back to article The UK's 'Universal Credit mega cockup was the coalition's NPfIT' - Margaret Hodge

When Margaret Hodge was appointed chair of the UK Parliament's Public Accounts Committee in 2010, she was the first Labour leader since 1997 – as its head is always drawn from the main opposition party. In 2015 her colleague Meg Hillier became the new PAC chair, with all indications so far suggesting her successor will also be …

  1. Alister

    Scary to say, she seems to be talking some sense about civil service accountability, and the unrealistic targets for IT projects.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Biased Advice.

      Its fairly easy to talk sense regarding Civil Service accountability, but putting that into practice is the hard part. Who do you trust in terms of lobbying/advice.

      Like Ultrafast Broadband, where you have vultures like BT (looking for even more taxpayer handouts) promoting pointless G.fast as the 'miracle' solution, which favours BT's Copper Carcass, and only BT's short term goals, of entrenchment / {sit on hands approach}, wait for Governments to be forced to invest.

      It means getting a meaningful technical viewpoint heard above this, into the hands of decsion makers - that can be trusted as the best long term decision for UK PLC and not just the best decision for companies like BT (out to reinforce its own position) - is the hard practical part.

      1. Vince

        re: BT

        Let's not forget re the BT part that they also benefit from this many stage progression to real fibre.

        Copper to Hybrid Coppier Fibre ... watch the cash roll in

        Upgrades to even faster hybrid copper fibre.... more cash to do that

        <any other interim schemes repeat>

        Actual Fibre.... and more cash again

        Profit!

  2. bigbob

    Erm no as big as it is, NPfIT was £11bn write-off for Labour, and Universal Credit, as awful as it is, is "only" set to be a £0.6bn write-off, so a different order of magnitude.

    1. dedmonst

      It's impossible to draw any conclusions from these numbers as both are program costs without taking into account at all parts of these programs which are actually delivering benefit now (however poorly), so the comparison is essentially meaningless.

  3. Primus Secundus Tertius

    Civil Service versus techies

    The mainstream civil service hates techies. Look at how they killed off the scientific civil service. In 2001 there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, which caused an election to be deferred. It was clear that there was nobody within government who actually knew anything.

    Instead we have the curse of managerialism.

    1. veti Silver badge

      Re: Civil Service versus techies

      I'm sorry, I didn't follow that argument. Are you saying that FMD was a bioweapon unleashed against the scientific civil service?

      Managerialism is, ironically, what you get when you start trying to monitor your civil service performance more closely. The more we talk about "holding them to account", the more they'll concentrate on covering their arses.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Here we are again

    Ah, another Government IT story.

    Obligatory message that the Dart Charge payment site is still "Alpha".

    It's only been live, what, nearly 2 years now.

    Bunch of clowns. Thank heavens they don't let contracts to run critical transport infrastructure like, say, railways.

    Oh, hang on.

    1. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Re: Here we are again

      'Obligatory message that the Dart Charge payment site is still "Alpha". '

      Obligatory reminder that toll charges on the Dartford Crossing are only supposed to be in place until it was paid off.

      Which happened in 2009

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Here we are again

        Which is why it's not a toll anymore.

        It's a congestion charge.

        You know, that novel sort of congestion charge that does nothing to reduce congestion because there are no (sensible) other routes. Unless it were to be set at the same level as the fuel cost for going the other way round the M25, less the cost of the time taken.

        Really, that is the laughable basis on which it continues to be charged.

      2. Lotaresco

        Re: Here we are again

        "Obligatory reminder that toll charges on the Dartford Crossing are only supposed to be in place until it was paid off."

        Obligatory reminder that the system is designed to force users into having to pay fines[1]. The payment methods are poorly explained. There's no option to pay at the toll booth. If you are busy, hassled, late and not likely to back in front of a PC for several hours then you are going to find payment difficult if you are not a regular user of the Crossing.

        [1] As is the Kengestion charge.

  5. BebopWeBop

    Ahhh - tech city raises it's medusa like head again

    In 2013 Silva wrote that their IT reforms were a fundamental change from the quasi-corrupt corporatism that had gone before: "From now on, delivering the state’s IT projects is going to be about channelling the spirit of Tech City, not Sir Humphrey."

    Now that would be 'tech city' as in the little shitty silicon roundabout in London would it? So while the rest of us in the UK (Oxford, Bristol, Cambridge, Manchester, Edinburgh - to name a small number of places where people are getting on with things in the expectation that they will build something more than their latte habits, and not on the public teat either) just get on with it. Another example of the blindness of our politicians......

  6. Doogie Howser MD

    Ha!

    Given Hodge's chequered past, I don't put any weight in anything she says. Yes we know Government can't run IT projects for toffee, nothing new there. I just don't like the hectoring from a failed public servant.

  7. peter 45

    FiReControl project

    I was on the bid team for one of the companies bidding for the FiReControl project. The bid documentation was a pile of poo. It read as if someone had taken every requirement from every source possible and thrown it together without any attempt to co-ordinate, rationalize or even put through a common sense filter. We all said to our senior management that we should not touch it with a long pokey stick as it would end in tears, but we were told to get on with it.

    When it was announced to our team that we had lost the bid, the only comment from the back was "thank the f**k for that".

    1. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Re: FiReControl project

      "We all said to our senior management that we should not touch it with a long pokey stick "

      I wouldn't have touched it with SOMEONE ELSE'S long pokey stick....

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: FiReControl project

      It read as if someone had taken every requirement from every source possible and thrown it together without any attempt to co-ordinate, rationalize or even put through a common sense filter

      "It read as if"? I've worked on requirements definition for several public sector (NHS) projects and this is almost exactly how it goes down. No "as if" about it.

      I say "almost exactly" because there's generally some attempt to co-ordinate and rationalise, but it's often ineffectual.

    3. Lotaresco

      Re: FiReControl project

      'When it was announced to our team that we had lost the bid, the only comment from the back was "thank the f**k for that".'

      One engineering consultancy that I worked for used to have meeting if we won a bid for a government contract to work out what we had done wrong. It's obvious that if you win that you have cocked up and have submitted the lowest bid, possibly because you didn't spot a large hidden cost element in the tender document.

  8. Alan Brown Silver badge

    Stopping the government from using premium rate lines

    Except she hasn't.

    The Home Office in particular are resolutely continuing to use 0870 and 0871 numbers.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    View from the inside

    "From now on, delivering the state’s IT projects is going to be about channelling the spirit of Tech City, not Sir Humphrey."

    I have seen this policy in practice from the inside. What it means is a new approach to IT delivery that can best be described as "reckless". The approach of "fail fast, fail often, incremental improvement" has its place, but should not have its place when it comes to security of the personal data entrusted to government. However that's how it is seen. Ministers want their iPads so that they can take home letters and email from constituents and papers to review at home. There has been the GSC initiative to allow them to do this. None of that inconvenient "RESTRICTED" or "CONFIDENTIAL" anymore. It's all OFFICIAL and you can throw it around as you like without bothering with encryption. Systems can be built with minimal or no security controls and improved if, when, possibly never, the programme matures.

    Dweebs call this "best commercial practice" but few if any of them have ever worked in business.

  10. PeterM42
    Facepalm

    Who cares? - it's public money

    .....Oh wait.....

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