Getting from A to B never cost so much!

According to figures released by the Department of Transport and placed in the House of Commons library, the total "expected" maintenance cost in 2008-09 for all websites under its remit is going to be £7,438,994 (give or take 50p).

The winner for the most expensive website is not however the department's main website (which incidentally I think is the best and easiest to navigate of all the departments). That one is expected to cost £730,000 to maintain this year.

No, the most expensive website is Transport Direct. A rather ugly portal site that talks to lots of other sites and gets you information about traffic, bus timetables, rail timetables, airport landing times etc. How much is it expected to cost this year? £4,750,000.

One presumes that when you submit a request to it what really happen is that fires an email off to a large sweatshop of workers who either dial 118 and ask them for the answer or they look through bus timetables manually.

Crisis? What crisis?

Some may or may not be aware of something called a "crisis loan". These are loans that the Government give to those who find themselves really strapped and up against the wall in the short term. They are usually given out to people in dire emeregency and the amount given is variable.

Below is a graph that shows the number of crisis loans processed for people of working age from Novmebr 1998 to October 2008. The figure were sourced in a document deposited in the House of Commons library in a response to a question by Chris Grayling last week.


That's an impressively steep incline from a pretty static trend there don't you think.?All of sudden there was a sharp increase in the number of people on the brink and in need of short term cash help. Now I'd say that steep incline represents a blatent warning sign that something bad was starting to happen.

Shame no one noticed earlier huh?

How we love Prorogation as an excuse!

Every now and again you get a sequence of questions in hansard that garner some great information and then hit a brick wall at the end that makes you think "hmmm how very convenient". Take for example:

Mr. Peter Ainsworth: To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs how many legal proceedings naming his Department as a defending party are ongoing or unresolved; and if he will make a statement.

Huw Irranca-Davies: The number of legal proceedings where the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has been named as a defending party which are ongoing or unresolved is 81.

Mr. Peter Ainsworth: To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs how many legal proceedings naming his Department as a defending party are under appeal.

Huw Irranca-Davies: The number of legal proceedings under appeal in which the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has been named as the defending party is three.

Mr. Peter Ainsworth: To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs what provision his Department has made in its budget for 2008-09 for potential civil liabilities stemming from legal proceedings.

Huw Irranca-Davies: It has not proved possible to respond to the hon. Member in the time available before Prorogation.

Not time to find the figure in the budget that relates directly to the previous two questions? I look forward to seeing the answer when Parliament reopens but I won't hold my breath.

The cost of the single payment scheme

Over the past few years the "Single Payment Scheme" for famrers out of the hellish EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has been famed for fiasco.

Last week, DEFRA confirmed to Parliament however how much it cost just to administer the system over the past three years which ammounted to a grand total of £298.4 million. Crucially, and this is the bit that leapt out for me in Hansard were the words,

These costs exclude the investment in new systems and improvement projects.

So, that figure is just the operating cost of making sure people receive their money, approximately £99 million a year. The "investment in new systems" that the figure does not include would be the £122 million spent on the, not-on-time, over-budget, computer system to manage the payments of the subsidies that are worth £1,515 million per year.

Bargain!

Government Website of the Day

Potatoes for Schools. Who ever thought that potatoes actually cared about the state of education huh?

Check in next week for the "King Edwards for History" website and the "Duke of York for Divorce" campaign!

6.2 million RAF Personnel documents stolen

The Ministry of Defence have admitted, in response to a Parliamentary question, that in August 2008, three USB portable hard drives were stolen from a "secure computer facility at RAF Innsworth". The incident happened sometime between 22 August and 17 September 2008. The contents of the stolen drives "6.2 million documents containing an archive of RAF personnel information".

Clearly the "secure facility" is not that secure. Mind you it could be that the theives used a stolen or lost security pass in order to get in. Either way, an archive of 6.2 million personnel documents is now out there.

One hopes that it has been deleted and the theives had no ulterior motive. If a list like that fell into the hands of terrorists then that would be a wealth of useful information for what would be considered "legitimate targets".

I would've thought such a fresh and recent admission of not just a security breach in a "secure facility" but also the loss of exceptionally sensitive data would have got some coverage, although I guess it did come about on the same day the Damien Green mess kicked off.
Source: Hansard

Toys....

I'm sure this post will upset one or two Apple lovers and iPhone users, but last week I got the new Google G1 phone which runs Android. I have to say, having played around with it now for almost a week I love it.
I'm yet to see the absolue killer app in the Android Market where there are scores of freebie downloads, but I do think that Andorid may very well become a killer OS on phones. The key to that success is going to be the fact that it is open source so anyone, Sony, Nokia, LG, Samsung etc can use it on their own hardware.

I would be surprised if Symbian on the Nokia does not start going the way of the dinosaur in the next year or so as Android development continues. The battle of the phone units will then become OS related rather than hardware with one OS to beat, the iPhones.

The problem that Apple have with iPhone, as it stands at least, is that it is hardware restricted, just like the bad old days of Apple and its early systems when IBM and Microsoft turned up. Back then you only got Apple OS on a machine from Apple, there were no clones from other hardware vendors. Today the iPhone is in the same category.

The next few years in the mobile phone market are going to be interesting to say the least. Let's not forget of course that Windows Mobile is out there too (also shipping, like the G1, on HTC hardware). I do love having a qwerty keyboard back though!

'Microsoft' Terrorism Survival Guide?

Get it for your Windows Phone here.

NOTE: Not really by Microsoft just distributed by them. Hence the ' ' in the title.
Via comment from T England

No jaw-jaw from Brown?

Having finally watched the video below that is doing the rounds I noticed something.
No dropping jaw like we have from Brown now. So would anyone care to speculate on why today Brown's jaw drops constantly when he pauses and breathes and yet back then it didn't?

Blogging to be light today....

Blogging has been non-existent over the weekend and will continue to be light just for today. I have a deadline to meet.