GDS to handle Govt payments? What could possibly go wrong? Be afraid. The previous government’s “elite digital team” which so brilliantly borked most of Whitehall’s websites, and that failed to meet its own targets, may be put in charge of handling real money: your money. New Cabinet Office Minister Matthew Hancock hinted at the opportunity at a gentle public grilling today. Although …
The Government has a multitude of platforms for paying people money.
Unfortunately, none of them seem to belong in this century. It used to be that when you sold a car the VED went with the vehicle, so it was all a neat cashless transaction. When they changed the process, they decided instead to refund the unexpired VED to the seller, and make the purchaser re-tax the car.
I received my refund the other week. In the form of a cheque - an instrument of payment that I haven't seen for years. It sat on my desk for about a week while I tried to work out when I might be near a bank. In the end I found an old paying-in slip and posted it.
Progress, eh?
Its all about the money. Your refund started from the end of the month that you sold the car. The new owner paid VED from the day he acquired that car. Every car sale is (average) 2 weeks extra VED.
Add to this the increase in fines and clamping fees for those who forgot to renew VED because the handy reminder was no longer stuck to the windscreen.
Of course you also allowed them to collect that bit of extra interest by delaying banking their cheque.
Being a former civil servant, I'm usually annoyed when people mention Yes Minister as real life in Government tends to be stupidly complex and has lots of very good people doing as good a job as can be done in difficult circumstances (certainly just as good or bad as in the private sector in my experience - you just don't see them being eviserated in the press very often).
However, this has all the hallmarks of the minister in question being throughly Sir Humpreyed.
"Welcome to your new office Minister. Just read this brief on how wonderful we are. Oh by the way, you have a select committee meeting in 3 days where you'll have no choice but to regurgiate our briefing as you don't know any better yet, and then you'll be stuck defending us forever more lest you be accused of a U-Turn".
Whomsever one gets to do the "single payment system" (or whatever else one might require), will have to maintain the "bespoke" system for ever (and ever)? Or is there some kind of magic "fix-it" sauce available to the idiot that said that?
It doesn't matter whom one gets to write or sells the software. Companies go bust, key developers move on or (sometimes) die. If the supplier (in house or commercial) doesn't have an independently verifiable and robust system for dealing with entirely predictable problems, then when it breaks - you still get to keep all the pieces.
I hope that sets everybody's mind at rest.
Incumbents in the civil service are well experienced at dealing with threats from the unwelcomed (be they MPs or awkward sods?), potential competitors and those invited against the civil service wishes.
Expect lots of cold shoulders, trips (what was the movie that showed the established at a public school fouling a newcomer to the same - something to do with running?), press releases by the hour, ... , ?
“The Government has a multitude of platforms for paying people money. And receiving money. What we don’t have is a platform all across government for receiving and paying money.” Well, GDS already tried and failed with the Rural Payments Agency so don’t gibe this to them.
The Government giveth money to people and organisations and it taketh it away. Debits and credits. Some would say that sounds rather like a bank account. Maybe it would be a good idea to make a single government agency responsible for all that. Perhaps one that already has responsibility for managing millions of accounts and doing it at less than half the cost of private sector banks. An agency that has already successfully outsourced payments for several other government agencies. One that has just handled the biggest retail financial services sales since war bonds during WWII. One with a modern UNIX core baking engine and that is finally starting to get to grips with online and apps. OK, the one I’m thinking of still has a way to go to get rid of a legacy paper-based culture but it’s happening.
I’m talking about National Savings and Investments. There’s really no need to reinvent it. But that won’t stop GDS from trying and failing.
I design payment systems for a living (3 national ones so far), and it is very very easy to screw up.
More interestingly I was recently rejected from consideration by DWP/GDS as an interim chief technical architect for not being sufficiently "heavy" i.e. not politically shiny enough.
I feel a gigantic dose of Schadenfreude coming on.
I worked with an ex GDS architect who was very proud of his prowess in some Indian martial art that "actually kills people". I'm not sure what his body count was, but it had to be a preferable outcome to listening to the arrogant bloviator talk!
His qualifications included a degree in Pharmacy. Understandable. After only one of his presentations I wanted drugs.
You will find the business case set out with admirable clarity by Mark Thompson, a public services consultant, in What is government as a platform and how do we achieve it?.
It all depends on the location of the digital profile of Payments on the Certainty-Ubiquity surface.
Providing a single pan-government Payments platform will unleash "unprecedented innovation, efficiency, and savings":
There are lots of discussion going on at the moment about digital “platforms”, and the impact they might have on UK public services. A rough and ready calculation suggests such an approach could save the UK £35bn each year – but the jury is still out on how best to go about making it happen.
I just had lunch with a Cabinet Office contact who has been close to this platforms work for a while and this Reg story is true! Whenever I look inside the civil service what I see is terrifying...
The payments bit of the government platform work is now led by the same project manager, Til Wirth, who was responsible for the chaos with GOV.UK and the UK border agency website that was covered by the Reg here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/18/the_inside_story_of_govuk/
He has already got the nickname "Teflon Til" - failure just doesn't stick to this guy. Check out his Twitter account and you can see the history.
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