A glorious performance, don\’t you think?
Ministers have admitted that nearly 200,000 school and college students are still waiting for study grants three weeks into term following the collapse of a new software system.
The Department for Children, Schools and Families said there was no guarantee that pupils would get their grants – worth up to £30 a week for 16- to 18-year-olds – this side of Christmas.
The system, designed to speed up the process of allocating 500,000 grants every year, crashed over the summer and had to be replaced with manual forms, while students have been left frustrated by unanswered helplines.
Isn\’t it just going to be so wonderful in a decade\’s time. You\’ll need your ID card with those lovely biometrics to prove who you are when you withdraw money from the bank, get NHS treatment, interact with the authorities, walk down the street when a policeman asks you who you are….and then the system crashes and the entire country grinds to a halt for three months.
It\’s said, variously, that we\’re only ever three paycheques away from anarchy, or three supermarket deliveries….could it be that ID cards and the inevitable collapse of the system will bring about the massed lamp post decoration party itself?
Manual System? WTF?
I’ve worked 20+ years in IT, much of it in software support and never seen a crash so bad that it had to revert to a manual system.
Someone has cocked up big time on this. Either they weren’t backing up a database server that crashed, or forgot to get a support contract written in to the project.
If they did what I propose and roll Child Tax Credits and Child Benefit into a flat £30 per week per child up to age 18, they wouldn’t need an extra system for paying this out.
What can possibly go wrong?