House and Inland Revenue

House
I've been thinking for a while that I should get more pictorial and I finally got around to it this weekend. I keep wittering on about the pots at the front of my house and my small back garden but have never included any pictures. So, below is my back garden as it was last year in late May. The flowers in the left foreground are Salvia Pratensis which grow in profusion by the wayside here and from which I pinched a couple of specimens; they've since self-seeded.

And below that is the front of the house a couple of years ago when long-time friend and some time colleague Alan Knight came to visit with his partner. I'll try to include more photos in the future (he promised).








Government Intelligence
I seem to have resolved my differences with the Inland Revenue in England, at least in theory. The result in practice remains to be seen. However, the Glasgow office has admitted that it has no knowledge of the letter sent to me by their Nottingham office containing instructions on submitting my self-assessment return and, moreover, that had they had it the current misunderstandings would not have arisen. My reaction was to ask the Glasgow office to request a copy of the letter from their Nottingham office so the matter can be resolved. This, apparently, is not possible; I have to send Glasgow a copy of the letter from their Nottingham office. Joined up government? Dream on!

The stupid thing is that all such situations can be resolved by the simply ploy of having personal models. All it needs is for government departments/agencies to have a unique ID for each person they deal with common to all financial communications and to build a simple IT model around that. All communications are then attached to, and retrievable from, that model; it really is that simple. The Swedish government has had such a system for decades but made the mistake of making the social security number the unique ID for all individuals for all purposes. This makes it too easy for hackers to get at personal information of all kinds. What is needed is an ID that is unique for a specific set of purposes but not for all.

Around three decades ago an inspired IT manager at the Royal Marsden hospital, Jo Milan, recognised the problem and created an IT patient model. This is several orders of magnitude more difficult than creating a personal financial model yet he managed it with arcane and barely adequate IT facilities. The achievement was totally ignored, indeed rendered infeasible, by government when it came out with recommendations for computerising hospital systems. Three decades on, it seems that government intelligence remains, as ever, an oxymoron.