This is one of the few times I agree 100% with conservatives. The very concept of the database is dubious, and the implementation is almost a paradigmatic example of waste. It amazes me that this is not a bigger scandal than it is in Canada.
The number (as I'm sure you know) typically quoted in the media, in Canadian dollars, is $1 Billion dollars.
If you went out onto the street in Canada and did a survey with one question: "How many Million dollars are in a Billion dollars", what percentage of people would be able to answer that question correctly. I would guess well below 50%. Literally not knowing how much it actually cost is the only thing that would explain to me the public apathy....other than apathy about almost everything actually important, which is the simpler explanation.
I'd like to see our new overlords impose a windfall tax on Accenture, EDS, IBM and all the rest. Start by clawing back the £20Bn the useless, unwanted NHS IT system cost.
Tho' to be fair, sacking civil servants (with no pension) when the projects they oversee overrun by an order of magnitude would go a long way to restoring some semblance of order. Remember that the British civil service once administered the Empire - most of the known world - with a fraction of its present staff and no IT at all...
Of couurse they had IT. IT in those days was the army of shipwrights, engineers and sailors that kept messages flowing from port to port and city to city.
And there were a lot of fat cat bureaucrats living off government largesse.
And I have a lot more respect for their modern counterparts than those ancient oppressors. (Not to say we moderns are blameless in any way.)
A lot of the Empire was created directly by commercial concerns (e.g. East India Company) and only taken over and managed directly by the state when things got out of hand (India's First War of Independence/Great Rebellion).
£35 million to provide a great deal of useful information on starting and running a business, and how to navigate the required government bureaucracy? Well, it's not cheap, but things that are worth having rarely are.
Of course, we could make things simpler so such an explanation is not required and everyone could just read the statutes, but given the world we live in, it's not so expensive for the useful information it contains. If I drill-down randomly, I get to "Taxes, returns & payroll > PAYE for employers > PAYE if your business closes or changes > If you no longer employ anyone and don't plan to do so again." That's pretty specific and useful. There are 10-20 categories per level, and 4 levels, and >100 words per article, giving a total of at least one million words of well categorised, useful business advice and information.
£35 a word all-in? Sure, it sounds pricey. Poor value for money? Then you have to make an argument that the website doesn't provide that much value.
I've heard of things not too far from this in Big Non-Techie Corporate America as well, and universities also (both public and private). Seems to be some function of large-budget organizations buying things they don't understand. There are entire consulting companies that seem to specialize in building these super-expensive Enterprise Portals for large organizations. (I have no idea how you break into that business.)
Doing a quick search shows the website is more than just a custom cms as the article suggests. Several other .gov.uk refer to the website with "[...]is now available at www.businesslink.gov.uk" so there must have been a huge conversion leading up to the launch. Also this quote:
It has three main types of information:
* text content explaining regulations and other areas of business [...]
* directory content
* interactive tools
According to this [1] it costs £2.15 a hit. Which isn't that bad spending wise if you consider the worst website in the UK government cost £11.78 per visit.
Heh, welcome to the world of government spending. What you can see on this list is really just corruption as usual - i.e. quangos assigning large amounts of public money to their friends and relations. In return certain recipient organisations or companies may or may not make donations to certain political parties, who in turn may or may not be able to pay increased salaries to high ranking party members and spend more money on campaigning.
Not very, in my experience. Although they were very helpful on exporting goods, every other question I had was either answered incorrectly (!) or met with 'we can't give legal/accounting advice' - which is understandable but I did tell them my questions beforehand so they could have avoided a wasted meeting.
They then tried to persuade me to use a particular SEO company - so I left.
Your experience of Business Link and what it can offer you is largely down to the postcode that you live in. In the good old days of the 90's and 00's the Government would throw resources at an area based on some criteria it had set. Year on year, postcode by postcode this would change.
Fairly hopeless. It's less about startups/business than it is about people becoming self-employed. I've tried it in various areas, from the shit to the affluent - always abysmal.
I'm currently observing a government department that is in the process of attempting to put a little web portal on their mainframe, an approach that's adding seven figures (at least) to the bill. That's the way they do things in the government. Choose the most cumbersome, inefficient, insecure and technologically arcane approach and run with it.
My spouse used to work as a lawyer in the Civil Service - I was highly amused to discover that when she brought work home it was carefully tied up in yards of real red tape.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Firearms_Registry#Cost...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2004/02/13/gunregistry_rdi04021...
This is one of the few times I agree 100% with conservatives. The very concept of the database is dubious, and the implementation is almost a paradigmatic example of waste. It amazes me that this is not a bigger scandal than it is in Canada.