Mark Andrews: Helping the public? How last century
Mark Andrews takes a wry look at the week's news
At long last, the penny has dropped. As part of its 'Growth, growth, growth' drive, the Government is demanding greater efficiency and productivity from the civil service. Brilliant, what's not to like? Presumably that means public servants will be told to come into the office and answer their phones promptly, then?
Well, not exactly. The Government actually reckons the problem is more down to inheriting 'a dire system which over relies on ways of communicating that should be left in the last century'. It cites HM Revenue and Customs taking 100,000 telephone calls a day, and the DVLA processing 45,000 letters.
Yep, answering the phone and replying to letters. How very 20th century.
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Unsurprisingly, the Government reckons these 'dire', 'last century' communications methods should be replaced with artificial intelligence, which seems to be the answer for everything at the moment. Which means, instead of civil service staff helping the public with the confusing regulations and red tape that officialdom loves to force on us, they will instead direct folk to an unreliable, unsympathetic chatbot that will be indecipherable to anybody who is not a tech geek, and will be unable to compute any situation which does not fit the neat little parameters programmed in by the tech geeks, and of course will be inaccessible to anybody who is not internet savvy. And you can bet they will make it as difficult as possible for people to find a telephone number to seek help with these queries.
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And I speak from my own experience when I talk about these things. Just under four years ago I developed chest pains and, not wanting to be a drama queen about it, tried calling the 111 non-emergency helpline. I was greeted by one of these chatbots, which wanted to know which local authority I came under, and gave me two options, neither of which actually applied.
Now under normal circumstances, I suppose most of us would just pick one, and take your chances with the call handler when you speak to them. But when when you're in the middle of a heart attack, as I later discovered I was, you don't always think like that, and the anxiety about what to do next isn't exactly helpful.
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Fittingly, the new package of AI measures the Government is proposing for the civil service has been nicknamed Humphrey - presumably after the manipulative civil servant in Yes, Minister, who spent most of his time playing the system to frustrate minister Jim Hacker's efforts to get anything done. As I recall, one of Humphrey's biggest triumphs was thwarting Hacker's attempts to force a new hospital to actually treat patients.
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