Where your tax will go

Following on from our story about the Prime Minister's personal web site No 10 web site, more news.

IR 35 has now moved up the hit parade of posts and is now at No 4 ahead of Europe and even Education.

The Prime Minister has revealed to the HoC that the web site has cost over £75,000 of tax payers' money to set up and a further £32,000 in the current financial year. Considering that this is only 6 weeks it looks like the Taxpayer is forking out annual costs of close to £300,000.

The site has been so slow that an enterprising individual has set up a mirror site which provides much faster access to all the posts, searchable database, top authors, most active forum. Recommended for viewing, then dip into No 10 to make a post if you feel like talking to yourself:-)

On a techie note; The No 10 site uses ASP which presumably is running on a Windows NT server. Many would question why the Government is wedded to using Microsoft products especially as Linux has such an excellent reputation for reliability. Some of the more cynical may link this with the presence on powerful Committees of representatives from Microsoft. Open source would make sense to any Government even without taking into account the superior performance and reliability.

Note added 29th July.

Thanks to a UKTECH reader for this link

Plug in number10.gov.uk and it confirms that it is running "Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98"