Calls for probe of UK.gov's DOESN'T VERIFY ID service Britain's opposition Labour party is calling on the government to urgently address its gaffe-prone identity assurance system "Verify" – the key component in getting citizens to use transactional digital services – or face an official investigation. The party made the recommendation for an investigation into the Government …
Assuming, and yes it's a massive assumption, that all these services somehow become online only, then how, in the absence of free net access, how does a person suffering from extreme poverty, get access to them?
Libraries are closing and net enabled devices are most certainly not free. I suspect this will end in rather embarrassing headlines, further down the line.
"...in the absence of free net access, how does a person suffering from extreme poverty, get access to them?"
People in that position need various forms of support: health; sorting out financially; accessing what benefits they may be entitled to; and sorting out with some kind of plan for the future if there is a viable one; help filling in forms due to literacy issues; and possibly just a square meal.
Sounds like a day centre/drop in with multiple services and a subsidised cafe as a safety net to me. You could run those as social enterprises. Some paid staff, some volunteers, some basic skills teaching from local colleges. Might save money in long term (ElReg's pet economist might not agree about that).
Alternatively, how about 50kbytes/sec free for all, faster when you pick a supplier and pay a contract? Then make sure Govt sites and basic education material is low bandwidth??
They're world experts at reskinning websites.
And running a mile from hard problems like 'a digital solution' for Universal Credit.
And they're geniuses at driving down the costs of IT. Like MOJ's desktop, broken into 'towers' by their edict. Which now costs more then projected as a single contract.
But they did set up G-Cloud......making it easier for IT teams to buy loads of consultancy
YAY! GO GDS!
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The government gateway never did authentication. Its history is well recorded on ElReg including here and here
Despite the marketing rhetoric it was only ever formally described as a registration service. For non users of digital certificates (which authenticated you elsewhere) authentication was an off-line traditional service based on sending you something to your home address.
"This demonstrate[s] the potential of large complex programmes enabled by digital technologies to go massively wrong."
Nope, just proves once again that "...large complex programmes enabled by digital technologies..." almost always go wrong when the Government are involved!
I know I worked on one once where it was dictated that a fully working app needed to be updated in our little part of the government. The project brief in a nutshell was to simply replace a server, a 3 million record database, an app that had 5 screens max ( 6 for admins! ) and 35 desktops. It took about 18 months and went 3 times over budget. It then took a further 2 years of botches and fixes to get it almost right so it could be used without problems!
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