Inside GOV.UK: chaos and nightmare as trendy Cabinet Office wrecked govt web

But what is certainly true is that that's a far better result than the typical government IT project. Give me the gov.uk "debacle" (which it ain't) any day over the DWP or the NHS PfIT...

You can't make things better without making choices. Much like Apple products, that's bound to piss off some people. But once you have something that's actually good at something, instead of just being mediocre all around, it's perhaps possible to over time grow that into something that's good at multiple things.

All other experiences of government websites show sites that are just universally meh or bad. Gov.uk has been the first government website where I thought "wow, that's neat."

For example, earlier this week I was looking for guidance on what responsibilities Unincorporated Associations have to HMRC. The site is pretty much barren, and feels like a link dump with little explanation for what anything is. And because Gov.UK has wedged itself in front of the old HMRC site, half of the URLS plastered around the net redirect to a gov.uk index page instead of letting me view old content.

One specific example that caught me out was a page for finding your local HMRC branch. It existed on the old site, but that URL now redirects to a generic `contact us` page for the entirety of HMRC. (See http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/local/individuals/index.htm)

My post was simply deleted. Obviously don't like public criticism.

The whole thing is an NIH stack of crap from a tech POV. Not only that they've broken the self assessment stuff terribly. It's now a mishmash of two sites that barely work together. I had to dig out a load of tax code notifications recently and it was painful.

Posted as a throwaway account as I've brought this up here before and I was buried.

Edit: This was their third attempt at a front end proxy solution. Even riverbed/f5 appliances are better value by the time you hit your third attempt.

However, much of this article appears to be anecdotes of people in Government complaining after-the-fact. Why were they not involved during the transition, when they could best help with the process? I highly doubt the gov.uk team rewrote entire libraries full of quite technical information on their own - there was someone on the side of the departments who failed to do their job.

Add to that the fact that you can't visit any uk government site now without being hit by google analytics tracking (no I do not want google tracking on my tax returns form!).

For the people who actually read the reports and statements departments put out (e.g. charities, affected businesses, campaigners, pressure groups) it seems to be almost universally hated. Lots of complaints about older reports and press releases being just about impossible to find and a huge reduction in transparency. For example: http://markavery.info/2014/10/21/awful-gov/

>I want to make a serious point here. This one single government website is less informative and less easy to use than its multiple predecessors. If you were the least bit suspicious of this government then you might think it had been done on purpose to obscure government actions and policies from the taxpayers who pay for it and the voters who might well choose another bunch of politicians in future.

>This government has done away with watchdogs and independent commissions who had the time and wit to question what government was doing on the environment and now it has obscured its own actions on its own website.

Also of note, supposedly "arms length" non-departmental government bodies like Natural England have also been subsumed by gov.uk, without anybody seeming to notice.

I've found that most of the Gov.UK stuff has actually been very good. A welcome redesign of a lot of godawful, confusing old websites that had no consistent interface from department to department. I still have to deal with the old HMRC website and it's such a pain in comparison. In order to file some documents you actually have to fill out a pdf form and submit data from there, rather than just using a simple webform...

For example, in a recent project I needed a list of bank holidays in the UK. Not only was it easy to find[0] all you need to do to get at the data in a usable format is add a '.json' to the URL. Same goes for the list of Courts and Tribunals[1]. It's a fantastic service and I'm fully behind them replacing ageing government portals and applications with it.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/bank-holidays [1] https://courttribunalfinder.service.gov.uk/search/

Also regards to The Register's 'trendy' accusation: GDS chooses what works over what's trendy for everything critical: their apps work without AJAX and CSS too.

In particular, looking for information (say, on immigration rules) can be almost impossible: between the seemingly random "see also" links, overuse of pdfs (and pdf landing pages) and lack of coherent indexing, I've wasted a lot of time trying to find what I needed.

There are certainly aspects of the new sites which need improvement from my perspective. GDS seem to be weak on taxonomies/organising large amounts of information, for example: https://www.gov.uk/business-finance-support-finder/search - even their drop-down filters can be unwieldy.

Likewise, the users who are unhappy are the wonks, the experts, the niche users etc (certainly including a select few who have the advantage of their own platform to amplify their disdain) and they certainly need catering for. But there's nothing to indicate that their needs won't be satisfied. Are they the highest priority when the 'Digital by Default' policy is also borne in mind? Some of those users will be unnecessary casualties and care should have been taken to recognise their user needs, but it wouldn't be the first time in history that someone screwed up by not doing so.

I'm anticipating continuous improvement of these sites, rather than the "this is going to be the website for the next ten years" approach. There's a realistic chance that things will gradually improve. The piece seems to imply that the job is done on these sites, when the likelihood is that the job will never be 'done'.

Some points to bear in mind about the piece itself. One, it's Andrew Orlowski. I like him and I tend to go to his stuff when I want to read a divergent opinion, but I bear in mind that he's not much of a fan of things that occurred after the turn of the millennium. Two, it's not hard to find people in Whitehall and out in the country who have their own agendas and/or empires, and are well-connected with sympathetic hacks (who might also have their own agenda). Some of them might even live in glass houses.

It's telling that HMRC is held up as some paragon of design and user-friendliness. The Self Assessment website has barely changed in several years, and that's a bad thing as it's always been extremely confusing to use - particularly for new users.

The GDS was created because a Government minister (Maude), who was enthusiastic about digitising the interactions between the government and its citizens (an entirely laudable goal), was sold a pig in a poke by people who saw the opportunity to advance or enrich themselves.

Martha Lane Fox is an ex-consultant, whose sole achievement of note was to have been the co-founder of Lastminute.com, which was lucky enough to IPO right at the very peak of the dot-com bubble. Since then, she's sat on on the boards of various companies and charities. Fortunately for her, everyone seems to have forgotten that Lastminute.com was never profitable and was eventually acquired for less than half its IPO valuation, so she was able to buy enough positive PR to convince the government to make her the "Champion for Digital Inclusion", during which time she commissioned a report from some consultants - http://www.go-on.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pwc_report... - which claimed that the government could save £900m if the "digitally excluded" got online.

Mike Bracken had zero experience in government or the public sector before being appointed as head of the GDS. His previous role was as "Director of Digital Development" for the Guardian, so his expertise is in running websites (and the infrastructure supporting apps) for a newspaper.

The GDS started off by creating the Alphagov prototype, which was essentially a pretty-looking static-HTML portal with zero functionality (all the links went back to the original websites). They then presented it to the powers that be, saying "Look, we can digitise the whole of government and make it look like this, AND save hundreds of millions of pounds!" (pointing to Martha's report as supporting evidence).

Francis Maude believed them and gave them the budget to recruit hundreds of Nathan Barley types (with more than a little cronyism and jobs-for-mates), with puffed-up CVs and a vocabulary full of buzzwords, and gave them grand titles (and grander salaries - Mike Bracken's base salary is over £150,000). Their few unqualified successes have been very low-hanging fruit. Most of what they've delivered has been worse than what was there previously, and in a few cases (e.g. trying to apply Agile methodology to the Universal Credit project at the DWP), they've screwed up massively and ended up wasting millions.

If there was ever a proper independent review of what GDS has delivered, there would be front page headlines about how much money has been wasted. Unfortunately, the public sector has always been bad at admitting to mistakes or underdelivery, and the GDS, in particular, is one big gravy train. Any suggestion that things aren't going well is hushed up and brushed under the carpet, so that those at the top can hang on to their little empire and their well-paid jobs. Needless to say, any dissension from within the ranks has the potential to be severely "career-limiting", so those further down the foodchain who have any sense have either left or decided to keep the gravy flowing for as long as possible by keeping their mouths shut and their heads down.

Meanwhile, Martha Lane Fox was made a Baroness, and Mike Bracken was given a CBE.