back to article Universal Credit white elephant needs 'urgent breakthrough' says MP

Acting shadow work and pensions secretary Stephen Timms MP (Labour) has warned that a "significant breakthrough" is now urgently required for the severely delayed and over-budget Universal Credit system, otherwise it may be time to scrap the project. To many the programme is increasingly resembling a white elephant, with the …

  1. El_Fev

    When did the Register become the mouthpiece of a failed labour party??

    Jesus the project is putting on people at a slow rate at the initial stages, unless you are suggesting it will be at 40 thousand a time FFS

    Lifetime costs? how can it have a life time costs when the system is there to provide benefits? will benefits stop being given in the projected lifetime?

    The money , that was lost was due to them realizing that the piece of shit that had been created by contractors would not scale and sticking with it would have been ruinous, so I'd rather lose 300Million and get jack rather than the 10 Billion and counting that we got shafted with when Labour tried to do the IT system for the NHS run by secretary shagger Prescott.

    FFS 1/10 poor effort sad Labour loser

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: When did the Register become the mouthpiece of a failed labour party??

      El_fev : How right you are. This project is a shining example of good governance, top quality project management, and, most of all, value for money.

    2. splodge

      Re: When did the Register become the mouthpiece of a failed labour party??

      Anyone got a lid for this box?

    3. wiggers

      Re: When did the Register become the mouthpiece of a failed labour party??

      So anything pointing out problems with a gov't project is automatically deemed a promotion for the opposition? I thought that was just an American disease.

    4. NogginTheNog
      WTF?

      Re: When did the Register become the mouthpiece of a failed labour party??

      Actually I read the piece as (another) indictment of a monstrously crap and wasteful failed/failing government project, not as anything party political. Sadly billion pound fuckups don't really seem to change whatever the colour of the rosette on the door at No. 10.

    5. fruitoftheloon
      FAIL

      @El Fev: Re: When did the Register become the mouthpiece of a failed labour party??

      El Fev,

      ooi what do you do for a living?

      I trust you don't have much experience of appraising something that is basically cream crackered?

      Some of us around here know a thing or three about sorting out shagged, pointless, missguided, poorly managed, absurdly optimistic programmes.

      And what is with the 'Labour mouthpiece' bollocks??

      Have you had your meds today?

      Kind regards,

      jay

    6. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Holmes

      Re: When did the Register become the mouthpiece of a failed labour party??

      How can it have a life time costs when the system is there to provide benefits?

      Is this system a Infinite Gum Dispenser or something?

  2. hplasm
    Facepalm

    So many white elphants in Whitehall now.

    An ivory sale could cancel the national debt.

  3. The last doughnut
    IT Angle

    In terms of government IT this is just a pretty standard colossal fuck-up. One has to conclude it was put in the hands of IDS to ensure its failure.

    1. tojb
      Paris Hilton

      To be fair

      I just checked IDS's bio (on his own site) and he was at Sandhurst in 1975 so you can almost forgive the other tory brass for thinking he might be capable of taking on a tricky job.

      Since then he has worked for GEC marconi (remember that shining example of corporate responsibility?), a property holding company and the tory party (he was leader for a while). I can't think of a CV that could raise many more red flags, why on earth was this man given a cabinet job?

      And that is from his own website. When you check wikipedia it appears that he left school at fourteen and has no O-levels or degree, despite having spent a year farting about at a uni in Italy.

  4. SVV

    "It is still too early to declare it a failed IT project"

    Really?

    It's been obvious to anyone who has been following this story for ages that it reached this status a long, long time ago. 15 billion should buy you the most collosolly impressive IT system ever, but no, they keep shovelling more and more money into the inferno. IDS is probably constantly shouting "get more people on the project" and nobody has the nerve to introduce him to a neat little textbook by Frederick Brooks Jr explaining why this won't douse the flames........

    1. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

      Re: "It is still too early to declare it a failed IT project"

      Osborne only wants to save £12 billion from welfare. If we'd not bothered with UC, there wouldn't need to be any cuts and we could spend another £3billion reducing, say, child poverty.

      1. Triggerfish

        Re: "It is still too early to declare it a failed IT project"

        Its never to early to declare failed projects.

        Just look for this initial sign.

        Its being run by the government.

  5. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Unhappy

    15 benefits (on how many mainframes?) integrated together in a single big bang

    What could possibly go wrong with such a mad bold plan?

  6. breakfast Silver badge
    Mushroom

    How?

    How have they spent this much money? What on earth are they doing?

    I mean, I get how you could spend a few million on getting a good size team of decent developers to build your application for you and more for some solid hardware to run it on or to hire the cloud services that it will need, but sixteen billion???

    That is more than the annual cost of all unemployment benefits put together. What is wrong with them?

    This is where private sector involvement falls down. If they had simply recruited and employed all the staff needed to design, implement and maintain this, it would have cost far less than they have already spent. The British government spends far too little on hiring good people, too much on horrible, awful, appallingly designed private sector contracts. Great if your ministers want a directorship but a shitty deal for us as taxpayers.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: How?

      You're labouring under the misconception that government exists to serve society: it doesn't; it exists to control and exploit society.

      What the government has achieved with the UC project is the transfer a lot of money from the pockets of taxpayers in to the pockets of people who pay very little tax at all. In this respect, the UC project must already be regarded as a huge sucess.

    2. MonkeyCee

      Re: How? Private + Public

      I've not too closely at the details, but like most public/private clusterfucks, it's almost certainly down to combining the worst aspects of both.

      The original spec will have been changed, possibly weekly. Masses of basic work on things like scope and capability will keep having to be re-done, or will just be ignored, since Whitehall/Canberra/Washington will change their mind anyway.

      There will be miles of red tape that must be followed in order to get paid, however none of it will actually require the thing to work, just that the appropriate forms have been filled. The first, second and third layers of private ownership of the projects will be the firms that excel at form filling, contract winning, and making sure they get paid, only then will firms (or individuals) who can actually implement or design an appropriate solution will be involved.

      At this point budgets, timelines and milestones will already have been set, without any regard for how any of this relates to reality or an actual solution. The workers who have to make this mess work are then faced with making all sorts of compromises, while management (on both sides) will just kick the can down the road when it comes to making difficult choices or admitting things are fucked.

      Then you get workers leaving, since it's clearly buggered, Private Eye or equivalent write up a long expose of how shit the project is, and anyone who can avoid it does. Unless someone who plans on running the zombie gravy train into the ground.

      By this time you've usually managed to fire/lose/downsize the people who designed, built and maintained the original systems, have not got an acceptable substitute in place, and so continue pushing forward because there is no real incentive to kill the project and start over. Because the public sector can't "go bankrupt" and the private sector is not going to lose anything by continuing to fail to deliver, you get both sides just carrying on.

      To run large complex projects the public sector needs to own the damn project, and sub contract off parts of it. Not the whole fucking project, probably not even the design phase. Better to realise what an omnishambles it's going to be at design stage, and plan from there, rather than take some political diktat as your milestones, and be sunk from the start.

  7. Elmer Phud

    If they're gonna piss money away, the Greeks could do with some.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Holmes

      Well, they had several of those projects which is why they are where they are now.

    2. NeilMc

      Greece Puh!!

      being and Ancient and Civilised society they have a head start on most developed nations that why as a nation they avoid tax, claims as many benefits as possible from their Government and reflect on the endless summer and very long retirement without a care in the world.....

      After all they are now tapped into the EU so their opportunity to pay less and claim more just quintupled...... Happy days the gravy train is still running.

  8. JohnMurray

    You couldn´t spend £16 billion and get nothing.

    Someone has to have done something with some of it.

    Quite possibly about £1 billion has gone on hardware, maybe another billion on software, leaving £14 billion transferred to the British Virgin Isles: somewhere.

    A quick shuffle and a few million gets shifted into ConCentre as a ¨donation¨

    Or is that too simple?

  9. Philip Virgo

    This is what happens when a minister tries to impose good practice on the "professionals"

    Right at the very start the Minister said he wanted the "pathways" checked before any code was cut.

    The officials ignored him. Ministers set policy - they do not decide how it is to be implemented.

    So the "usual suspects" burned through several hundred million before what they had produced was tried out on real humans. Surprise, surprise - it did not work - other than technically.

    The "reset" was to go back to testing processes with real humans before they were enshrined in code for large scale roll-out.

    It looks as though a subset does indeed work with real humans - and the phased roll-out of that subset can now begin - at an accelerating pace.

    Next will come the task of "folding in" the other benefits - but at each stage checking that the changes work with those who are intended to use it. Hence then open-ended timescale.

    I find it interesting that the Register should not be a fan of good practice.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: This is what happens when a minister tries to impose good practice on the "professionals"

      But 16 Billion and counting?

      While officials implement policy they can only do so with at least the consent of their political masters, who, with the officials, should be held responsible

      This sort of thing happens far too often to be anything but policy, corrupt policy.

    2. John Smith 19 Gold badge
      Meh

      Re: This is what happens when a minister tries to impose good practice on the "professionals"

      "Right at the very start the Minister said he wanted the "pathways" checked before any code was cut."

      If true that would seem like a very good idea.

      In fact it would seem like a very good idea for all upgrade/re-engineering projects with a substantial chunk of data housed in one or more existing databases (pretty much all UK govt projects).

      So why isn't it SOP and why would a Minister have to request it?

  10. Anonymous Coward
  11. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Unhappy

    A mad, bad, bold, bald plan

    Anyone have any more adjectives that might be appropriate?

  12. Zap

    Too big to fail so we will not call it failed

    The problem with the NPFIT (Renamed Connecting for Health) was that staff would not cooperate, why should they, it would make them redundant.

    They brought in LSP's who were promised multi billion pound contracts, they had no clue how medical data is structures, they figured that HL7 would define all the data but the IT staff refused to give them the access control data, sometimes because they did not know it and sometimes because they wanted to mess them around. It is not as simple as saying "this guy is a consultant he must have access" clinicians can only see data that they need to see and things like HIV results have very special access control.

    Still most of the figures you see banded about about £20bn were projected 20 year costs. Less than 3bn was actually spent and a lot of it is still in use every day in the NHS.

    Now the Univeral Credit system is going through the same thing, the aging system still runs on mainframes and they are dragging their feet over exporting data. Of course the new system has not been designed to accomodate that data and nobody wants to lose it.

    Then you have the various "interested parties" who want to delay delay delay.

    It does not help that the DWP staff are spread across so many sites, do they have been developing around various workflows of different areas (JSA, ESA, Income Support etc) but completely failed to create the integration.

    It is too big to fail because IDS will not resign.

    Yet in the last month he has LIED TO PARLIAMENT when he denied that data existed for death figures but the DWP had already told ICO they existed but it did not want to publish them because WE MIGHT GET THE WRONG IDEA!

    http://i.imgur.com/AwJ2qQi.png

    Imagine if all data was not published on this basis!

    There have been many petitions to get Iain Smith to resign go sign the petition and it might actually happen although his bald head and slippery nature has led to him being called Teflon with civil servants.

    https://www.change.org/p/hm-courts-and-tribunal-service-publish-stats-showing-how-many-people-have-died-after-their-benefits-stopped

    http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/benefit-cuts-deaths-revealed-how-5939071

    http://thirdforcenews.org.uk/tfn-news/over-235000-signatures-yet-dwp-wont-release-benefit-related-death-figures

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