UK Government Tax Disc Renewal Website Buckles Under Pressure 145
An anonymous reader writes When you pay the tax on a road vehicle in the UK, you used to get a paper "tax disk" to affix to the inside of your car windshield. However the relevant records are documented electronically anyway, inspiring the government to replace the paper system with a purely online one. Unfortunately said system was still in beta when it launched today and predictably, it has broken under user demand. No alternative system is available. (The licensing agency actually ran out of the paper disks more than a month ago, and has been printing them out on normal office paper and asking vehicle owners to cut out the circle themselves.) The initiative is part of a larger "digital-first", restructuring of how the government provides services aimed at "meeting user needs".
Is this news? (Score:3, Insightful)
Another goverment project fails?
They all do.
If one would actually work perfectly from day 0, taht would be news!
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Re:Is this news? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a Government Digital Service initiative. It will have been built using open source products almost exclusively.
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Also, we're talking about a system that fundamentally just needs to collect some money and then update a simple database, on a scale of only thousands of users per day. If it weren't for the inevitable security/privacy/reliability concerns because this is an official government system, it's the kind of project a new web developer might write as an exercise in a day and a single properly configured web server would be expected to handle the entire load even at peak times.
Even with those concerns, I am strugg
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To follow up: I just spotted a note at the end of one of the articles suggesting that it wasn't actually the government's own systems that fell over, but rather something provided by Vodafone. I suppose that raises questions about why a system like this would need the services of a company like Vodafone for its implementation, but presumably this at least puts the outage in the "more subtlety in the real world implementation" group, which is reassuring in some ways.
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obviously the gov't went over their 10Gb/month cap.
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It probably depends on how you use it, if you have a issued renewal reference number then its easy.
Never done the hm gov prove your a 'human' registration route and if all the non car taxed cars applying for it on one day that might be the reason the system is overloaded as all the not taxed cars are being taxed all of a sudden.
I lost my photo id/paper license from the dvla an that took a couple of weeks with a paper from a post office to fix, although the online version of it looked hard work so i opted fo
Re:Is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Survivorship bias. You only read about them if they fail. You don't read about the ones that work because it's kind of a boring headline: "Computer system works properly; nobody complains"
Also I can count a large number of non-government systems that have folded under the zero-day load.
That's because you block ads (Score:2)
You don't read about the ones that work because it's kind of a boring headline: "Computer system works properly; nobody complains"
You usually read about success stories in advertisements: "$our_service helped $client take its service online and save $big_bucks. [See How]" If you block ads, you don't see them.
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Re:Is this news? (Score:4, Insightful)
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No. They really have introduced a new system, that is allegedly still in beta
https://www.gov.uk/tax-disc [www.gov.uk]
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I've just realized that they have a fucking unicorn in their coat of arms. Probably one of the very few governments in the world that does that :)
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They have to because it's Scotland's national animal. If the Scots had decided to bugger off last month we could have dumped it.
Timely... (Score:1)
Slashdot, as always.... very timely with its news. Only a day late on this one!
No alternative system is available ? (Score:5, Informative)
How about using the telephone, or calling in at your local Post Office? Both alternative systems and both available.
Re: No alternative system is available ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yesterday the phone service was offline too.
I know because I renewed yesterday.
The website was fineby the afternoon.
Why the service had trouble is a mystery to me, the only apparent difference is instead of saying your disc is in the post it now explains this is not required. Nothing new about anything else.
Jason
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and of course the cost savings of not having to manufacture, print, and post the decals every year, and the lower government labor costs from an entirely automated online system, will surely be passed on to taxpayers in the form of lower fees, right? right?? RIGHT???
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Lower fees? This is the system used for collecting a tax. The tax disc was there to prove to any passing police officers that you have paid the necessary tax to drive your car on UK public roads legally.
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The road tax is not hypothecated, it all just goes into the government's pockets and they'll decide what to do with the savings. They may choose to contribute it to a tax cut, or use it to help reduce the deficit or perhaps improve some service somewhere.
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I suspect that normally people renew a week or two or three in advance because they need the paper disc to come through in time so they can display it before expiration at the end of the month and hence the load is spread across a few weeks.
Now however, people probably just figured "Hey, I don't need the disc anymore, I'll do it last minute", hence why it was the last day of the month that it fell over- because everyone now figures they can wait until last minute to do it.
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The authorities are actually pretty good on this, a friend completely forgot to renew his altogether and drove around for 6 months before realising, he phoned the DVLA to admit his mistake and they just told him not to worry, that people forget and as long as he's happy to pay it there and then that they wouldn't see any reason to pursue it as the fact he'd called them to explain was evidence enough in their eyes that it was nothing more than an honest mistake and I know my father forgot to display his new
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The authorities are actually pretty good on this, a friend completely forgot to renew his altogether and drove around for 6 months before realising, he phoned the DVLA to admit his mistake and they just told him not to worry, that people forget and as long as he's happy to pay it there and then that they wouldn't see any reason to pursue it
Sounds nicer than the message you get from the website... I let my tax lapse by about a month a few years back, renewed on the website (paying the full amount from the date the old disc expired). The website displayed a warning after I'd paid which essentially boiled down to "you've paid now, but you screwed up and so we might come after you at some point in the future and fine you £oodles".
my father forgot to display his new disc once, got pulled, but they took no action after checking he had renewed online
My wife spent about 2 months over seas a few years ago, her tax disc expired while she was away and she didn't
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I've still had tax disc reminders this year, and my partner only just got hers even though she's in this first October tranche of no paper disc folks so even with the change to paperless taxation they're still sending out the reminders thankfully.
I agree about the MOT btw, I find it a royal pain in the arse because it's not like the tax disc where you get a reminder and do it online, as you say you get no reminder and then you're at the whims of the fucking garages as they determine when you must give up yo
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I agree about the MOT btw, I find it a royal pain in the arse because it's not like the tax disc where you get a reminder and do it online
When I let mine lapse by accident, I was sorting out the MoT for my car when I thought "I don't remember doing the van this year... oh crap", checked and discovered that I had indeed not done the MoT for the van 6 months earlier.
IMHO an annual check is a good idea, no matter how many miles you do - things still corrode when sat on your drive. I find the tax disc annoying because it's tied to emissions and claimed to be a "green tax" to discourage people from having vehicles that do poor mileage,
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We keep both cars in the garage though, so corrosion isn't really much of an issue. I can see that if we have a bad winter with lots of salt being spread corrosion certainly becomes more of a problem, but on a 7 year old car, doing 3000 miles a year, being kept in a garage, there's not really much that can go wrong.
I don't mind green taxes either as long as they're used to fund green things, but they never are. All money from supposed green taxes should go straight into funding installation of solar panels,
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I'm not sure how the online thing works - you'd probably have to plug in the MoT test certificate number and your insurance policy number. But it's been that long since I did that, I don't actually know.
Roa
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Technically, until recently it was totally illegal to drive a car around without a valid tax disc, even if you had paid for it. However, about five years ago, I received my new tax disc in the post and put it on the side ready to put it in my car the next time I used it. Then, about four years ago, I received my new tax disc in the post and put it on the side...
Re:No alternative system is available ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Their telephone system doesn't have enough capacity either. The Post Office is the only option really.
It's just incredible that they find this level of traffic surprising. They know exactly how many tax discs are due for renewal.
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Previously you could buy the old tax disc with the car, now you have to re-tax the vehicle straight away so demand would spike.
Re:No alternative system is available ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Their telephone system doesn't have enough capacity either. The Post Office is the only option really.
What's the betting that the post office and folks on the phone are just using the website anyway.
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The post office definitely isn't, they have always had an electronic system in place.
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Well actually they don't.
You're assuming everyone previously had a tax disk, which isn't true. One of the main reasons for the switch to this new system is to install ANPR cameras in all fuel stations to make avoidance near impossible.
So all the people without tax, would yesterday have been frantically trying to get it too I suspect.
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If you didn't have tax previously, you were driving your car illegally on the road (unless you were in one of the few tax exempt bands which don't require you to get a zero cost disc) and would have been caught long before by ANPR cameras already installed.
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Rather than having these people spread out over a week or so, they all decided to renew in what was likely just a 3 hour period so the system probably got many times the traffic it normally does.
Phased in (Score:2)
Or they could just waiting until their old tax disc expires/ receive their renewal notice before swapping to to the new system.
The majority of people whinging on twitter are just idiots.
Re: No alternative system is available ? (Score:2)
Australia can get it right (Score:3, Interesting)
We've had online registration and health care services for years. I haven't had to fill out a medicare form or go into a medicare office... ever. Not once in my adult life.
As for online vehicle registration. Thats state based instead of national (well we only have 7 states and 2 territories) my state, Western Australia did away with registration stickers that you would affix to your windscreen years ago... Before I got my drivers license in fact. Apart from a the tired whines of a few dullards who ignore the reminder the government sends them about their expiring vehicle registration six weeks in advance it's been a fantastic success.
If I need to know when my registration is up, I just look it up. If I want to know if the car I'm buying is registered (and for how long) I can just look up the number plate. About the only thing a malicious person can do on this website is pay my rego for me.
Re:Australia can get it right (Score:5, Informative)
The sole reason the website broke is because there was a massive upsurge in people accessing it, well beyond the normal rate for tax renewals as people were for some reason waiting for it.
I've done my previous 8 vehicle tax renewals online via the DVLA website just fine (yes, this isn't the first time you could buy your vehicle tax online, they've had it for years, all they are doing now is not sending you a physical tax disc) and the website has been fine - in this case I wouldn't lay all the blame on the service provider as they were working to previous usage levels that have been long established.
As for health care services, well I've never had to fill out a form relating to health care in the UK, I just receive the care that I need. Oh, and I can book appointments, order prescription renewals and even choose a specific doctor to have an operation with online. Have done for years :)
In summary, the system isn't as broken as the story makes out.
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Fair enough. Looks like I put too much trust in
Also it seems that they were phasing out the paper tax discs rather than running out.
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It seems to me that healthcare in Australia is much more effort to participate in. They have some sort of copayment system, and most people on a reasonable income have to take out private healthcare insurance to cover this. So not quite as universal the NHS, or even a lot of Europe and large parts of Canada for instance.
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I just receive the care that I need.
Rubbish. Living here now in the UK (from Australia) for the past couple of years, I can categorically attest that the NHS is both tragically underfunded and conversely, moronically inefficient. Yes I can see a GP for free, but quotas and waiting lists are ridiculous and it simply means that you don't get referred and you don't get treated unless bits are literally dropping off you. Turns out my son has Autism; pity the UK hasn't grasped the concept of "early intervention". The Australian system of a good mi
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Yes [in the UK] I can see a GP for free, but quotas and waiting lists are ridiculous and it simply means that you don't get referred and you don't get treated unless bits are literally dropping off you..
I dont think you understand how the UK NHS works. They make you wait for a long time for treatment in the hope that you will die first. It saves money.
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Tell me about it; experienced brokenness caused by central control yet again today.
Recent surgery has resulted in a painful infection, so I needed to go see a doctor today to get prescribed something to deal with it. My home practise had a walk in session but not starting until 10.30, so my options were either skip work for the morning to go there, or go into work and try and find something near work.
So I went to work figuring I could see someone at the practise near there. They can't see me because I'm not
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the US comparison is bogus
The US comparison is a bit of a sidetrack, and really only used to suggest how broken the UK's public health care system is. They main thrust here was to compare with the Australian system that is a mix between public and private. Private is incentivised by increased tax on higher income unless you have private health cover. Medicare (public health cover) will cover a portion of all private sessions even if you have no insurance, which further incentivises people to go private as it is more affordable. Ther
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I've lived in Canada, Australia and the UK. I prefer the system in Ontario where they are completely anti adding private in to the mix (although every company offering medical benefits for prescriptions seems to get ignored by voters). Private isn't the answer, and there's probably more to the story than that in Australia. Ridiculous rules like catchment areas (finally abolished this October) and limited opening hours, as well as lack of proactivity are the biggest failings in the NHS that I see. On the
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Depends how much spare capacity you want to keep around - by some accounts, the upsurge in visitors peaked around 400% over the same day the previous year, so do we really think keeping that amount of spare capacity in reserve, or building on a public cloud system for extremely rare occasions is worth it?
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Governments tend to employ job-for-life people who don't mix nearly enough with those in industry. Government management from the lowest to the highest levels are behind the times when it comes to IT so they end up spending more and achieving less than any free market company would.
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What's your point? The UK moved to a fully online vehicle registration system yesterday, can't you read? They are just having some zero-day issues, as most large-scale sites do. And the scale issues here are caused by exactly the dullards you're talking about - people who left it to the last possible day to renew, so have to renew *now* and not at leisure sometime in the next month. For anyone else it's not an issue that you might have problems renewing on day one.
One of the weird things about the new s
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The system isn't fully online, and you have always needed either the V5 document number or renewal number to buy your tax through the DVLA website anyway.
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Just a typical self-righteous Aussie. They live so far away from everybody else, in their insular little world of mostly white mono-cultural bigoted bogans
1956 called, it wants its demographic stereotypes back.
Australia has changed significantly in recent years. Even in the late-80s, people were complaining that "Neighbours" didn't reflect the multicultural reality of the country, and it's far moreso now. 2011 Census reveals one in four Australians is born overseas [abs.gov.au].
Just take the Tube from Heathrow
Yeah, Londoners. Never guilty of assuming the world revolves around *their* f****g insular metropolitan bubble, are they?
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Queensland here, we did away with our registration labels yesterday.
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What he said! Victoria has just done away with annual rego labels this year; the police have on line systems in cars that can lookup the registration plate number and see if it is current. I just pay the the bill online and that's it now. very convenient.
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Why cant the UK or US?
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We've had online registration and health care services for years. I haven't had to fill out a medicare form or go into a medicare office... ever. Not once in my adult life.
Living in the UK, I have never had to fill out a "medicare form" either. That's because we have a National Health Service.
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Living in the US, I have never had to fill out a Medicare form either.
And don't have to use paper much when dealing with the hospital/doctor - usually there's one form I have to initial four times, then sign (I really hope I'm not promising my first-born to Satan on that form), which I read once many years ago, and now just initial and sign.
Everything else - scheduling follow-ups, test results, etc. I get at their (nominally) secure (enough for HIPAA) websites....
Australia can get it right (Score:1)
That's right! In NSW there are no registration stickers anymore. Now that all Highway Patrol cars have automatic licence plate readers there is no point in attaching a sticker to your car. Registration is all done electronically.
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Not sure what you mean about the US not getting it right. Registration in the US is state by state; its not a federal issue.
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It's state by state in Australia too. You've seriously never noticed that people group things together when they have similar properties before?
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I dont know that its safe to assume anything about other country's states simply because they use the same word. I dont know anything about AU's states, and would not assume that you have anything like the 10th amendment or that they look anything like the US's states. Different countries, different circumstances when the country was formed, different constitutions.
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Sure, but the post you replied to explicitly stated that car registration was state based in Australia. Making it obvious hat they meant by "the US not getting it right" - that the way it seems to be handled in the various jurisdictions in the US isn't as good as the way it is handled in the various jurisidictions in Australia. Whether that is true or not is another matter, but it has nothing to do with federalism and state rights.
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Because Australia rocks?
Stupid (Score:1)
This is the dumbest thing. You've been able to renew your tax disc online for years now and the site's always been fine. You don't have to replace you're existing paper disc until it expires so I don't understand how they've taken a functional site, added barely any additional load and made it fall over.
I put it down to this (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the dumbest thing. You've been able to renew your tax disc online for years now and the site's always been fine. You don't have to replace you're existing paper disc until it expires so I don't understand how they've taken a functional site, added barely any additional load and made it fall over.
I put it down to many sites [theweek.co.uk] saying that anyone can check any cars status on the government's vehicle inquiry service [service.gov.uk] (currently down). Loads of people want to check whether their friends and neighbours cars are legal.
I put it down to this (Score:1)
There was a fair bit of coverage being all alarmist along the lines of "but how will you know if (car X, that isn't ours) is taxed or not?"
Answer 1: there's a website where you can look it up.
Answer 2: the car's not yours. It's none of your damned business whether it's taxed or not, and don't you have better things to do? The government are apparently content they can prevent car tax dodging, so that should be enough. We don't make people display a certificate of having done their tax return in their window
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Loads of people want to check whether their friends and neighbours cars are legal.
Is this a cultural thing? Around here we definitely wouldn't be doing that to our "friends" and we would only do that to neighbors we actively hate to the point of almost being willing to frame them for crimes.
Can you explain this from a cultural perspective?
I can explain our cultural perspective: we generally dislike the government, so we would have to hate someone pretty badly in order to find it attractive to harm them by helping the government. Furthermore, this also seems offensive culturally because i
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Britain has a lot of little Hitlers who resent rules, but nonetheless love trying to help enforce petty rules. They usually are employed somewhere as a "jobsworth" (google the term) but when they are off the clock they enjoy continuing to be a jobsworth-type of person.
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Loads of people want to check whether their friends and neighbours cars are legal.
Is this a cultural thing? Around here we definitely wouldn't be doing that to our "friends" and we would only do that to neighbors we actively hate to the point of almost being willing to frame them for crimes.
Can you explain this from a cultural perspective?
I can explain our cultural perspective: we generally dislike the government, so we would have to hate someone pretty badly in order to find it attractive to harm them by helping the government. Furthermore, this also seems offensive culturally because it represents meddling in others' affairs. Certainly not something one would do to a friend.
In general, Britain has an anti-sneak culture, so I doubt many people would literally report their neighbour. It's more likely to be general nosiness.
In any case, the police have been able to do a live check on tax/insurance for ages now, so they don't really need members of the public helping them out.
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In general, Britain has an anti-sneak culture, so I doubt many people would literally report their neighbour. It's more likely to be general nosiness.
Plus the urge to check your cars to make sure that they have "got it right".
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In general, Britain has an anti-sneak culture, so I doubt many people would literally report their neighbour. It's more likely to be general nosiness.
I could believe people check on their neighbour, find they haven't paid, but only grumble to their friends and other neighbours.
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Simple: a lot of Brits have an authoritarian streak that applies to everyone but themselves. They want the State getting into everyone else's business, but not their own. It's a weird combination of self-righteousness and paranoia.
If you think this might influence how they vote in elections, you'd be dead right.
I got my tax yesterday, no problem (Score:2)
the website was a bit screwed in the morning, and I had the wrong reference number with me (a SORN number doesn't work, you need the V5 number, or the renewal if you haven't SORNed it) it was for a car I don't use much and it failed the MOT last month, so I got it fixed and parked it off road to tax this month without the disc. I kinda thought it would be more exciting as one of the first cars without a disc, but if you have a taxed car you can now just throw away the disc, so my 16 year old Fiesta is not a
Why is this news (Score:2)
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Re:Why is this news (Score:5, Informative)
> It's what they can expect every month end from now on.
No it isn't. Literally nothing has changed about the system other than it no longer mails you tax discs afterwards - nobody's leaving anything to the last minute now that wouldn't have before, NOTHING has changed. This is an "odd spike" caused by people seeing the story everywhere of "you can look your car up online!" so instead of the usual trickle of people going there to update their tax once a year, they're getting flooded by half the country going "Oo, a website, must click!"
The summary is BS, all the "before it's ready" is pure fantasy: This is a massive spike in visitors causing an outage, nothing else.
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Not true, now you have to buy tax when you buy a new car, rather than it carrying across owners. So there will have been a legitimate demand spike - saying nothing has changed is incorrect.
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Err no. They really have got a new system brought to you by the Government Digital Service
https://www.gov.uk/tax-disc [www.gov.uk]
Notice how it has the little beta tag.
In summary, they have both changed the rules and introduced a new online application system at the same time.
Three times fast (Score:2)
I hear they're also available where they sell seashells by the seashore.
Glad to be American ... (Score:2)
... cut out little stickers? Hell, I can't draw and stay inside the lines and stuff.
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In Ohio, the stickers are printed on label printers, on a "secure" stock. Nothing special here - the driver licenses and state IDs are printed on off-the-shelf laminator printers, again using "secure" stock. I wouldn't be surprised if the "secure" stock were made in China and just offered for sale by some local company that has Ohio gov't contract. Printing of anything in China is really cheap, and access to high-tech printing technologies is rather easy.
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The lamination is not done on a laminator you might find in your local copy store. The pieces laminated together are multiple layers of plastic stock. No paper, no stand-alone photos. Delamination is not really possible without destroying the ID. What you call "hard plastic" has been laminated from multiple layers of stock that doesn't seem to be anything special. Many European IDs were more spoof-proof a dozen years ago, though.
fun (Score:2)
decentralized digital (Score:2)
"Digital first" does not have to mean "create a gigantic, centralized, privacy invading registry", like governments frequently seem to think. "Digital first" could well mean "print a digital signature as a QR code that we can then verify using a reader if need be". You know, it could work like movie tickets and boarding passes. Such a scheme is also much easier to administer and much more resistant to failure.
The identity card debate is often messed up in just the same way: an identity card need not be coup
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Why bother with the QR code? The car has a unique identifier attached to the back bumper (as well as a globally unique one in the corner of the windshield). That can be looked-up to verify that the registration is valid, if need be.
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A globally unique identifier requires verification in a central database. A digital signature can be verified offline without a central database. That's my point!
Are Tax Discs (Score:2)
> Because for a very long time we here just piled the stickers on the plates. Then when a corner got too full you'd pile them on other corners.
Now parking permits are another matter entirely. They are easily replicated and nobody would know the difference.
Another solution (Score:2)
I remember a british sitcom some time ago (perhaps it was one of the last seasons or reincarnations of Are You Being Served?) where some Londoners found themselves living in the British countryside and at one point the issue of tax discs came up. One of the locals just pointed out that they used a beer coaster. The local constabulary just took it on faith that everybody in the area was honest.
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Save us, Norman Gates!
More likely Bill Gates...
It's a Microsoft system. Of course it collapsed under load.
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It's a Microsoft system. Of course it collapsed under load.
Let me guess: the last version of Windows you used was Windows 98, you've never even seen Windows Server 2003, and you recommend Linux just because.
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Except the site in question's been up for years and working fine. It had a bit of trouble yesterday due to excess traffic but now it's fine again. This happens in the commercial world too.
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I think we know who paid for them.
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Heathrow is owned by Heathrow Airport Holdings. Private sector. The tax disc website is by Government Digital Services. Public sector. The savings they have made by moving government functions online are in the billions.
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Boot.....Trunk....whatever. it's where you put the bodies.