There seems to be growing problem with the reliability and legality of digital government programmes.

These problems range from breaches of the rule of law to the routine loss or alteration of data in mission critical national systems — a problem worryingly similar to the failed Post Office Horizon system.

Examples being reported include:

  • Universal Credit: the digital system’s design breaches the rule of law, fails to properly implement legislation, and routinely leads to wrong amounts being awarded to claimants, often the most vulnerable, leaving some in acute hardship.
  • Courts: staff in magistrates’ courts report that the flawed Common Platform routinely loses and alters case records.
  • Home Office: the Atlas immigration system has left colleagues sobbing because official data can ‘evaporate’, with people logging in to find “photographs or visa details often relating to complete strangers attached to their records”.
  • Ofsted: inspectors find the system crashes unexpectedly and loses all their notes from interviews.

We’re in the fourth decade of UK government ambitions to modernise and improve public administration and our national institutions. It’s time to identify and fix the underlying causes of failure — and reset digital government initiatives onto a better, and more successful, track.

You can read the full details and my analysis in my Computer Weekly article Digital government: problems on the horizon.