Disastrous universal credit IT system hangs in balance as Iain Duncan Smith quits

Op-ed: Ex-minister, who repeatedly hit "reset" on chaotic omni-dole project, backs out.

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ChickenHawk[/url]":2qn1p0gg]Amongst other things, I am a trainee CAB advisor (although I am only speaking for myself here) and one thing that is clear in the materials is that Benefits and Welfare is a quagmire of confusing benefits, misleading names, and weird arbitrary distinctions. Employment and Support allowance for example doesn't have anything to do with Employment - a recipient may in fact be completely incapable of work.

Universal Credit is at its core such a common sense idea that it confuses me exactly as to why this IT system is so damn complicated. Rather than different benefits with different payout amounts, it's one rate, with some extras on top for certain groups (eg more if you're disabled and need extra funds for the extra living costs). Surely at its core it's just a billing system in reverse?

Yes it should be simple to implement, feed a bunch of data from different departments, aggregate them, and run an algorithm over it to work out how much you get.

But then, rather than give it to me to write, they give it to consultancies who have 1 or 2 good people and a huge number of outsourced (ie cheapest) "IT" workers and contractors who get paid by the day.

I've worked on such things, it was hell attempting to do good work in the face of so much incompetence.

 

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peterford[/url]":22o0mlto]

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Yes it should be simple to implement, feed a bunch of data from different departments, aggregate them, and run an algorithm over it to work out how much you get.

But then, rather than give it to me to write, they give it to consultancies who have 1 or 2 good people and a huge number of outsourced (ie cheapest) "IT" workers and contractors who get paid by the day.

I've worked on such things, it was hell attempting to do good work in the face of so much incompetence.

I don't often criticise someone I don't know, but based on this comment, you are utterly ignorant on this subject.

Government systems- especially those like universal credit are rarely technically complicated. The problem is that they translate law into code and this is incredibly complicated. Law makers don't think through every possible outcome, but creating these systems means you have to. This is where most delay comes from.

If you think you can translate huge areas of benefit law to code then you are either a god like genius or a chancer. The rest of your comment leads me to one of these.

No, I do not work on universal credit.

I worked on FiReControl, it was some, stuff we did for other customers and the only difference would have been a few fire-specific modules and national scale (which considering the number if calls fire gets compared to police or ambulance is less nationally than some constabularies). Add it was, the government and consultancy made it watt more complex than necessary, requirements that even conflicted with each other were common. They had 4 years working on those requirements....

Benefit law isn't impossibly complicated, it's all written down. There might be a lot of it, but that's only a problem of writing out algorithms that apply them.

I also worked on credit reference software. Taking inputs from so many different data feeds, writing out credit scores based on a lot of factors, that's not materially different from universal credit IMHO.