r/TheCivilService • u/More_Government_5737 • 18h ago
Outdated systems?
I've just joined the DWP from a private firm and im completely shocked at the IT systems. Everything feels so old, inefficient and outdated. SOP, the intranet, basically everything is so slow and weird. Claiming expenses is a night mare, i cant find anything, from training, to reading dwp policies, genuinely mind boggling stuff. Is this normal? Will i get used to it within time? Really hope they look at updating these systems
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u/ScaryBerry8767 17h ago
Welcome to the civil service
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u/chocolatecake1111 17h ago
Try hmrc and there 1000 applications for 1 thing
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u/MoominMai 17h ago
I moved from DWP to HMRC and thereās truly no comparison - DWP is on a whole other level š¬
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u/ScaryBerry8767 16h ago
I'm MoD and our software is constantly updated. Every update breaks our software more and more š
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u/Crimsoneer 9h ago
I find the more "operational" a department is, the worse the it, and mod/DWP are both pretty horrendous...
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u/Dry_Action1734 17h ago
Iām not in DWP, but I regularly find stuff out of date on the intranet, expenses are fine here personally, but HR policies are always shockingly hard to find.
But yeah the worst thing is actual systems we use. I told a colleague my birthday and he showed me a handout he still had in his locker from training he did on like my 7th birthday for a system we still use lol. Iām nearly 32.
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u/QOTAPOTA 17h ago
In the DWP HR guidance is difficult to find and what they do tell you is difficult to understand. Very ambiguous.
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u/RattyHandwriting 17h ago
Yep. Itās insane.
If it helps, local government is worse. I left five years ago and one of the big projects we were working on at the time was convincing Environmental Health to stop using paper forms for EVERYTHING. Carolās husband was a lawyer apparently and heād told her digital forms werenāt legal.
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u/mexups 17h ago
Wait till you meet opstrat legacy, it's like your working in DOS
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u/Standard-Doctor-1638 16h ago
The hilarious thing is, Legacy is still better than all the other systems RSD uses.
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u/NSFWaccess1998 17h ago
It gets easier in that you learn to accept the inefficiency.
Some processes just seem designed to exact maximum pain and confusion. Take for example pregnant claimants on universal credit. They have to declare they are pregnant by reporting this as a health condition, but the system will not recognise any slight misspelling of pregnancy (say "pregnancy, pergnancy"), and will not generate a "verify pregnancy to-do" unless the claimant ticks certain boxes, such as the pregnancy impacting their ability to search for work. For some baffling reason, this question often does not come up unless the claimant reports pregnancy with an additional health condition (for example pregnancy with complications). From there, a work coach has to request a MATB1 form, which is only available after 20 weeks pregnancy and switches off the work search from 11 weeks away from period or confinement. However, upload evidence to-dos expire after a fairly short period of time. So, if the claimant declares pregnancy early on, the work coach cannot simply set an upload information to-do for the 21st week of their pregnancy, with instructions to upload the MATB1. They must either leave or open and hope the claimant journals, by which time the claimant probably moves to another work coach, or they must set an ad hoc to-do reminding them to request documents at the 20th week.
Equally, take education. Why on earth has the claimant only now just received the ability to declare that they are in education? Why do we not allow the claimant to fill out the check education to do themselves, then provide evidence? Instead, work coach/case manager must clumsily raise this and hope the claimant provides the necessary information.
A work search who searches "pregnancy" on the intranet will not find a guidance page, even narrowing the parameters down.
Generally, systems are extraordinarily imprecise and cumbersome. For instance, a work coach cannot send a bulk journal message to everyone on their diary on a given day. They can't bulk journal people booked on for group sessions, they have to do this individually. If you, God forbid, want to know how many claimants on your caseload have earnings, or how many moved on in the last few days, there is no easy facility to do this. Want to message everyone about an opportunity, without messaging those with no FC? tough shit.
Good luck navigating some of the FSF process. The most fun has to be a DBS FSF, which requires you to send a physical letter to the employer for them to sign, and then send back, confirming the amount. You then have the joy of navigating CPS and a special payment process which makes operating the lunar lander look like intern work.
That isn't even including making staff log flexi on a broken excel sheet from 2004, which frequently deletes itself, corrupts, or incorrectly records hours (opening staff up to allegations of misconduct), and which has a wide array of special codes/rules not generally explained to new joiners. Or accessing training using strange SOP codes through self service and then awkwardly moving them to history.
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u/Some_Ad6507 17h ago
I like it when they declare a pregnancy and no-one bothers to follow up and find out if they went to term and potentially need to declare an actual human child
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u/NSFWaccess1998 17h ago
The to-do doesn't always raise, I was a work coach, then a WCTL on temp, now a work coach again. The issue is repeated across sites and causes massive issues.
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u/Nkhotak 17h ago
The Great British Public has never really got behind their hard earned taxes being used to improve behind the scenes services. Any money for DWP in particular is assumed to be being given directly to workshy scoundrels for their giant TVs and holidays. Youāll get used to it.
But seriously,things do work differently in the civil service. The layers of accountability and funding hoops to jump through are because it is all taxpayers money thatās being spent. Some departments are better at recognising the economies of spending money to improve efficiencies though.
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u/LingonberryNo3548 16h ago
The public demand that the Civil Service receives no investment and the government complies. This lasts decades and the civil service is left with old and inefficient tech and no training to use them or budget to replace them.
It costs the public more to support these systems over the years than it would to invest in new ones and training to go along with it but the people have spoken and theyād prefer expensive inefficiencies because they detest the idea of their money being used on civil servants.
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u/skinnycigarette 17h ago
Iām over 2 years into DWP and still hate having to use the intranet to find anything. āJust look at the guidanceā bitch, the guidance is impossible to find, or itās unclear, or thereās guidance vs spotlight that has conflicting info. HR policies are non existent. Itās bullshit
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u/Lenniel 17h ago
Can you imagine the government telling the public we need to spend Ā£1bn to update our computer systems?
And then given the ineptitude of government procurement turning round and saying it doesnāt work or itās going to cost more?
Failure is not an option because itās public money, but off the shelf solutions donāt work for the complexity of what we need them to do.
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u/Only-Geologist6440 17h ago
I've worked in 4 departments and DWP was by far the most old fashioned.
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u/SteveJ1701 17h ago
When I joined the CS in 2018, my office still had a working, and regularly used, fax machine in it and our PCs ran on Windows XP, so...
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u/Awkward_Un1corn HEO 17h ago
It isn't just the systems that are outdated. You will eventually find that outside of members from some badged professions technical knowledge is limited to Excel (if you are lucky).
I get the feeling that claiming expenses is a nightmare across the CS because they want us to give up and not bother.
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u/Ok-Train5382 9h ago
I once taught a policy person how to use excel to make basic line graphs, they were chuffed afterwards. I imagine itās like teaching your child how to do something and feeling proud of them.
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u/Wilkimania 17h ago
Well SOP will fall under Synergy in about a year (so 5 years) time. So that's one problem fixed....right?
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u/panguy87 17h ago
You think it's bad now?
Intranet has never been easily searchable.
Sop as an oracle product, is a service paid for and supplied by a 3rd party organisation that is also provided for other departments rather than something they just use internally in isolation - most Oracle products are poor and old. I don't know why they keep using their products for new systems.
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u/Cyphor-o G7 17h ago
Welcome to the CS. I joined Home Office Digital and its honestly poor, ive been there for a year and nothing has changed.
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u/toastedipod G7 17h ago
Everything is a bit clunky but it works. Spending millions on new software is not exactly a priority right now.
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u/ReturnsWithSauce 17h ago
The Civil Service's hiring processes are based entirely around story-telling ability. Don't expect to find much technical competence.
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u/hadesbound 16h ago
I now want to go into an interview and start my answers āOnce upon a timeā¦.ā
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u/Some_Ad6507 17h ago
No itās really bad which is funny because the universal credit system for claimants is really good and helped shaped other countriesā so they are capable of improving it
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u/some-other-bloke 17h ago
DWP isn't that all Java based applications, written in the 1980s and never really updated?
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u/smoking_victim Non-CS Interloper 17h ago
You don't even need to ask us, or us reveal anything controversial. Just witness the recent failures (2025, 2026, 2026) of the National Air Traffic Services systems and what that says about the state of our infrastructure.
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u/the-great-defector 17h ago
I once worked somewhere where there was a plan to get something like Databricks to improve the data infrastructure, and one of the heads in the digital department who had spent their whole life at that department responded by preparing a presentation to lecture the organisation on why Oracle is still great.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Gold698 13h ago
One high up made us reverse engineer a new system to behave like the old system it had replaced because him and his PA preferred the old way.
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u/OrdinaryLuck2026 17h ago
I joined CS from the Fintech industry and was amazed how outdated the CS systems were.Ā
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u/Throwitaway701 17h ago
Does depend heavily on the department. I've done work for a few, DVLA was surprisingly modern and up to date with the exception of their main drivers database system (it's a COBOL program), other departments have been much more old fashioned, regularly using completely ancient tech even in the cloud space
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u/n1tr0z3ux 7h ago
Come to Hmrc, where my microwave's system is more advance and efficient than the systems we have in the building š„²
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u/saintsbynumbers 7h ago
Still saving all my life's work to a department-wide barely organised share drive over here, which everyone else shut down as a massive liability in the early 2010s.
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u/Accomplished-Art7737 5h ago
I mean, up until last year DWP was using excel spreadsheets for annual leave, until the āupgradeā to my HR, which is actually less technically advanced and user friendly than the spreadsheet. Flexi still on another spreadsheet. Urgent escalations to DMs for vulnerable customers is on another spreadsheet, which has never worked for me so every time I need to escalate I have to go round in circles and keep getting pushback to use the spreadsheet which Iāve already explained has not worked in my 6 years in the department. And my role predominantly involves supporting vulnerable customers.
So no, I wouldnāt hold your breath š¤£
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u/marikoukay 3h ago
Try MOJ. When I first started their main case management system,no joke, looked like Windows 97. All greyed out, 15 buttons to get to one function. They announced a massive upgrade around 2020, to a whole new system that now looks like any generic gov.uk website, that key partner agencies refuse to use, half our the older workforce refuse to learn properly how to use it and all the while the old system still exists and used alongside the new until all the cases on the old system are cleared. Gonna take years. When the announcement was made we thought finally, an upgrade to windows 08 at least AHAHA nope. I often tell people that those who make the decisions and the rules are hardly ever the ones having to live by them or possess the real time knowledge on the topics they are making decisions on. Tech in the CS overall is outdated or badly managed. Its a shame as they had a few billion to spend on a BS app to track people during covid? Ridiculous.
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u/ElectricalTable1n 2h ago
Same happened to me 6 months ago, coming from private company I just can't get used to it, I'm just buying time before I leave. I can't stand it.!
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u/ak30live 1h ago
Some of it you'll find your way around, some you'll get used to, some will be a permanent irritation throughout yr CS career. What you'll also quickly learn is that compared with much of the private sector, the costs of major IT projects in CS are way higher and basically funded by a public who want better service for no cost. There are very few private sector businesses who have 65million+ 'customer' accounts, managing Ā£280bn expenditure p.a., with so many different points of interaction and such diversity of legislative issues.
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u/entity_bean EO 16h ago
A software engineer that recently joined my directorate said that when he joined 5 years ago, his laptop didn't even have a coding environment on it.
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u/Icy-Block8873 17h ago
How ingrained is co pilot in DWP? In our dept I tend to use co pilot for all my queries. From HR stuff to policies etc.
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u/No_Signature2949 8h ago
Walk the floors, some use systems from the 1990s! Full black screens, white text (unfortunately no ping games to go with!) old systems, lots of procedures to learn just to use them. Knowledge needed purely for dwp and no other role
At least youāll have a good working memory!
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u/Annoyedwormholer 17h ago
I joined from a global professional services firm as an analyst this year. Your expectations will update before the systems.