Budget Contingency

As I understand it, there is a "Contingency Reserve" set aside every year for emergencies and other unexpected events that may cost money over and above what is budgeted for. I read somewhere (that I cannot remember), that the contingency reserve for last year was £57,000,000,000. Which is a staggering amount. It is 10% of total expenditure, where does it go?

Does it actually get spent even if there are no emergencies?

Is there anyone out there who can bring some light on how much it is and what happens to it?

Broadband getting worse

I, along with most people in North Norfolk, have to depend on BT to do the links between my home and the exchange and then my exchange down to the server that handles my Broadband.

Now, I pay for a business connection, which has a 20:1 contention rather than the standard 50:1, and up until 7 months ago I was getting (every day) a connection of just under 2Mb/s down and 796 Kb/s up.

Then it changed

Now I get 1152 Kb/s down and 256 Kb/s up, so I have lost half of my download speed and two thirds of my upload speed. ( I hear you say "Talk to the ISP")

I did, the ISP (Demon Internet -- Thus Telecom ) have been very helpful, but they say that the line is capped at 1Mb/s AT the Exchange, as there is a disconnect that happens regularly on the line, once or more times per day. Can I find anything that causes it? Can I hell!!

Now this week, performance is abysmal, everything is taking 2 - 3 times longer than it should, no extra load on the line from here, just is much slower. Who else in North Norfolk is suffering ?? Anyone

Computer Security

So again we have a loss of data from a government source.

So far, we know that this Government has lost approx. 20 million NI Numbers -- then sent out an apology to everyone WITH the persons NI Number on the letter

Then a laptop with names of people thinking of joining the Armed Services went missingm just a paltry 20,000 names on that, but going back FIVE years

Now Hazel Blears loses a laptop with data on it THAT SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN RELEASED.

I work in the IT area, where are the Controls? Where are the Checks? Is this a sign that Whitehall isn't just leaky, it's totally porous. I read a few years ago that the RAF were having nightmares after an upgrade to Windows XP due to it's USB friendly setup.

Why on earth are our armed services using Windows?
I wonder what the Licensing costs are per year

As for the NI number loss, outsourcing always appears to give an immediate improvement to the bottom line, but the Service Level Agreements between the Government and it's suppliers probably mean that a simple query on the Database would cost in excess of £10,000, as it almost certainly would not be covered by the SLA. This means that a database query that would take a Professional about 30 minutes to design and execute ( and would therefore cost about £20) costs about 5,000% more than it otherwise would have.

So much for saving on the bottom line