Legacy IT to blame for UK's inflexible benefits system
- Reference: 1651843806
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/05/06/legacy_it_benefits_delay/
- Source link:
According to reports, the Conservative politician in charge of The Treasury was prevented from raising some benefits because of aging systems at the country's Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which has overall responsibility for social security.
Some benefits were increased by 3.1 percent last month. The chancellor was told he could not introduce further increases because the systems at the benefits agency could not support this, [2]said The Times . A government source said: "The system was simply not built to be flexible."
[3]UK government preps tech suppliers for multi-billion mega framework
[4]Court papers indicate text messages from HMRC's 60886 number could snoop on Brit taxpayers' locations
[5]'Please download in Microsoft Excel': Meet the tech set to monitor IT performance across central UK government
[6]UK government isn't keeping track of the risk posed by legacy systems, says Central Digital and Data Office
The department is partway through a longstanding IT project ( [7]15 years and counting ) to transfer benefits to a Universal Credit system, but a significant number of claimants remain on older schemes. A 2020 report by the UK's independent public spending watchdog found the cost of extending the IT supporting those schemes until September 2024 hit £570 million ($703 million). This was "mainly because more claimants were expected to remain on those benefits for longer before moving to Universal Credit," [8]Parliament spending watchdog the National Audit Office (NAO) said [PDF].
The Times claims older benefits schemes were supported by inflexible IT systems operating since the 1980s.
[9]
A DWP spokesperson did not deny this. "In 2024 we are fully transitioning to a modern benefit suited to the 21st century. Universal Credit makes it easier for people to claim support they are entitled to, is more generous overall than the old benefits, and it successfully met the demands of the pandemic."
[10]
The overall state of the DWP's legacy estate is illustrated by support for another function: pensions. In September last year, [11]the NAO found that a 34-year-old computer system was one of the causes of a scandal which led to more than £1 billion of state pensions not being paid. The culprit was one of the first Virtual Machine Environment (VME) mainframe computers to be installed by central government, supplied in 1987 by ICL Limited, which was later bought by Fujitsu.
The [12]topic of legacy IT was brought into sharp focus last summer when an independent study by the Modernization and Reform Group found UK government spends $2.3 billion ($2.84 billion) of its £4.7 billion ($5.81 billion) annual tech budget on "keeping the lights on activities" on "outdated legacy systems".
[13]
In the US, according to a [14]report by the Government Accountability Office , the government spent over $90bn in fiscal 2019 on IT. Most of it, the GAO said, was planned for operating and maintaining existing tech, including legacy systems.
In an analysis of 65 federal legacy systems, the watchdog identified its Social Security Administration (SSA) as having one of the 10 "most critical" high risk legacy systems. Its "system 10" is 45 years old, although most of the hardware is no more than five years old. In May 2016, it noted that the SSA had to rehire retired employees to maintain its COBOL systems. ®
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[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-inflation-jumps-30-year-high-70-march-2022-04-13/
[2] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/it-failures-stop-benefits-keeping-up-with-inflation-05ncjg9t2
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/21/ukgov_preps_the_tech_market/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/27/hmrc_ss7_hlr_lookups/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/21/excel_monitor_central_uk_govt/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/28/uk_government_legacy_systems/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2010/11/25/poor_it_contributes_to_dwp_errors/
[8] https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Universal-Credit-getting-to-first-payment.pdf
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YnVGK9idwOPt-UXcuqJ3kQAAAFM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YnVGK9idwOPt-UXcuqJ3kQAAAFM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/22/icl_mainframe_uk_pension_errors/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/13/mckinsey_awarded_3m_8_week_contract/
[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YnVGK9idwOPt-UXcuqJ3kQAAAFM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[14] https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-19-471#summary
[15] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Interesting variant excuse
This is just a symptom that suggests that the IT system maintenance may have generated a regular income for years for a politicians friends company.
My BS-o-meter just shot off the scale
I know politicians lie, but Rishi Sunak's nose should be longer than a barge pole....Truth is that the DWP thinks anyone on welfare whether disabled, retired, mentally unwell, temporarily unemployed is a criminal intent on stealing "their" money. Aided by their friends in the American private insurance industry, (seriously look into the links betrween the DWP and private insurers and basically insurance companies weasealed their way into "assist" the DWP and pushed heavily for welfare cuts and punitive measures, all so they could up their policies sold backed by advertising about "protecting your family" andn making reference to welfare cuts (that they drove) )
DWP act like the probation service or an inquisition rather than a social security agency, people are constantly harassed, harangued and judges decisions are frequently ignored. It wouldn't surprise me if they had a "benefits monkey" they placed on the desk of anyone who approved a claim, in the same way the immigration dept had an asylum monkey they put on the desk of anyone approving an asylum claim......
Sunak et al have NO idea how the rest of us actually live, they complain about having to give social security rises while quaffing x hundred pound bottles of champagne, claiming meal expenses per day worth more than many people's social security payments for the week....sickening....
Re: My BS-o-meter just shot off the scale
Did you not notice the pandemic when UC claimants got an "uplift" but legacy benefit recipients didn't? Again, IT was said to be the source. And then there's the pension issue mentioned in the article.
While I agree with your view of DWP, I can also buy that the legacy benefits system is inflexible.
He could have still have done it for UC, of course, which seems able to cope. And perhaps he could have accelerated the switchover to UC. Not that either would be without a political cost.
Re: My BS-o-meter just shot off the scale
Please expand on the "asylum monkey".
I was blacklisted two decades ago so have 1001 anecdotes about DWP incompetence and abuse, and two or three contradictory examples. I'll spare you 1000 of them.
I used to live with a DWP TEO, many of my family were similar or worse, so I knew their systems. Each time I'd sign on (for dole, not login) I'd either help them work their terminal or fix one of their job lottery puggies.
For foreigners, a puggy is an evil gambling device like a video game in a pub or betting shop. JobCentre terminals were identical but if you played long enough then you won a job. And if you did'nt play you went hungry.
WinNT pc under the hood. Kept on breaking down, leading to long queues and sometimes violence due to a lack of technicians qualified to open the case. "I'm an MCSE, let me through!"
The DWP staff would sometimes ask me to fix multiple problems, and I'd decline. "The first one is free, the second one is £50 cash in hand - and don't tell the Dole". One time one of the managers agreed to that even though I'd just been joking. Paid me out of their pocket. Took an afternoon but worth it for the story.
Re: My BS-o-meter just shot off the scale
"the systems at the benefits agency could not support this"
So you're seriously telling us that either a single column in a database table containing a payment amount, or possibly a hardcoded amount in a COBOL program cannot, in any way whatsoever, be updated? I would be demanding some kind of technical report explaining just exactly how such a simple commonplace task is supposedly "impossible", as every IT system I have ever encountered would have had some way of quickly making such a trivial change.
Re: My BS-o-meter just shot off the scale
>So you're seriously telling us that either a single column in a database table containing a payment amount, or possibly a hardcoded amount in a COBOL program cannot, in any way whatsoever, be updated?
You're assuming the system is digital. It is not. The critical information exchange the minister is complaining about is paper-based. There's a complex web of interdependent systems and agencies (DWP, HMRC, local authorities etc.) tied together with very legacy paper processes that take months to fully propagate changes, so there are only a handful of change windows a year.
It was meant to be fixed decades ago but then UC took over and we've been waiting for that to make a difference for 10+ years.
Make a new system.
Run in parallel with the old system until all data has been moved and all bumps smothered out.
Keep a VM of the old system just in case.
Is not easy or fast, but that's the best solution.
That system is called "universal credit". The switchover is ongoing.
Interesting.
Article says significant number of people are still in the older system, implying that the new system is up and running and it's just a matter of transfering the data to the new system.
Would have expected a DB dump from the old system to the new system, and both running concurrently for a while to make sure the new system works as expected before the old one gets retired.
What are they doing if it's a multi year process to switch over? Manually entering DB records for every single person?
And has been in the process of cutting over since approximately 2013, with implementation costs very well north of £10Bn.
When it comes to taxation, benefits and pensions, if you think you can solve the problem with a simple statement like "run it in parallel" or "simplify the system" then you don't understand the problem.
Remind Me...
Which party has been in power for 27 of the last 40 years?
Re: Remind Me...
Correct answer: the Civil Service, for all 40 years. The Government you don't get to vote for.
Interesting variant excuse
"Computer says can't" rather than "computer says no".