wikipedia wrote:The system was originally introduced in 1995 on a pilot basis in a small number of Post Offices, alongside a joint work programme between the Department of Social Security's Benefits Agency and Post Office Counters Ltd. The objective of this programme (known as the BA/POCL Programme) was to provide an automated system for making benefits payments through Post Offices and thereby reduce fraud.
At the Conservative Party conference in October 1995, the social security minister Peter Lilley brandished a smartcard as the intended replacement for the benefit book, declaring that, with the Benefits Agency and ICL, Post Office Counters Ltd would install smartcard reading terminals at every branch, through a private finance initiative (PFI) to be delivered under a commercial contract. At the time smartcards were under consideration as part of the full system, but a final choice of technologies had not been made.
After a lengthy competitive procurement exercise which began in late 1994, the contract for further development and full implementation in all Post Offices was awarded in May 1996 to ICL's Pathway division, which had been created for the purpose.[13] ICL later became part of Fujitsu.
In 1999, four years and £700m of taxpayers' money after the pilot scheme began, the Government, by now Labour, stopped the scheme in its tracks. The Department of Social Security withdrew from the deal, leaving ICL/Fujitsu to run the system. ICL has since criticised the PFI payment criterion: it would have been paid partly on how many customers Post Offices attracted. "Looking back, I think it was over-ambitious," said Stuart Sweetman in 2001, as the then group managing director of customer and banking services for Consignia, the name used at the time for Post Office Counters Ltd. "You can't export all the risk to a supplier."
Roujin wrote:How much jail time do you get for falsely imprisoning 39 people?
g.man wrote:The Dwarf Union will be up in arms about that.
g.man wrote:They're striking for less...
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