Tax return system works, um, smoothly

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

After last year’s tax return debacle, which saw the Inland Revenue site collapse when 204,000 people attempted to enter their return on deadline day, it’s reassuring to see that this time it just worked.

Purely for the sake of research, and by no means due to me putting it off for a number of weeks for no particular reason, I found myself going through the various steps between 10.30 and 11.30 last night. And it worked without a hitch.

Perhaps part of the reason is because HMRC has greatly simplified the procedure – for instance, I wasn’t forced to enter all the details of The Guardian when declaring the magnificent £75 I earned for a piece on its website – but perhaps a bigger reason is because the team behind the system has done an excellent job in load testing and simulating.

It’s great to see a company, or in this case public service, learn the lessons from previous problems and rare that they get praise for doing so. Somehow, I doubt HMRC will get as much attention this year as they did last: people love to read, talk and write about failure, whereas success just doesn’t make a good headline.

Which rather reflects life as an IT professional as a whole. Make a mistake, everyone notices. Get something right, nobody seems to give a damn.

Government-commissioned review says Government shouldn’t spend money shocker

Friday, September 12th, 2008

With the Chancellor perfecting his Private Frazer impression (”we’re doomed”), the chances of the Government handing over a fiver, let alone the £5 billion needed to bring fibre to the country’s cabinets, were remote. 

So it will surprise absolutely no-one that a Government-commissioned report into so-called “next-generation access” has reached the heady conclusion that the Government would be best advised to do chuff all. 

“There is little evidence that, in the short term, UK consumers will experience a detriment due to the lack of an extensive NGA network,” concludes the report’s author, former Cable and Wireless boss, Francesco Caio. Perhaps he should try getting out a bit more, because if he ventured even 50 miles outside of his comfy London office and started talking to people on the edges of BT’s rural exchanges, he would have found plenty of homes and businesses that are struggling on sub 1Mb/sec connections.

This very morning, in fact, Cisco released a report that claimed only Japan has the broadband quality to cope with next-generation web apps. The UK fell below the threshhold required for today’s apps, let alone the ones coming round the corner. 

 The case for public funding is debatable; the fact that Britain’s broadband network remains woefully inadequate is indisputable. 

The seven month hitch

Monday, July 28th, 2008

Back in January I decided to chase up a rumour that the Government was planning to radio-tag serious offenders so it could track their movements. So, I did my research, wrote some words and rang the prison’s service to see if anybody fancied having a chat about it – confirm, deny, ignore. Whatever. Seven months later, I got my response.

Seven months… that’s 213 days, 639 meals, five and half million breathes, 1,704 hours of sleep. Empires have fallen quicker than that.

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