Universal Credit IT system could lead to MORE FRAUD, MPs warn The number of benefit cheats in the UK could rise thanks to yet more IT problems with the government's new Universal Credit system, MPs warn. A communities and local government committee report published on Wednesday cast more doubt over the "readiness" of the Department for Work and Pensions' Universal Credit system - which …
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>>they could double the amounts that benefits pays and it would still be a drop in the ocean<<
Projected spending on welfare for the year 2013 is £117 billion. Approx. 1/10 of our national debt (£1,159 trillion).
http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/year_spending_2013UKbn_12bc1n#ukgs302
I suspect that you actually refer to just a small part of the welfare budget. (such as JSA) Certainly, for the recipients, even modest increases could make a huge difference to them.
As for the new system, chances are that it will cost a lot more than any actual savings they eventually make.
Should be "Approx. 1/10 of our national debt (£1.159 trillion).
Although that's largely irrelevant. The welfare budget is current spend, the national debt is the excess and cumulative spending of past governments.
The real comparison is either with the total government fritter, or with the deficit, (the £120bn a year more that government spend over what they raise in taxes).
"The questions is what propotion to they get of the overall total. Just becuase your 1 ina hundred if you geta 1000 times more than anyone else, then you make a big difference!"
Just a quick calculation, but working from a minimum payment someone would get ( single person living on their own HB+JSA+CT), then you would have the person claiming a 1000 times as much getting paid £8704000.
Even the daily mail hasnt gone that far. :)
"The system would not work from local authority property databases and so it would not be able to detect automatically, as local systems did now, when multiple individuals made a housing benefit claim for the same property."
And therein lies the problem. The expectation is that the new system has to interface with many, many other systems ranging from RDBMS' of all flavours, to flat file based systems that have to be delivered by USB stick (I shit you not).
A system is ONLY as good as its weakest element and since it is forced to work with all these other prehistoric systems using a wide variety of gateways and information exchanges, you can't really blame it if it isn't the new electronic messiah.
You forgot to include lashed up excel spreadsheet with badly written code underneath that's been added to over the last 15 years as new legislation has come in, or whenever someone thought they might like an occasional non-standard report. With a few manual workarounds to transfer the data from the spreadsheet to an access database that holds a different subset of the data.
We know from past experience that the server that runs the UC system will be left in a pub by a drunk government worker.
It will be found and handed over to The Sun, who discover that the admin password is '1234' and the folder containing the database has its sharing permissions set to 'Everyone'...
bet the cost overruns and the fact that 10% of claiments will be using the job center's computers to do the claiming couple with the cost overruns, and the bad security cost overrun, means that the estimate for how much the complete system with cost has overrun and we end up paying £4 billion to scrap the whole lot and start again (£5 billion because that cost will overrun too).
So, let's start over. Say you didn't have ministers demanding mega systems to support their latest political wheeze. Imagine instead building a system that, while enabling them to deliver on their ill-considered brain-farts, was itself rationally architected.
You have an entity (citizen) who sometimes receives money from the government (benefits, tax refunds, compensation, etc.) and who sometimes pays money to the government (tax, licenses, fines, etc.). Doesn't that sound rather like a bank customer with a bank account? Aren't there already off-the-shelf proven robust platforms for handling millions of banking customers and billions of transactions? Don't they also handle corporate clients?
Install such a system – and do it once only. Give every citizen an individual account. Give every government department a corporate account. It will all just work. Plus, you get to leverage all the proven add-ons for accounting, interfacing to other systems, etc.
So, when some minidrone says something like 'Let's pay out child support payments via ATMs', the admins can say, 'OK, not a problem', and then head confidently to the pub.
Aren't there already off-the-shelf proven robust platforms for handling millions of banking customers and billions of transactions? Don't they also handle corporate clients?
Install such a system – and do it once only. Give every citizen an individual account. Give every government department a corporate account. It will all just work. Plus, you get to leverage all the proven add-ons for accounting, interfacing to other systems, etc.
A common sense suggestion if ever I heard one, especially as gov.co.uk must own quite a few banks at this stage.
Sadly, as common sense is involved the government and other vested interests would never go for it.
Have an upvote anyway...
Nope that idea is a complete non starter and would never ever work
Why...
Simple, the MPs would'nt be able to get kickbacks from the IT companies building the system, or government (ex)ministers find themselve cushy directorships with said companies
Alledgedly (the lawyers demanded I put that in)
Anyway without the kickbacks, how are you going to be able to claim for a cost overrun?
I'm disappointed by El Reg's use of the lazy, sloppy and derogatory phrase "benefit handouts"
The over-repeated myth that living on benefits is some kind of lifestyle choice made by people who have never done a day's work is just that, a myth. The majority are claiming what they are entitled to, because they paid into the system while working or their wages are not enough to support a family.
Having already set up a division in the nations consciousness between the deserving and undeserving poor, i.e. strivers versus skivers, using a single label for a collection of benefits allows the government to portray all claimants as skivers and makes cutting support for the most vulnerable so much more palatable. Now this pre-emptive talk about fraud will give the government the cover it needs to make it even harder to for genuine claims to be made.
Regardless of that, there's a £120bn gap between what government raise in revenue and then choose to spend on whatever. As a result of the popular-at-Westminster idea that we can simply keep borrowing to fill the gap, we now spend around £50bn a year just on interest, and that figure continues to rise.
So unless you want to go the way of Ireland, Iceland, Greece and Cyprus the books have to balance, so you either raises taxes, or you cut public spending, which includes benefits.
Not that I'm defending the governments clueless and inept policies, but if you're looking for £120bn then there's no single acceptable measure.
If your wages aren't enough to support your family, why did you have a family?
Benefits should not enable people to make or support life decisions precluded to people who work.
The very notion of the 'benefit trap' appears to be a challenge for you to comprehend.
"If your wages aren't enough to support your family, why did you have a family?"
If your wages were enough to support your family until you had to change jobs and/or take a cut in pay, what do you do? Hand the kids back?
"Benefits should not enable people to make or support life decisions precluded to people who work."
You're peddling that divisive propaganda myth that people either work or are on benefits, never a mix of both. But the truth is, the many, if not most benefits claimants also work. Exact figures are difficult to come by as it doesn't suit the government's agenda to give clear figures, but it has been reported(1)(2) and disputed(3) that in 2010, one in eight housing benefit claimants were unemployed and between January 2010 and December 2011, 93% of housing benefits claims were made by households with at least one employed adult(4).
Benefits are there to support people with the life decisions they made while they were in work. Otherwise, what is the alternative?
"The very notion of the 'benefit trap' appears to be a challenge for you to comprehend."
The very notion that people's circumstances might change appears to be a challenge for you to comprehend. Cutting benefits doesn't make housing, food or fuel any more affordable for someone on a low income. It doesn't magically create lots of jobs. It just pushes the already vulnerable into deeper poverty and turns a "benefit trap" into a homelessness trap - try getting a job with no fixed abode for your address.
(1) http://england.shelter.org.uk/news/previous_years/2010/june_2010/housing_benefit_warning
(2) https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/6735/2084179.pdf
(3) http://fullfact.org/factchecks/one_in_eight_housing_benefit_claimants_unemployed-27479
(4) http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/tenancies/majority-of-new-housing-benefit-claimants-in-work/6521183.article
...would be to train everyone who is out of work in project management, IT and implementation. They can then all be employed as IT workers implementing massive government IT projects aimed at reducing waste and saving money! A win all round; everyone has a job and no-one is claiming dole or benefits and the massive government IT projects would continue to rumble on, costing billions and wasting money ;)
No training needed, there are enough out of work project managers and other IT staff claiming benefits as it is without adding to the hundreds applying for every job going already. Some of these out of work IT staff were recent government employees who were made redundant as part of a cost cutting exercise by the very same government.
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