Unreliable Public Transport

So much for trying to get us out of our cars, you can see why they still rule the roost and why the government’s efforts to get us out of them are in vain. The minute we get hit with a few inches of snow, they all grind to a halt. I went to use a train this morning for my commute because I was worried about driving conditions, but they were out of action, so were the buses. So I reluctantly turned to my car and was able to complete my journey in about the same time as usual without incident.

Aside from cutting the huge cost of public transport, priority number one must be keep it running whatever the weather, surely? Where’s the transport minister? I’ll sort him out.

Women in the Workplace

Reading a recent BBC article on what would happen if women were legally required to make up a third of the workforce it clashed with my experience.

I have worked in various roles in various organisations which have had women in high-places positions, working alongside male colleagues and they have been respected and treated as equals.

Now in certain jobs (the article mentions the law profession) maybe their are things like the old boy network in operation, but by and large employers look for the best candidates and the reason there are fewer women in higher positions is, I think, more social than discriminatory.

With the bigger pay packets comes an expectation to work all the hours needed, possibly to do things like attend social events outside of hours, etc.  For both partners in a relationship to do this they would need no commitments, but when children enter the fray someone must put time aside to care for them.  Which means someone has to stay home.

Men can’t conceive children, it’s a simple fact, so if a couple decide to have a family the woman is going to have to have time off work to deliver the baby at the least.  Socially, it’s then accepted she will take time off for maternity and will likely become the primary carer while the man continues to work.  This is something that is ingrained in our society, whether you agree with it or not.

The fact that she has had time away from the workplaces means she has moved backwards by the time she returns and then still has ongoing commitments to her child, everything from collecting them from school, staying home when they’re ill, etc.  This means a woman can’t put in the extra hours expected.

Then there’s psychological reasons.  Men compete and drive for those top jobs, women, in my experience, don’t seem bothered in the same way about reaching these high-ranking positions.

And as for talk of making football teams or builders a trade where a third are women, there’s the simple fact that men are physically bigger and stronger and in some professions that’s important.  It doesn’t matter how skilful a player you are, if you can’t match the physical demands of the game you won’t make the grade.  That’s evolution, not discrimination.

More Website Rip-Offs

So I wrote about this last month but the BBC have announced the costings for another government website, which cost £105m over three years.

The COI report has some detail – £6.2m on strategy and planning, £4.4m on design and build, £4.7m on hosting and infrastructure, £15.3m on content provision and £4.5m on testing and evaluation. What I can’t work out is why that cost is repeated for three years.

Go and read some of the comments on that post to see the figures people who have built equivalent sites are quoting, the actual costs should be about 1% of the figure we, the tax payer, ended up paying.

Absolutely this is a complete rip-off. I know that part of the problem is the size company the government is forced to deal with (by its own rules) and long tender processes add expense. There’s also the issue that the government has to, and has, it’s own, expensive options in place because it requires security (the branch of the MOD I worked for had to run across a separate WAN created by BT, which cost just just that one department £300k a year), but this is still way over the top. Personally I’d like to see charges brought.

It’s not just services that need looking at though, some of commentators mention that staffing needs reviewing. There’s usually a cap on staff, but not on contractors, which means, you guessed it, lots of overpriced personnel to cover gaps.

To give you an idea, I showed some interest in the web in my time in IT support, so when we restructured the support teams I got asked to head up a new team to look after the internal and external websites. My team consisted of three people and our combined salaries for a month were less that the one contractor we replaced was paid for a week (he was on, I believe £650 a day, project managers were on £1000 a day).

Will it change, unlikely. Just remember when you hear all these headlines about job cuts in the civil service, what is actually happening is that they get rid of staff, but the work still needs to get done, so they hire contractors to fill the gaps who don’t get classed in the head count. So it’ll end up costing us more.

Will free schools benefit all?

My biggest fear for letting anyone setup and run a school is that it could mean segregation. If communities or religions think their children are not being properly catered for they’ll go off and set their own up and while they may have to be open to other students (I imagine that’ll be a pre-requisite) and have their curriculum reviewed they’ll end up catering for certain races and religions at the exclusion of others and we end up with school ghettos.

The Government and Data Protection

Only yesterday was I watching a programme featuring a story about how Customs and Revenue were doing things like assigning National Insurance numbers to people despite them already being used and sending out someone’s complete history of confidential details to the wrong person and getting outraged about their incompetence (I’ve worked for two branches of the civil service and can say with some knowledge of the subject that they’re useless, not generally because the staff are incompetent, but because they’re often under-resourced, under-staffed, with a lack of training and support and no motivation, added to which management with no clue seem to be on a mission to make their lives harder).

So when I read an article stating that Revenue and Customs had managed to lose data, including banking data, for every family in the UK with a child under 16 I was doubly outraged. For starters, why the hell was the data on a disk at all? Why was it taken outside of a secure environment, why was it not carried as if transferring weapons? Well, it was sent to the National Audit Office by unregistered internal mail. Not a good advert for the carrier, TNT. The chairman of HMRC (Her Majesty’s Customs and Revenue) did have the good sense to resign at least.