I mean its a silly idea but I don’t see why systems would necessarily need updating if people chose to sell in imperial measurements.
1 - any seller would likely in any case have to list the metric equivalent anyway.
2 - all imperial measurements are now defined by metric measurements anyway.
3 - any company choosing to sell B2B in imperial measurements would likely find itself at a commercial disadvantage, as businesses in the UK almost always work in metric.
For constantly running applications it can be cheaper just to run a server. This fact has been used to avoid migrating to serverless by a lot of orgs i’ve worked with, even when it doesn’t apply to their use case.
Its seen as setting up a system similar to national ID cards.
Weirdly National Insurance numbers are not always unique, and people can have more than one. Also while they are used by for tax and benefits (HMRC and DWP) other departments have a different ID number, the biggest being NHS numbers, military service numbers, passport numbers and driving license numbers (DHSC, MOD, Home Office, Department for Transport).
So you’d need to unify it, under one of these, effectively creating a ‘National ID Number’, even if you don’t call it that it’d be spun as that by opponents (libertarians, big brother watch etc).
You’re probably right in that the public probably aren't too worried about it, and would probably be appalled to see the waste that goes on as a result of it not existing. But politicians and parts of the media will get riled up by it.
I get what you’re saying I have the same problem with SA, but the key is better personalisation, which login can help with.
Gov.uk provides hundreds of services, like SA, which each user will only use a small subset of. That subset will be different for each user. I now need SA whereas 5 years ago prominently signposting that would have been useless to me. For others education services, welfare services and health should be highlighted. All this is quite difficult without knowing who is accessing the site.
Though In the specific case of SA, I think its not as well conceived a service as it can be. 95% of the time i’m not ‘registering for self assessment’ or ‘filing a self assessment tax return’ , i’m ‘checking what tax i owe’
The lack of a ‘login’ button is a huge issue IMHO, but the main blocker to it isn’t the tech teams, its at the ministerial/senior civil service level.
The problem isn’t the button itself but the infrastructure behind it. I.e. it requires a single database of users (i.e. a national register of citizens).
This needs doing, but politicians come out in hives because it involves setting up a system similar to national ID cards (politically difficult). Senior civil servants dislike it because its a question of which department owns it, if its GDS its the cabinet office, and that means the Home Office, DWP, HMRC surrendering some control (i.e. being increasingly dependent on external systems), which is something departments seem to dislike.
It’d save millions (billions probably) in the long run, but there isn’t the political will to do it. It would need an influential cabinet minister to push it through and would take 3-5 years to get properly embedded.
It all comes down to cost vs convenience. I don’t think rail is the answer long term. Trains are generally slower and less comfortable than air travel. Not to mention often similarly priced or more expensive.
I’m more excited by the prospect of electric/hydrogen powered regional air travel. IMHO that is what will start to make a real difference.
1 - any seller would likely in any case have to list the metric equivalent anyway.
2 - all imperial measurements are now defined by metric measurements anyway.
3 - any company choosing to sell B2B in imperial measurements would likely find itself at a commercial disadvantage, as businesses in the UK almost always work in metric.