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Universal Credit for couples - I’m confused
Daily Telegraph 9 December 2013 -
“Universal Credit IT system cannot yet cope with couples or people with children, officials admit”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10507067/Universal-Credit-IT-system-cant-yet-cope-with-couples.html
- yet the video on this Gov.uk page, citing Universal Credit as an ‘exemplar’ of digital transformation, specifically talks about the customer claim portal taking account of the complexities of dealing with couples -
https://www.gov.uk/transformation/apply-universal-credit
“Watch a demonstration of the service built by the Government Digital Service and DWP, delivered in October 2013.
Delivered a digital strategic solution on 3 October 2013.”
Ah, but they’ve decided to pull the GDS stuff out of Universal Credit.
“Look - that bit works”!
“Can’t have that, it would raise expectations - dump it”!
More seriously, as the video says that is showing a proof of concept. Even if the actual claim screen shows an option to say that the claim is being made by a couple then, as new claims aren’t being taken from couples, all the system will do is say ‘go away’. The processing of couples isn’t working in the back-office system. It’s also going to be interesting to see how much actually gets done on-line in the future as Howard Shiplee (I nearly wrote Harold Shipman) said “From a security point of view, to have everything digital is not at this stage of development a sensible or appropriate solution, it will take some considerable time to get to a totally online system”.
[ Edited: 12 Dec 2013 at 12:54 pm by Gareth Morgan ]Thanks Gareth - so can we infer that these [abortive] front end claiming screens were developed entirely in isolation from the actual back end processing functions?
Paul T has already posted this link on another thread —UC on mobile phone—
http://brianwernham.wordpress.com/2013/12/10/breaking-news-universal-credit-v3-0-running-on-mobile-phone-video-demo/
“The 40 strong joint GDS/DWP v3.0 team followed an Agile Project Management approach. It was ‘Agile’ and ‘test driven’, rather than ‘specification driven’. The software was developed in 2 week ‘sprints’ in DWP’s offices over a period of just 3 months.”
The background to this seems to be a DWP vs Govt digital services battle for who gets the enormous booby prize of responsibility for UC
...can we infer that these [abortive] front end claiming screens were developed entirely in isolation from the actual back end processing functions?
I don’t know but that’s actually a very sensible approach, to separate the data collection from the processing; it makes things much more flexible.
Have a look at http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/public-sector/3493315/most-universal-credit-interactions-will-be-face-face-by-telephone-or-by-post/ which lead to a few interesting links. The Universal Credit Journey is where the bit that says “After you make your Universal Credit claim, most interactions will be face to face, by telephone or by post. In time the range of Universal Credit activities that can be done online will increase” is found.