Oh RLY?
"We’re also working with a range of identity providers to ensure we offer choice, control and privacy for users."
Translation: "We spoke to Facebook."
UK.gov can't get farmers onto its Verify service – even to claim subsidies
Significantly fewer farmers are registering online for the Common Agricultural Policy payments scheme than last year, despite government plans to create an online-only exemplar digital service, Freedom of Information numbers reveal. As of 10 February, just 1,300 farmers have so far registered online with the Rural Payments …
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Monday 16th February 2015 10:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
From the Whitehall Home for the Hard of Thinking
So government chose the least well connected section of society, with the lowest levels of technology engagement within the actual work they do, and the government department with the worst record of ineptitude on simply handing out money, and then they thought "let's create a digital only exemplar project". I suppose it is an example project, but perhaps not quite in the way the originators hoped.
Does working with government make you stupid, or do they recruit for it?
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Monday 16th February 2015 11:03 GMT Bob Wheeler
Re: From the Whitehall Home for the Hard of Thinking
How many times have you seen a pilot of a wonderfully new complex system being trailed by IT savvy/power users who know how to use computers.
Is it not a valid idea to trail a new system on those with the lowest level of technology engagement, IF they get it to work for them, then everyone else is easy?
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Monday 16th February 2015 11:43 GMT Richard Jones 1
Re: From the Whitehall Home for the Hard of Thinking
Alternative Headline,
'Whitehall Thinkers Shocked To Find Wet String Users Unable To access Broadband'.
Given that most of the farms are in the countryside and the countryside has crap to no broadband what did these great minds expect?
Or did they think farmers live and work on the 32nd floor of some tower block in a town centre?
Perhaps the farmers are at 'the lowest level of technology engagement' hardly surprising if you consider none available broadband to be the pinnacle of technology.
However, have you seen the average technology in a tractor or harvester these days?
Farmers use technology that works and if the rural world had access they would be using it as keenly as everyone else
Based on my experience of rural users they are as keen as mustard not to have to rely on 'trips to town' to do business
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Monday 16th February 2015 13:08 GMT tony72
Re: From the Whitehall Home for the Hard of Thinking
During a broadband outage last year, I had no 3G signal either, and I actually had to use dial-up via a 56k modem for a few hours (yes, there are still dial-up ISPs providing payg access). Yes you wouldn't want to access netflix or youtube on it, but to log on to my bank and make a few transactions, it was usable. Not having high-speed broadband shouldn't prevent anyone from logging on to a portal and filling in a few online forms, as long as they've got some sort of internet connection.
Now I can't claim to know any farmers or rural types, so if a significant number actually don't have any internet, then this is an issue, but I find that hard to believe. And if that is the case, then we should be talking about getting them online, not about using low-tech solutions so they don't have to go online.
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Monday 16th February 2015 13:41 GMT Peter Gathercole
Re: From the Whitehall Home for the Hard of Thinking @tony72
It all depends.
If the web-site designers have loaded it with copious numbers of large images, it may actually not be possible to use dial up, at least not if you intend to maintain your sanity.
I've not seen the Verify web site, so I can't say for certain how heavy that page is.
From my perspective, there are basically two different types of farm. Large ones, run by technically capable farmers, and small mainly family run farms that may be years behind in the deployment of technology. I have both types in my extended family, and have had to help my father-in-law comply with some of the demands made of them in the past, as even something like deciding what the map reference and acreage of a field is can be a challenge. My father-in-law before he gave up farming would have no idea about how to verify his ID using a service like this. He would rely on a professional like an accountant or other professional to do it for him, like he did with his tax, VAT, and to some extent his subsidiary paperwork. If that avenue was not open, he would have left farming earlier, like so many others.
It may actually be the case that using a relatively technically challenged group is a good one to test the system out with, but you'd better make sure that there is an emergency catch-net, because in the case of some farms, the EU subsidy is all that separates break-even from loss, and I'm not sure that the banks are compassionate enough to refrain from taking action if loan or other payments are not made because the subsidy payment is delayed.
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Monday 16th February 2015 14:25 GMT Mr Humbug
Re: From the Whitehall Home for the Hard of Thinking
The article says that "70,000 farmers registered online last year" but "just 1,300 farmers have so far registered" this year.
From those statements I would expect that neither a lack of rural broadband nor a lack of technology skills is the problem in this case. Perhaps the new system is just not trusted and not easy to use?
That's not to try and belittle the problems with rural broadband - it's just that I don't think it's likely to be the main cause of failure here.
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Monday 16th February 2015 15:47 GMT ilmari
Re: From the Whitehall Home for the Hard of Thinking
(Not in UK)
Re farmers using technology that works.. Couldn't agree more. As part time tech support person, the most complex networks/LANs I've encountered with farmers. Recently one told me "I really regret not signing up the cow for fibre optic internet when I had the chance".
He has fibre to his own house, and a point to point 54Mbps wifi link to the building with the cows some 200m away. There's a "visitor/casual" wifi and lan, and a "infrastructure" LAN, plus home lan+wifi. The infrastructure part of the network is where the milking robot, feed silo management, and god knows what sits. This is, of course, available to him on his smartphone and PC realtime. If a cow gets in an argument with the robot, his phone buzzeds and he can look at the situation and have the robot shoo the cow or bribe it with treats or whatever.
.. But it'd work much better if it wasnt behind a 54Mbps bottleneck.
As for government services? Dump all the paperwork and receipts with specialists that can decode and speak governmentese..
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Monday 16th February 2015 10:46 GMT Paul 87
They made a mistake in the press statement. It should have read
"GOV.Verify is an exciting new way to get you to voluntarily input all your personal details into a central database, which replacements the ID card scheme that got rejected out of hand. We're keen to ensure that every member of the British public is registered so that when we lose the data through Ministerial cock-ups, everyone will be equally disadvantaged
We hope that you embrace the exciting future where soon, your entire digital lives will be collated in a central location at our secure facility in Cheltenham"
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Monday 16th February 2015 10:48 GMT Spearchucker Jones
"GOV.UK Verify is a new, innovative way..."
Oh really? It does less than the Government Gateway. What's innovative about writing your own Id federation system that's not industry-proven, has a small subset of industry-established alternatives like Tivoli FIM, ADFS or even (*shudder*) Oracle IF?
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Monday 16th February 2015 12:06 GMT Bill Buchan
Yeah. Rural Broandband. Its just amazing how many farmers are inconveniently located in rural areas.
I'd possibly dispute the 'low level of technical..' comment above about farmers. Your modern tractor/combine has more GPS than a stealth bomber did have 10 years ago, and these guys are rather more tech-savvy than most people realise. They just can't connect at any meaningful speed.
Pity the fibre cabinets being rolled out are absolutely useless in rural areas where telephone-line lengths usually exceed 2 miles. We should follow the Dutch model and run fibre to every home.
---* Bill
http://www.Marykirk.com
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Monday 16th February 2015 12:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
And in other news...
"The roll-out of universal credit will cost less than expected and is being carefully delivered "stage-by-stage", the work and pensions secretary says."
This was posted by dear old Auntie Beeb without any real challenge to the claim. No doubt that any report on the roll-out of the Verify Service by them will also fail to challenge its "success".
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Monday 23rd February 2015 10:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: No ones using Verify?
I checked with a farmer I know in Wiltshire, visiting the farm at the weekend.
I assist her with all her IT needs, and she's not using verify.
She is IT competent as a user.
Her line length, and its exposure to the elements (outside her property and thus not something she can do much about as there are wayleave issues) is such that she's limited to an unreliable dial-up, and whilst the mobile signal is reasonable for voice if she goes to a particular windows, data is not viable, plus its only a small farm (30 acres) so not exactly able to afford heavy connection costs.
Like where I live in Essex, its one of the many small businesses that have been told they'll never be upgraded in terms of connectivity as its not commerically viable. I guess in the not too distant future some large agri conglomerate will start borging the smaller farms around where she lives.
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Monday 16th February 2015 17:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Wrong end of the stick for most replies here
Dig into the details folks and its crystal clear this is nothing whatsoever to do with lack of broadband or tech savvy (and to be fair as one post points out, 70k managed it on the old internet service).
Its all to do with an utterly useless for purpose complex verification system that simply fails to validate most users due to the ludicrous demands it makes regarding the information that needs to be supplied.
GDS are good at making a pretty looking web front end. They are clueless when it comes to the back end (they couldn't find the back end of a cow let alone an OLTP system) so they've farmed that out (ha ha) to a hapless third party who doesn't understand the demographic.
Cluster, meet F......
(AC because I have met some of the fwits involved with this system)
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Monday 16th February 2015 19:42 GMT Chris G
Re: Wrong end of the stick for most replies here
I am inclined to agree with you AC, micro managing crop yields via GPS and Sat photos has been common since the '90s and I knew a couple of relatively small farmers who were writing their own management programmes for livestock at the same time. Farmers are probably the most multi skilled industry of all so tech savvy is unlikely to be the reason for non take up.
More likely is that they are savvy enough to recognise a waste of time when they see one, having had decades of experience with the EU and MinAg or whatever it's current incarnation is.
Possibly they also won't want the little photo card that will eventually go with the gov's ID verification scheme which of course won't be an ID card just membership of the online scheme.
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Monday 16th February 2015 22:32 GMT Panicnow
Everyone has to register
In order to get a farm done, everyone who works on submissions need to be cross registered. thus the farm owner, the farm manager, the accountant and the company secretary need to register.
With Gateway many just used the one account and shared the password.
Getting the owners to register is a big problems! one has to track them down in Barbados, Singapore, Beijing or wherever!
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Tuesday 15th December 2015 14:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
It's not that.
They switched from Software AG, who were providing a working service for not much money, to a bigger player, who provided the system database and who'd been gradually more and more embarrassed by the rubbish value for money of their much more expensive part of the system, and edged them out.
However, the big player couldn't get it working. Thus they had to switch it off.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
