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What I learned on Friday

September 30th, 2006 · Posted by Skuds in Technology · 1 Comment · Technology

I learned that sometimes a government IT project does come up with a real improvement.

Our car tax runs out tomorrow and I have been sitting on the reminder for weeks.  Having left it to the last minute I decided to try the online renewal instead of queueing at a Post Office.

I just went to the direct.gov website and put in the reference number from the reminder letter. The site then came up with our car's details for me to confirm. After that the site checked my insurance and MOT, took a bank card number and that was it. I had an e-mail confirmation straight away and the disc will arrive in the post in a few days.

From a user's point-of-view it was very straightforward, but knowing something about how computers work makes it really impressive and shows a positive side to data-sharing between the DVLA and the insurance companies. It certainly saved me having to waste half an hour digging through files to find the most up-to-date documents.  

I also learned that the police activity yesterday was because they were trying to catch the driver of a car which was involved in a chase.  Well.  I think that would have been high on our list of guesses.  What they will not say is whether they caught them and why they were being chased in the first place. Maybe I am just being picky, but I am interested in whether the police are chasing dangerous people into my street, and also I would like to think that when they are tying up at least a dozen officers in one place for a whole hour, leaving most of the rest of town unpoliced, it was for a good reason and not just a faulty tail light or something like that.

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One Comment so far ↓

  • Jane Skudder

    From my detailed study of ‘Traffic Cops’ the ‘dangerous’ person was probably a bunch of kids who have progressed from those mini-moterbikes onto stolen cars. They see the police after them as another computer game and don’t yet know that in the real world when the car hit someone they end up as pate.
    It is a waste of police resources but the alternative seems to be sending in a fleet of ambulances to scrape up the body parts…