Richard Baum

I often write on here about how the government is changing this country for the worse - ID cards, mass surveillance and an over-reliance on computer databases to access all types of services. It’s done in the name of security, or data-protection, or ID-fraud prevention, or whatever excuse the government thinks of at the time, but it is depressing that I can’t do anything these days without jumping through hoops to prove who I am.

And last night it came back to bite me.

I changed my car in November, after the old one threw a strop in the middle of the M1 and refused to ever work again. That’s the last time I buy French…

So I did everything I was supposed to do, including filling out the form to let the DVLA know that I wasn’t the owner, and that the garage I’d bought my new car from was instead. I heard nothing. Not the promised acknowledgement letter or anything. And a few weeks later I got a tax disc reminder letter, which was concerning since I had told them I didn’t own the car.

So I rang them up, and put the matter to bed over the phone, making it clear that they had made a mistake, and being told that, yes, they had made a mistake. Job done. I didn’t really mind the cost of the phone call or the wasting of my time, because mistakes can happen, and this one got fixed.

Only last night I returned home to discover an £80 fine waiting for me, for failure to tax a vehicle that I have now told them TWICE I don’t own any more. I can’t ring up to appeal, I can only ring an automated line to pay the fine. My right of appeal can be made by letter, but if I say I’ve let them know and have no documentation to prove it, I am still lumbered with the fine.

I have let them know (twice), and because of their incompetence, I of course do indeed have no documentation to prove it. But I am not going to pay this fine. I have appealed in writing, and await a response.

This is annoying (and potentially expensive). But it’s also worrying. Everything we do is now on one government computer or other. They want all of our health records on computer, our fingerprints, our iris patterns, maybe our DNA… And of course mistakes can happen. Computers are run by people who make mistakes. Whichever DVLA staff member dealt with me has inputted something wrong, and now I have an £80 fine to pay which is difficult to challenge, and for which the burden of proof lies with me. How many people, I wonder, are in my position, mistakenly fined? And how many of them are too frightened of the letter shouting about a “criminal offence,” or too unsure what to do, to challenge the fine? £80 is not a small amount of money, and it should be rightly levied against real criminals. But not everyone fined is a real criminal, because computers at the DVLA make mistakes.

Imagine if they make a mistake inputting my ID card data. Someone else’s fingerprints down as mine. The wrong code put somewhere by some faceless bureaucrat somewhere, and me denied access to the NHS. Or you denied a job because of a mistake with a CRB check. Or your children stopped from getting onto a plane because of a mistake in their passports.

Government reliance on computers to be 100% right all the time means that it is now extremely difficult to challenge the mistakes that are sometimes made. Government needs to be less arrogant in its assumption that it is always right. Government isn’t always right, and in my case now it is wrong. The fact that I’ve told the DVLA of a change of address in the intervening weeks between my supposed offence and now is hardly the act of a criminal trying to hide. And yet, despite them writing to me at the new address, they don’t take that into account, because the computers that run Britain can’t be wrong…

But they can, and they are. And how often do they have to be before someone puts the brakes on and we return to a place where we can talk to people face to face, and relate to the government that is supposedly there to help us. Nick Clegg, the leader of the Lib Dems, has had something to say about this this week, paying particular attention to the mobile phone costs of ringing government helplines. He too is concerned about the faceless bureaucracy which we all have to deal with these days, and which I now have to tackle for the sake of £80.

Rick