How can a website cost £35 million? You’d better ask the government | Hacker News Reader

How can a website cost £35 million? You’d better ask the government

matthewparsons.net

60 pointsswombat28 comments

Amateurs. Canada set up a national gun registry database for a mere $710 million US. That's just the cost of the computer system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Firearms_Registry#Cost...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2004/02/13/gunregistry_rdi04021...

This is one of the few times I agree 100% with conservatives. The very concept of the database is dubious, and the implementation is almost a paradigmatic example of waste. It amazes me that this is not a bigger scandal than it is in Canada.

The number (as I'm sure you know) typically quoted in the media, in Canadian dollars, is $1 Billion dollars.

If you went out onto the street in Canada and did a survey with one question: "How many Million dollars are in a Billion dollars", what percentage of people would be able to answer that question correctly. I would guess well below 50%. Literally not knowing how much it actually cost is the only thing that would explain to me the public apathy....other than apathy about almost everything actually important, which is the simpler explanation.

Incompetence does not always explain fuckups of that magnitude. Throw in equal amounts of conflicts of interest and corruption.

Pffffft. I can beat that.

PPARS, the "new" payment system for Irelands national health service (new in 2005, the health service is called the HSE).

With a set budget of €9m,the total cost was €220m in 2009, and the system isn't even bloody working.

Remember this is not Canada, it's Ireland, with only 4m people and a much smaller income.

The problem is that this isn't an exception, in Ireland it's the rule.

More info here:http://www.independent.ie/national-news/ppars-fiasco-as-cost...

Sorry, but the UK really can beat that. The NHS spent ~£12bn (approx $18bn US) on a computer system that the government eventually wanted to "scrap"! http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/pbr...

How can an ugly building in Edinburgh cost £414 million?

A combination of incompetence, greed and a general air of "it doesn't matter as it's only taxpayers money".

Have a read of this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Plundering-Public-Sector-David-Craig...

I'd like to see our new overlords impose a windfall tax on Accenture, EDS, IBM and all the rest. Start by clawing back the £20Bn the useless, unwanted NHS IT system cost.

Tho' to be fair, sacking civil servants (with no pension) when the projects they oversee overrun by an order of magnitude would go a long way to restoring some semblance of order. Remember that the British civil service once administered the Empire - most of the known world - with a fraction of its present staff and no IT at all...

Of couurse they had IT. IT in those days was the army of shipwrights, engineers and sailors that kept messages flowing from port to port and city to city.

And there were a lot of fat cat bureaucrats living off government largesse.

And I have a lot more respect for their modern counterparts than those ancient oppressors. (Not to say we moderns are blameless in any way.)

A lot of the Empire was created directly by commercial concerns (e.g. East India Company) and only taken over and managed directly by the state when things got out of hand (India's First War of Independence/Great Rebellion).

£35 million to provide a great deal of useful information on starting and running a business, and how to navigate the required government bureaucracy? Well, it's not cheap, but things that are worth having rarely are.

Of course, we could make things simpler so such an explanation is not required and everyone could just read the statutes, but given the world we live in, it's not so expensive for the useful information it contains. If I drill-down randomly, I get to "Taxes, returns & payroll > PAYE for employers > PAYE if your business closes or changes > If you no longer employ anyone and don't plan to do so again." That's pretty specific and useful. There are 10-20 categories per level, and 4 levels, and >100 words per article, giving a total of at least one million words of well categorised, useful business advice and information.

£35 a word all-in? Sure, it sounds pricey. Poor value for money? Then you have to make an argument that the website doesn't provide that much value.

I've heard of things not too far from this in Big Non-Techie Corporate America as well, and universities also (both public and private). Seems to be some function of large-budget organizations buying things they don't understand. There are entire consulting companies that seem to specialize in building these super-expensive Enterprise Portals for large organizations. (I have no idea how you break into that business.)

Doing a quick search shows the website is more than just a custom cms as the article suggests. Several other .gov.uk refer to the website with "[...]is now available at www.businesslink.gov.uk" so there must have been a huge conversion leading up to the launch. Also this quote:

It has three main types of information:

    * text content explaining regulations and other areas of business [...]

    * directory content 

    * interactive tools

£35m is still a lot for a portal but I wouldn't call it "a website".

* The Wikipedia page is already flagged for sounding like an ad.

* The same article refers to the site as a website anyway

* Most of the features are 'information on...'

I did a bit of cleaning up of the Wikipedia page :) r.e. the quoted text, it actually seems a reasonable description of the site (from a quick look).

According to this [1] it costs £2.15 a hit. Which isn't that bad spending wise if you consider the worst website in the UK government cost £11.78 per visit.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/25/gov_websites/

Careful with the apples and oranges. Counting visits and hits are very different things.

Last I looked, facebook (a website) has raised $836 million, twitter (a website) $160 million.

Heh, welcome to the world of government spending. What you can see on this list is really just corruption as usual - i.e. quangos assigning large amounts of public money to their friends and relations. In return certain recipient organisations or companies may or may not make donations to certain political parties, who in turn may or may not be able to pay increased salaries to high ranking party members and spend more money on campaigning.

I'm wondering how useful Business Link is for startups. Any UK founders care to share?

Your experience of Business Link and what it can offer you is largely down to the postcode that you live in. In the good old days of the 90's and 00's the Government would throw resources at an area based on some criteria it had set. Year on year, postcode by postcode this would change.

Not very, in my experience. Although they were very helpful on exporting goods, every other question I had was either answered incorrectly (!) or met with 'we can't give legal/accounting advice' - which is understandable but I did tell them my questions beforehand so they could have avoided a wasted meeting.

They then tried to persuade me to use a particular SEO company - so I left.

The site itself isn't bad, there's a fair amount of decent advice on there, although nothing that isn't really available elsewhere.

Fairly hopeless. It's less about startups/business than it is about people becoming self-employed. I've tried it in various areas, from the shit to the affluent - always abysmal.

I'm currently observing a government department that is in the process of attempting to put a little web portal on their mainframe, an approach that's adding seven figures (at least) to the bill. That's the way they do things in the government. Choose the most cumbersome, inefficient, insecure and technologically arcane approach and run with it.

Italia.it costed 45,000,000 of euros and was developed by IBM. The project was also a big failure.

Welcome to electronic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_tape

My spouse used to work as a lawyer in the Civil Service - I was highly amused to discover that when she brought work home it was carefully tied up in yards of real red tape.

I don't know how they end up with this price tag, but I have an idea where they could shave off a bit for the next austerity bill..

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