Surprised?
No, not really.
Glad GDS have been spanking my tax money on expensive coffee and iThingys for them to play with in their swish Westminister offices.
Just a tiny proportion of people are completing the online application for a lasting power of attorney - one of the government's flagship digital services. An LPA is a legal document that allows often vulnerable individuals to appoint someone to make decisions on their behalf. Around 300,000 such applications are made each …
It came 'top' in a google search and so should be easy for JoeP to find .. however it is not a fully online service and the online bit looks like a guided way to complete a 'paper form' which you then need to print out anyway ... the basic instructions are:
"How to register
Apply to register as soon as you’ve sent the ‘notice of intention’ form to the people who need to be told.
There are 2 ways to register:
+ use the online tool if you originally used it to make your LPA - go straight to step 4 after you’ve signed in
+ download and fill in the application to register (LPA002) if you didn’t use the online tool
Print out the form and sign it when you’ve finished, then send it to OPG - the address is on the form.
Make sure you include the original lasting power of attorney form and the fee."
So I can see why most people might just fill in a blank form and post it off as it is probably quicker and easier for most JoeP to handle.
Personally I think Register's criticism is unfounded in this case.
Prices per hour? I wish. Can you provide a single example of a firm regulated by the SRA not providing an affordable fixed fee for completing an LPA? As far as i'm aware our competitors that weren't doing fixed fee work went out of business years ago, with the exception of a few London firms doing work for people who don't know (or much care) what they are being charged.
Of course it is, you're looking at it wrong. The system is working as intended.
The harder and more unpleasant they can make entering the system, the fewer people will do so. Less claims to process equals cost savings.
The fewer people in the queue, the faster the poor buggers at the sharp end of processing the queue will clear it. Wait times will go down. Shorter wait times will tick a few performance target boxes.
Reduced costs, shorter wait times are "News Worthy", the project is obviously a success and HMG can demonstrate that "Some Thing Has Been Done"
Yes but it was the first image they could find on Google.
Not least among the horrors of the Reg redesign is the replacement of a small collection of, admittedly rather boring, images with a larger range of bigger, more intrusive, and largely irrelevant ones.
I like gov.uk in general. It looks nice, the information is generally easy to find, its often laid out in a nicer way. Far better than the old sites its replacing, its always a work in progress I guess, there is a lot of information and functionality to move, but I think they've doing a good job so far.
" Far better than the old sites its replacing,"
But it's just a portal to other sites, each with its own logic and purpose. So if you search on self assessment, gov.uk comes top of the list, but then merely directs you off to HMRC that has its own identity, logic and design. If you search on taxing a car then something similar happens, and then you end up at the DVLA's self service web site (which is delightfully painless given the poor reputation of DVLA, or painless until you get stung for hundreds of quid).
Given that gov.uk is generally a bit pointless I suppose it doesn't matter that (eg) NS&I and industry regulators seem to be outside the scope of gov.uk.
Having recently had to be a party to a LPA, the idea of "just filling in some form or other online" without legal advice being on hand would have been utter madness.
[It may be OK in the simplest of cases but as soon as the LPAing individual is a landlord, trustee, member of a LLP or similar it gets very fun very fast]
Best bit about .gov.uk is the ability to pay VED online. Though it doesn't make the pain of coughing-up the readies for a "Band M" vehicle any less painful.
I just tried using
The HMRC.gov.uk site to file my tax return. WOW the hassle
I had to have
Unique ID thingy, which I had
Email address that i signed up with (which died ages ago)
Password that I had no idea was sent to me by plain text in an email to a dead email address
Luckily the girl on the phone yesterday (after about 5 attempts) managed to reset everything and I got
into the HMRC SA site to file.
I'm thinking a few sheets of paper might be called for next year!! ;)
I've done two LPAs, one before the digital version where a pdf was filled out by hand and one online. For me, the new online version is significantly easier to complete, with much less chance you'll get something wrong. Filing an LPA isn't a trivial process but they've made it as easy as possible to get it right. I have major issues with most of what this (and every other) government has done, but this has been well thought out.
Organisations, not just the gov, seem to have the idea that they can save costs by shifting everything onto a website.
Which is fine, except that too often this leads to a site that is far too dense in printed words for people to comprehend properly.
And, perhaps more to the point, too inhuman.
People like to feel they are dealing with people - and with good reason, people interact and meet you halfway. Web pages don't.
In this particular case, the gov is motivated to get as many people creating LPAs as possible as the cost to the taxpayer of assigning deputies to make decisions on behalf of those who have lost mental capacity without an LPA in place is a lot higher. I'm not sure that what you're saying makes much sense.