullards who ignore the reminder the government sends them about their expiring vehicle registration six weeks in advance it's been a fantastic success.
If I need to know when my registration is up, I just look it up. If I want to know if the car I'm buying is registered (and for how long) I can just look up the number plate. About the only thing a malicious person can do on this website is pay my rego for me.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
This is the dumbest thing. You've been able to renew your tax disc online for years now and the site's always been fine. You don't have to replace you're existing paper disc until it expires so I don't understand how they've taken a functional site, added barely any additional load and made it fall over.
The foremost problem is, of course, burning your bridges before you've well and truly tested the replacement. After that come the interesting ones.
The fallacy here is believing that replacing the trappings will improve the mechanics. Here's how they should be doing it: Consider all the processes inside some department (starting with its overall utility; if below par, scrap department, then on to policies, and so on), then re-organise the internals to something that isn't a straight "we did this in paper thusly, now we do it electronically thusly", but is an efficient process based on the strengths of the (new) tools.
And then you do your best to hide that you did it from the rest of the world, by providing several interfaces, digital and less so, to all comers. You want to couple your systems directly to ours? Here's our API documentation. You'd really rather call us? Sure. You want to use a website? Here's ours. You'd rather write us a letter? Please do.
In contrast, here's what I see governments the western world over do instead: Cook up a shoddy website, probably throw in lots of "identification" malarky with either a "unified" but intrusive system, or stacks of usernames and passwords that you keep having to reset, elevate it to the new gold standard, see all function crumble. This is bad for a number of reasons, starting with "websites" being far less useful than paper even, certainly not useful to couple other digital systems with (why automate if you can't take the automating further from there?), and in fact not fit to stand up to the ages. Even cheap paper lasts 200 years, but websites last until the next web"standards" fad, which may be just an apple product release away.
So, instead of the governments' shiny entrances into the new digital era, we have layer cakes of fail; good gigs for overpaid consultants but as we've seen and will see time and again, function and thereby service to the citizen, suffers.
There's a good litmus test for this sort of thing, and it's hand-writing a letter to the department. Can you still get what you need that way, without further ado? If not, the automation has failed.
the website was a bit screwed in the morning, and I had the wrong reference number with me (a SORN number doesn't work, you need the V5 number, or the renewal if you haven't SORNed it) it was for a car I don't use much and it failed the MOT last month, so I got it fixed and parked it off road to tax this month without the disc. I kinda thought it would be more exciting as one of the first cars without a disc, but if you have a taxed car you can now just throw away the disc, so my 16 year old Fiesta is not as exclusive and exciting as I thought it would be.
This is the dumbest thing. You've been able to renew your tax disc online for years now and the site's always been fine. You don't have to replace you're existing paper disc until it expires so I don't understand how they've taken a functional site, added barely any additional load and made it fall over.
I put it down to many sites saying that anyone can check any cars status on the government's vehicle inquiry service (currently down). Loads of people want to check whether their friends and neighbours cars are legal.
Any site will collapse if there is an unusually high volume of traffic. Why spend millions in hardware that is going to idle just to cater for the odd spike or /. effect. I don't even know why this is news? Are they going to post an article each time /. or twitter et al accidently drops someone's website because of a post?
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
There was a fair bit of coverage being all alarmist along the lines of "but how will you know if (car X, that isn't ours) is taxed or not?"
Answer 1: there's a website where you can look it up.
Answer 2: the car's not yours. It's none of your damned business whether it's taxed or not, and don't you have better things to do? The government are apparently content they can prevent car tax dodging, so that should be enough. We don't make people display a certificate of having done their tax return in their window after all!
The change should not cause an increase in website traffic because the old tax discs are still valid until they expire normally.
This website traffic spike must be caused by idiots that have failed to comprehend what is a simplification of the system.
Or they could just waiting until their old tax disc expires/ receive their renewal notice before swapping to to the new system.
The majority of people whinging on twitter are just idiots.
Windscreen!
I think we know who paid for them.
Korma: Good
That's right! In NSW there are no registration stickers anymore. Now that all Highway Patrol cars have automatic licence plate readers there is no point in attaching a sticker to your car. Registration is all done electronically.
Heathrow is owned by Heathrow Airport Holdings. Private sector. The tax disc website is by Government Digital Services. Public sector. The savings they have made by moving government functions online are in the billions.
Just try saying that fast three times: tax disk; tax disk; tax disk.
I hear they're also available where they sell seashells by the seashore.
... cut out little stickers? Hell, I can't draw and stay inside the lines and stuff.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
You don't read about the ones that work because it's kind of a boring headline: "Computer system works properly; nobody complains"
You usually read about success stories in advertisements: "$our_service helped $client take its service online and save $big_bucks. [See How]" If you block ads, you don't see them.
They should do that in America. DMV: now with arts and crafts! Cut out your own documents and licenses.
"Digital first" does not have to mean "create a gigantic, centralized, privacy invading registry", like governments frequently seem to think. "Digital first" could well mean "print a digital signature as a QR code that we can then verify using a reader if need be". You know, it could work like movie tickets and boarding passes. Such a scheme is also much easier to administer and much more resistant to failure.
The identity card debate is often messed up in just the same way: an identity card need not be coupled to a central register; quite to the contrary, giving people a physical token that establishes their identity and can carry data on a smartchip in principle reduces the need for centralized, insecure databases and could be privacy enhancing.
Digital technology can either enhance or destroy privacy, depending on how we use it.
The same as registration stickers here in the U.S.?
> Because for a very long time we here just piled the stickers on the plates. Then when a corner got too full you'd pile them on other corners.
Now parking permits are another matter entirely. They are easily replicated and nobody would know the difference.
I remember a british sitcom some time ago (perhaps it was one of the last seasons or reincarnations of Are You Being Served?) where some Londoners found themselves living in the British countryside and at one point the issue of tax discs came up. One of the locals just pointed out that they used a beer coaster. The local constabulary just took it on faith that everybody in the area was honest.
You get a tax reminder a whole 2 weeks before the renewal is due and you can arrange for the new tax anytime in that period with no additional cost. So you know who is to blame if you leave something important to the last minute and then experience issues that leave you liable for legal repercussions? Yourself.
Will someone get prosecuted or fined for this debacle?
Of course not, so we will continue to see this sort of ineptness for as long as the corrupt and incompetent rulers of the UK (and other countries similarly) look after their back-hander cronies in the businesses that get these contracts, until the earth burns up in the Sun's Red Giant phase.