Sounds like the kind of lash-up that in a world of crystalline perfection should be audited, and a new system built from the ground up.

Like HS2 and other capital projects. I think of them as the equivalent of follies in the eighteenth century: consciously or not providing redistribution of wealth during fallow times, whilst not undermining patronage or the value of labour.

  Yeah right.

Actually, it is (or was) regularly audited, ISO Certification and all that, but because it's so massive the actual audit could only be done on bite-sized pieces. The issues for rebuilding are as numerous as a big numbery thing and I'm not sure what kind of appetite HMRC has for mega-rebuilds. They got a nasty bite from flirting with Hadoop a while back.

@Milko, I'm sure a good Keynesian argument could be made. Problem is we (maybe) leave the EU in a few weeks and at best we get a transition of less than 2 years at which point the systems must chug along as sweetly as they do now. If there's no deal and no transition then Shit Creek is low on paddles.

@DSSMITHHFX, I'm not in the least bit surprised. Public projects like this have a history of never learning from the previous fuck-up. They almost always aim to select the best (=cheapest) bids but simultaneously fail to spot that there's a reason those bids are the cheapest. Also, senior managers in the public service are notoriously fond of shiny things when they buy IT. If they can see a shiny icon (on the shiny new laptop that comes with the project) and clicking the icon makes shiny things happen, then they invariably pony up the funding even if it's a million miles from what the business needs.
 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system

Original estimate & launch date: $310 million, 2015

Current estimate: $2.2 billion, still not working.

Lots of finger-pointing, no accountability.

Interesting summary on wikipedia - and probably, when it comes to causes, some truth in all of them. I have to say that IBM has been one of the better companies I've worked with. OK, they're money-making bastards like all the rest, but generally, and at a personal level, they do seem to aim at ethical behaviour. 

The "Quality" view, in all its depressing incarnations, is that it's cheaper to do it right first time. That was actually Phil Crosby's mantra. DIRFT. OK, in the real world that's no more than the benefit of hindsight, but when we're looking at public spending project disasters it does at least pay some dividends to look at the early stages. And yep! Nearly an 800% overspend, because correcting errors is bloody expensive.

I can't tell you how much I hate quality management in all its forms. Unless I just did.

> My guess would be that they are doing almost nothing because these systems are almost incomprehensibly huge and complex with inter-dependencies that are probably not even known in detail, parts dating back to the 1980s, 3rd party elements (e.g. SAP, IBM, BMC, etc etc) that are black boxes and so on. Any modelling of alternatives in anything other than the broadest most superficial ways would be a) very difficult b) very time consuming and c) most important, very expensive.

Sounds like the perfect opportunity to offshore it to the cheapest team of underskilled front-end developers they can find, who will proceed to build it in whatever the current five favourite JavaScript frameworks are. :P

Hah! How dare you hint at the truth. Of course, one of these sad truths beginning to come home to some of our captains of finance is that the IT churning machine of Mumbai isn't Bombay any more and that just because you can get something wacked out at a bargain price in some shitty ERP shell, doesn't mean it'll be you who creams off the profit.

The other little nuisance is that it's hard to offshore anything that smells as though it might dish the dirt on UK tax liability. Imagine the annoyance if details of Jacob R M's tax affairs leaked out because his data found its way abroad. So we bring the buggers over here under various schemes. See how those damn natives love a decent wage - I mean it's still cheaper than paying our locals. But then there are complaints about that. I mean, how's an honest exploiter supposed to earn a living?

Third time lucky... not.

Not a fucking clue what happens now.

Ideally a general election, but can't actually see Labour winning that in the current climate. Mess.

Even a second referendum would probably result in a Leave vote again.

Current polls have stay ahead.

 :-((

thing with a second GE is that the media has to show a modicum of even-handedness with their reporting, by law. So last time there was a GE all the predictions were for a Tory whitewash and we know how that worked out. This time Labour aren't starting from so far back, despite the effort of the Tinge (or the CUKs as they now want to call themselves for some reason). I mean, it's still pretty grim, but there's a little hope.  

Well obviously you switch from Mumbaikars to Romanians - they have paler skin, closer accents, less alien names, and of course it wont be long now until Romania is a full EU member making travel even easier...

I can't see anyone winning - Labour and Conservatives have both pissed off so many people, but then no idea how many will still vote for them given the lack of any other option...

What happens if there's another hung parliament but nobody can build enough support to make a coalition?

I'd love it if the country united behind writing "Fuck off all of you" across the boxes and the majority was spoilt ballots.

Then you'd just have the royal family to run things.

Those bunch of turds don't give a shit.

'course not, as long as we keep paying them for whatever it is they do then the concerns of the little people can go hang.

If May resigns her post she's only going inflame the haters ire, in that she's stubbornly dug this pit we're all in, but as we're scrabbling for ladders, she walks away from the mess embarrassed and defeated, but away from the spotlight (a la Cameron) leaving the next poor sod to shoulder the burden of blame. Who that particular job falls to is anyone's guess at the moment. The polls I saw were favouring Gove for the role. If that happens and he's unelected or as the result of a GE, I can see more than effigies being dragged through the streets of London.

Just read that Jeremy Hunt is throwing his hat into the I wanna be the PM ring. That sends a cold shiver down my spine.

Who is the least bad candidate?