Every local councill has a different payment system for colecting councill tax, and all of them fail in novel and unpredictable ways.

Last time they collected my name and address over the phone and got both of them wrong.

Then they were sending letter to a person that doesn't exist, to an address that doesnt exist, never used my email or phone number, didn't respond to my email, but still told me it's my fault!

I had the fun experience of my local (UK, major city) council sending debt collectors after me for non-payment of council tax while simultaneously (literally same week) asking what bank account to send the several thousand pounds they owed me for overpayment - because they failed to acknowledge that despite having moved address, I was still the same person, and their systems treated each address as an account not each person. They still told me it was my fault.

This is the difference between “council tax” a tax on property and “poll tax” a tax on individual people, and that went quite badly when it was tried... So it makes sense for the primary accounts to be per property. However you are quite right they should have a better understanding of a second layer of accounts being individual people.

The IT infrastructure around tax/HMRC is ridiculously complex. The “making tax digital” initiative is trying to fix that. The aim for business taxes, for example, is that each individual business will have a single tax account eventually, rather than separate once for each tax type as they currently do.

In the world of councils, an address is an account.

They just need to make sure that every address is paid for every day of the year - that's the way they maximize their revenue. They don't really who pays, as long as someone does. Hence the account system keyed on address.

You pay council tax on your address, not on an individual basis. So if you moved house and didn't tell them, they quite reasonably would have counted the payments towards your old address, not your new one.

I did tell them, the person I told said I could keep my automatic payments going, which I did for a year before they said I hadn't paid a year on the new address and had overpaid a year on the old address.

They then denied knowing that I had moved address, but didn't have an answer to "then why have you sent me a letter (to my new address) saying the payments for the old address should be refunded if you think I still live there?" (they literally denied knowing I had moved after sending the letters).

I appreciate that involved human incompetence not just a poor IT system, but a better system would have made the updating of me as a person paying council tax from one address to another seamless, then it would have flagged the problem sooner than a year in, and then it could have crossed my "debt" with my "overpayment" rather than passing it (in what I assume was another human mistake, but again allowed by the system) to a debt collection agency.

> I wish there was more buy in by local councils of this system, there are some incredibly poor local government sites.

You may be interested in Local Gov Drupal. Unfortunately they've defined themselves around a specific tool, rather than a design library, but maybe that was what it took to get them to come together. Seven councils are using the solution, and around 30 councils are involved in the initiative, but there is plenty of scope for the 300+ others to leverage the work and join the initiative.

https://localgovdrupal.org/

> You may be interested in Local Gov Drupal

Not much!

/me former Drupal developer. Drupal makes super-heavyweight pages, and is a real pain to learn. There is no backwards compatibility between major releases; to upgrade, you have to rewrite your site.

I burned 8 years working on Drupal sites. I made a living, but I ended up hating Drupal with a passion.

Yikes. Drupal is complex enough to be a government in its own right. Stay far far far far FAR away from it and any company or agency that demands its use. It's an overengineered nightmare of opaque idiosyncrasies.

I imagine a buy-in by local councils is just that - a cost. And most councils are either poorly funded, poorly managed financially or both!

I can only speak for my council, which complains it has no money but has hundreds of millions in slush fund "for a rainy day" and keeps building new council offices or rental spaces that aren't even being used or getting the rent. There's a huge one they built that needs like 30k+ a month in rent, no takers for 18+ months now (as you'd expect in such a crappy area and a certain pandemic).

They also have terrible web based services, akin to Frontpage '97 on a good day.

I'm not so sure, I think there is a real NIH syndrome in local government IT services, they quite often want to build something themselves - but then as you said don't have the budget to do it properly. Using the design system, and sharing platforms using it, would be a significant cost saving.

Plus the (at times) antagonistic relationship between Whitehall and local government I think means they don't want to necessarily use something they associate with the incumbent administration.

Not really.

Local gov doesn't have anything like the budget of central so they don't typically have the choice to build their own. Instead they're left with cobbling together behaviours from tens, maybe even hundreds, of disparate third-party systems, each independently solving the full stack of a given department's function. E.g. there's a dedicated system for planning approvals, another for administering blue badges, etc., etc.

These third-party systems are typically very cheaply made, with a very low maintenance budget, and don't provide anything like enough customisation to adhere to someone else's design system. If you're lucky you can add your own header/footer and set some main css colours to match your council's brand.

> They all use this design system

Does that system require absurd cookie banners? Gov.uk should be leading the charge against ridiculous cookie banners.