WRITTEN ON July 10th, 2008 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Power of Information
Here’s our* first suggestion for the Showusabetterway competition:
Name: Thanks-but-Ill-do-the-personalising-myself-if-you-dont-mind-ta-very-much.gov.uk
Description: DIY Personalised services
Datasets required:
– DWP and HMRC benefits rules engines
– HMRC tax computation engine
– listing of health services and facilities
– rules according to which health services are made available
– ditto for education and leisureHow it works:
User describes their own circumstances (or those of someone for whom they act as carer or guardian) on their own system (local PC or web site). It then draws on government lists of public service outlets and rules of entitlement to model what welfare/pension credits/tax breaks, health services the user is entitled to, or would get if their circumstances changed (eg children, divorce, moving house). Then the user can initiate those services to which they’re entitled and which they want, or opt out of non-mandatory services or notifications which they’re not interested in.
Does that work? Power of Info is not meant to be about government-held personal data, and accordingly this assumes the personal data is held and processed by the user. Glad of comments. Our = Mydex and friends of Mydex – cheers C.
4 Responses to “Thanks-but-Ill-do-the-personalising-myself-if-you-dont-mind-ta-very-much.gov.uk”
Where do I sign up 🙂
I think on a privacy v computation v bandwidth trade-off, it would almost always make more sense to execute the rules locally than via a remote API. The guvmint could even multicast rules and updates to save further bandwidth.
It’s a nice idea, but unfortunately the ‘DWP rules engine’ (if such a thing exists) will be next to useless if the quality of day to day decision-making is anything to go by.
The benefit system is *so* complex, with significant amounts of benefits being awarded on a subjective rather than objective basis, that the results of user initiated queries would either be slanted towards the negative interpretation of circumstances(for instance, not including an award of Disability Living Allowance) which would restrict peoples ability to make informed decisions, or would have a positive slant which could be just as dangerous, encouraging people to make life changing decisions, which could turn out to be financially unsustainable once a real-life decision maker has decided to refuse a certain benefit.
This definitely works for me. One note: although it would be better if the rules could be downloaded, maybe an open anonymous remote API(web service, etc) for each section would work as well?
For example, rather than get the tax computation rules, submit the minimum tax data into the gov’s real algorithm and get the result. I’m not talking about having a website where the user has to type in their name, address, job details, etc, but exposing the core API that would be used to calculate the tax anyway. This could be used by your application which makes multiple requests to the back-ends and produces a combined overview of your situation.