The UK Government recently unveiled its ‘AI Skills Hub’, which wants to provide 10 million workers with AI skills by 2030. The main site was delivered by PwC for the low, low price of.. £4.1 million (~$5,657,000).
It is not good. Like, at all - the UI is insanely bad and it’s clear that this was just a vibecoded site (to be fair, this is the AI Skills Hub, but c’mon, where is the pride in your work? I would be ashamed to even release this as a prototype!)
PwC didn’t even write any of the course content! The only thing the Skills Hub does is link out to external pages, like Salesforce’s free Trailhead learning platform:
Note that I’m fairly certain this course already existed before the contract was even awarded, so all the site does is.. link out to other sites?
PwC itself also admits that the site does not properly meet accessibility standards:
Even for those without a disability, the lack of here in this regard means that the site can be very confusing and buggy as a result.
Incorrect laws
The site has a course on “AI and intellectual property”. One thing it mentions is fair use:
Except that fair use is not a thing in the UK - that’s a US concept! The UK uses what’s known as “fair dealing”, which is more restrictive than fair use, so the details here are plain wrong.
Lack of care, lack of craft
The interface for this website has also not been clearly thought out - one glaring example is the process of actually enrolling in a course.
On the course page, the “Enroll Now” button is tiny, and if you don’t see it and try scrolling down to the bottom, you will find yourself nothing but a comment section!
Then you have other bugs too, like the “Skills & Training Gap Analysis” - which is linked at the top of the site! - apparently being closed off to the public for no reason:
To be honest, seeing this made me angry.
I’m angry at the sheer wastefulness of the UK Government here. Our public services are collapsing - while £4 million is admittedly chump change for the UK government, there are real people behind these numbers - families waiting months for NHS appointments, children in crumbling schools, vulnerable people not getting the care they need. The waste feels particularly galling when you realise that almost no one will actually use this site!
I’m also angry that the small webdev businesses we have here in the UK were left out of this - for less than 5% of the cost, we’d have a better website and help out small businesses who actually care about their work, instead of handing the project to a multinational company that made nearly $60 billion in revenue in a year and has zero qualms about ripping off the British taxpayer.
Do better.