UK minister tries to intervene after Government Digital Service migration mangles Ministry of Justice webpages
- Reference: 1614243730
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/02/25/gds_ministry_of_justice_website_migration_calamity/
- Source link:
A crackdown by the [1]increasingly rudderless GDS on the Ministry of Justice's website has led to lawyers and campaigners sounding the alarm after a key legal text was mangled almost beyond comprehension by GDS's one-size-must-fit-all approach to web development.
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On top of that, GDS efforts to seize and destroy revamp the MoJ's highly regarded High Court and Court of Appeal listings webpages and email services have imposed substantially poorer alternatives on the public – alternatives even GDS admits are less accessible for the disabled than their predecessors.
The Great Leap Forward-style razing of justice.gov.uk has direct parallels with [3]GDS's web-based empire building back in 2015 , which we summarised at the time as "the most unpopular government web redesign ever yet undertaken".
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Build it and who cares if they come
The damage began last week, when the Civil Procedure Rules, Family Procedure Rules, and Criminal Procedure Rules were all moved, without notice, off their longstanding homes on justice.gov.uk.
If legislation.gov.uk contains statutes, the skeleton of the law, the procedure rules are its flesh and blood: being laws themselves, the rules define how court cases are carried out and regulate all the nitty-gritty stuff that's too mundane for full-blown statutes debated by Parliament.
GDS decided to impose one of its web redesigns on the various procedure rules' webpages as well as migrating them across, prompting lawyers' trade mag the Law Society Gazette to [5]describe them as "unusable", highlighting "doubts about how litigants in person can navigate their way through the rules in their current format".
One of the reasons you pay a lawyer is because he or she knows the procedure rules and how to navigate them. If you're going it alone in court as a litigant in person, you depend on those rules being published in a clear and accessible format you can follow – something GDS jeopardised.
Justice minister Lord David Wolfson was forced to step in, [6]tweeting last week: "I'm looking into this: it's important that the Civil Procedure Rules (and similar Rules) are easily accessible but also in a comprehensible manner – that's all part of access to justice."
He followed up on Tuesday (23 February) by saying that GDS's pages were being deprecated and the old system restored, [7]tweeting : "While we work to improve the CPR pages on the main http://gov.uk site, we've removed the redirects from http://justice.gov.uk. The original pages are again accessible and operable. I hope that deals with the immediate access to justice issue."
GDS hadn't taken the minister's interventions seriously, however.
They might stop us… go go go!
Perhaps realising that others were about to step in and take control, GDS charged ahead with the next phase of its plan. At [8]6:39pm last Friday , an email was sent to court list subscribers stating: "The daily court lists you subscribe to are being moved from the judiciary site to GOV.UK. The change should take effect on Monday."
Court listings are daily lists setting out which court cases are going ahead, where and when. The MoJ used to publish these at known, bookmarkable web addresses in plain HTML. If you signed up for free, the MoJ would email you these lists whenever they were updated. A sample of one of those emails (for the Business and Property Courts at the MoJ's Rolls Building) [9]can be found here .
Monday came, bringing chaos. Instead of one email or one webpage for the Business and Property Courts, GDS had decided to [10]publish nine separate PDF files every day , all of which are now at different web addresses as unique uploads to the GDS website.
Sure enough, a public outcry was triggered once again – especially from journalists who rely on these to turn up and report from ongoing cases, but also from lawyers and law firms. It even interrupted an MoJ contractor's supply of High Court listings to its customers, with Courtel Communications [11]posting on its website: "Due to recent publishing changes relating to the transfer of justice.gov.uk content to the gov.uk website, the court lists are temporarily unavailable on courtserve.net."
The Ministry of Justice took the flak this time, tweeting:
The Royal Courts of Justice daily court lists have moved to [12]https://t.co/8cOu0j4tJm . This was needed as the justice website no longer meets mandatory accessibility and security requirements. [13]https://t.co/ThdyoXoWcX 1/3 — HMCTS (@HMCTSgovuk) [14]February 23, 2021
Beneath each PDF file on GOV.UK's High Court listings pages is a warning that says: "This file may not be suitable for users of assistive technology." Such warnings were not present on the old webpage, as can be seen from the link above to the previous Business and Property Court list.
Web design principles are [15]taught to schoolchildren . It is completely unclear how a government agency which [16]uses in excess of £450m of taxpayers' money per annum has failed to recruit enough people with school-leaver skills to smoothly migrate justice.gov.uk onto a new domain.
A Cabinet Office spokesman, on behalf of GDS, failed to respond to The Register 's questions about the unit's doings with the MoJ website and email services, or the humiliating double public slapdown by Lord Wolfson.
An MoJ spokeswoman would only point to the three tweets posted by the MoJ yesterday as public anger over the cockup mounted.
She did not respond when we asked her precisely what standards the new GDS site complied with that the old MoJ in-house services failed to meet.
Why GDS has turned webpages into PDFs is a mystery: the body itself knows full well how useless PDFs are compared to plain old webpages in the 21st century. [17]As we reported in 2018 , GDS accessibility man Neil Williams wrote: "Compared with HTML content, information published in a PDF is harder to find, use and maintain… More importantly, unless created with sufficient care PDFs can often be bad for accessibility and rarely comply with open standards."
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Open standards – or basic usability by the intended target audience. ®
Get our [19]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2019/07/10/gds_purpose_has_become_increasingly_unclear_says_parliamentary_committee/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_datacentre/cloud&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YDeDSuHApTZvLSLSSGmRYAAAAA8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2015/02/18/the_inside_story_of_govuk/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_datacentre/cloud&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YDeDSuHApTZvLSLSSGmRYAAAAA8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/justice-minister-pledges-immediate-review-of-new-cpr-website/5107505.article
[6] https://twitter.com/DXWQC/status/1362038829146865665
[7] https://twitter.com/DXWQC/status/1364248458035666949
[8] https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/UKHMCTS/bulletins/2c2826c
[9] https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/UKHMCTS/bulletins/2be3661
[10] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/business-and-property-courts-rolls-building-cause-list
[11] https://www.courtserve.net/rss/servicestatus.php
[12] https://t.co/8cOu0j4tJm
[13] https://t.co/ThdyoXoWcX
[14] https://twitter.com/HMCTSgovuk/status/1364210026546679809?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
[15] https://revisionworld.com/gcse-revision/ict/networks-internet/web-design-packages
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2017/03/30/gds_lacks_a_clear_role_says_nao/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/17/govuk_to_make_its_accessible_html_exportable_as_pdfs/
[18] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_datacentre/cloud&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YDeDSuHApTZvLSLSSGmRYAAAAA8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[19] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Working for GDS
It must be crap working for GDS - whenever you do some work, people cry foul.
The underlying idea of gov.uk itself is fundamentally flawed. The idea that you can press a massive disparate range of services into one common template/format really doesn't stack up.
Discoverability of simple documentation suffers massively too - if I'm trying to find documentation from the taxman, I used to be able to add the domain name to the search to ensure my results came from them (and not, say, related posts from DWP). Now it's all the homogenous mess that is gov.uk.
Re: Working for GDS
I'd disagree that the fundamental idea of .gov.uk is flawed - for simple citizen' type queries on the lines of 'how do i tax my car?' or 'point me at the latest government statement on x' it works fairly well. It's annoyingness is that it is so completely dumbed down and has the memory of a goldfish. Heaven forbid us mere subjects should be interested in what the government said last year, or want to read some technical document on CO2 emissions and car-tax rates.
It could so easily have been a standards setting exercise, rather than a centralising exercise. But that wouldn't have a) been sexy, b) involved big contracts or c) kept the plebs in the dark
Re: Working for GDS
> for simple citizen' type queries on the lines of 'how do i tax my car?' or 'point me at the latest government statement on x' it works fairly well
That's only concerned with publishing information though - having a single point of call does make sense for it.
The problem is, they've also tried to shoehorn interactive (and often specialised) services into it. Filling our your self-assessment? Good news, it's now in gov.uk. Dealing with your Dart-charge account? gov.uk
I tried not to dwell on aesthetics in my original post, but part of the problem is that GDS's template comes at the cost of readability for some of these services. The old HMRC forms for self-assessment were outdated (in a technical sense), but were readable. The new service gives me a headache at times.
One-size-fits-all is almost never a good idea
Re: Working for GDS
> It must be crap working for GDS - whenever you do some work, people cry foul
You don't understand the mentality of the people working for these departments. Crying foul doesn't bother them in the slightest, the people crying foul clearly don't understand that GDS know best and that the foul-criers are just demonstrating their ignorance.
I've worked with these people, the levels of self-delusion are off the charts.
DNS bollixed?
$ dig justice.gov.uk
returns an empty ANSWER section, and consequently an http browser doesn't find a server
$ date
Thu 25 Feb 09:45:05 GMT 2021
Change control?
User impact analysis?
Hardly needs a rocket scientist to get this right!
If you can't change the law, you hide it.
Don't confuse what you consider incompetence, with genuine government malice.
Where gov.uk is concerned, assume incompetence. I doubt they're competent enough to be so malicious.
Paranoid? Moi?
All part of the grand 'repress the masses' and 'anti-intellectual' policies enacted by several Governments of late...
Why do plebs (especially disadvantaged plebs) need access to Government things anyway? their lawyer should be dealing with the matter.
What do you mean "they can't afford lawyers"? If they can't afford them, they don't need them; you will be wanting universal health care free at the point of use next!
Anyway its not as if they can understand what's going on... After all part of "state schools becoming more like private schools" (Gove, 2014) presumably includes the ability for schools/Academies to ask for parental contributions to the running of them, say a reasonable £8k per term per pupil... can't afford it? tough - your, frankly, irresponsibly whelped loin-fruit obviously don't need educating... if you can't afford to bring them up properly you shouldn't have them in the first place.
In other news, there is a vacancy in room 101, whilst the continuing war with Oceania is going in our favour, we have never been at war with Oceania,
Re: Paranoid? Moi?
> Paranoid? Moi?
> All part of the grand 'repress the masses' and 'anti-intellectual' policies enacted by several Governments of late...
If we're talking conspiracies, it's remiss of you not to point out that a certain well known SpAd was quite keen that the government start collecting analytics tracking user's movements across gov.uk.
Pulling in information on what laws and procedures people are looking at, particularly after a "leak" presumably, might be quite useful in spin-doctor-world.
Why GDS has turned webpages into PDFs is a mystery
This calamity is never a mystery : it's because some senior bod decides that they "look nicer" than web pages, especially when printed out. They do of course generally print out much better than web pages, but it's always a clear indication that the senior bod is a moron who doesn't understand that information is meant to be used, rather than admired for the aesthetics of the way it is presented. And that the web is a dynamic medium that allows easy changes of content, rather than having to regenerate a 100 page pdf whenever something changes (or worse, not bothering to update it). They don't even care that dynamically changing content means that they shouldn't print them out anyway, as they'll be referring to out of date info. No it's stupid bedazzlement of the "look how professional and cool my document looks!" variety.
Re: Why GDS has turned webpages into PDFs is a mystery
The real mystery is that anyone in gov.uk ever decided that their web pages were an aesthetic or functional improvement on anything.
Crossed swords with GDS
Worked on an NHS project and ran afoul of GDS. Basically, their attitude is:
"NO JAVASCRIPT FOR YOU!!"
We had to jump through hoops to get it to work without js. That our 6 users would all have js enabled seemed to be lost on them.
Who needs foreign state actors to sow dissent and social upheaval when your own government departments can do the job so much better in house?