A scheme that cost £6 million of taxpayers hard earned cash which teaches teenagers about contraception and drugs actually saw an INCREASE IN PREGNANCY!
Local authorities have now been told that £72 million of taxpayers hard earned cash has been wasted on a computer system to protect vulnerable children because it is actually a danger to them!!!
It generated stacks of paperwork 6 inches thick FOR EACH CHILD! Baroness Morgan, the childrens minister has written to councils telling them they can abandon the controversial system which took up 80% of social workers time and had no way of tracking the siblings of abused children.
Tim Loughton, shadow childrens minister said "Ed Balls has finally had to admit what front line social owrkers have known all along - the Governments Integrated Childrens System was at best a waste of money and at worst a danger to children".
ICS stores case records about children at risk of abuse and was introduced in the wake of the Laming report which revealed that information sharing failures at Haringey Council led to the death of Victoria Climbie in 2000.
In a report following the death of Baby P, the investigating Task Force said that the system kept social workers "tied up in bureaucracy" and away from actually working in the field!
So, what are they going to do?
FFS!!!
Time and again this government writes database systems from the top down needs of the state for stats, rather than the needs of staff.
ReplyDeleteI don't know who is designing their systems or who the programmers are but they're shit!!!
ReplyDeleteEDS and Crapita and they're shite.
ReplyDeleteBoth outsourcing companies, figures. I worked for a company in the UK a few years ago that got a team of Indians in to do the systems design and programming.
ReplyDeleteNice chaps, we used to meet in the Smoking Bus Shelter provided by the company at the back of the building. They couldn't speak much English though and I was taught that before you begin a systems project, that you get the users to fill out questionnaires as to THEIR requirements.
Needless to say, the system was 2 years late and was total crap!
Many moons ago, I used to work for Avon & Somerset Police as a Comms Op. It was decided that the system of Call Logging and Despatching then in use was well past its sell-by date. No argument from anyone...it was.
ReplyDeleteSo the bosses called in a hugely well known firm to design them an all singing-all dancing replacement.
This was brought and we all had to go on two week courses to learn how to operate the system. Within two days every operator was complaining that it was unwieldy and cumbersome. Even worse was the fact that every Force resource (ie..those officers on duty at the time) could be wiped off the system by ONE operator making a simple (and easily made) mistake.
Eventually they bought an off the shelf design from another firm which worked superbly.
Twats.
I sometimes wonder why we worry about this government's drive for e-totalitarianism. They actually find it impossible to get a system designed that works properly.
ReplyDeleteIt's the money that's wasted and the risk to our data that is worrying as a consequence!
Incompetents, if only they would get a few good software engineers together who actually knew what a "feasibility study" was all about :)
Ho-hum!