Canaries in the mine

Abstract

For some years now the UK government has used a lot of resources building up what they have come to call ‘-government’, by which they mean government services facilitated by computing technologies. Unfortunately, if reports¹ about government information systems failures are to be believed, their record of designing, building and managing these systems is not encouraging. There have been a range of problems, for example, relating to the national DNA database, the Criminal Records Bureau Database, a variety of children’s databases, the Child Support Agency (now scrapped), the Police National Computer (PNC) system, the Department for Work and Pensions system,² the scanning and creation of a digital population database (outsourced to India), the Passport Agency computer system, the Immigration and Asylum system, a £100 million Violent Criminals Database (scrapped in 2000 after being criticised by police and probation services as a disaster);³ and more recently the national identity card system and the National Health Service (NHS) information system.