alt Hacker News> A Home Office spokesperson said: “Over 10 million people have already successfully used eVisas to prove their immigration status. ..."
So how many people did not successfully use it? Could be 100 million for all we know. Do they think just throwing out a large number without anything to compare it to is somehow proving something?
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> Do they think just throwing out a large number without anything to compare it to is somehow proving something?
Welcome to the last 20 years of UK public policy communications. Politicians know that people do not question big numbers or have the skills to put them in context.
I remember the May government shouting that "more children go to schools rated good+ by Ofsted than ever before". Me and you would say, well, there's more children alive than ever before, so it's hardly an achievement.
Without the total number of attempts, number of failures and ideally how those failures are distributed, it tells us almost nothing
Look, I'm robbing you but you have to consider that 99.9% of people never get robbed so really it's not something anyone should care about.
It only launched in the middle of April (edit: middle of February was the switchover at the border where no other fallback would have been possible)
It sounds to me like this number indicates broad success.
The rough estimate seems to be that only about two per cent of border crossings use an eVisa anyway (British passport holders don't and non-immigrating visitors don't).
Even over summer that would probably only mean maybe 2.5 million border crossings, so the other uses are not at the border — they will instead be employment/landlord/benefit/healthcare checks using the online systems.
So for example, renting a new property, starting a new job, applying for a new benefit, or needing non-emergency healthcare etc.
What was the failure rate on the earlier system, the mean time to resolution, and the maximum time to resolution, and how does that compare with the current system.
Why do you have to ask? Because you don't have easy access to the data. Whether or not your nation has a culture of honesty, big scale communication is always going to be dumbed down.
I would say what we do care about is the number of people who were not able to use the system successfully through no fault of their own. Even 0.001% failure rate is too high when is affects more than a few people per year. Especially so when there is no easy way to rectify the problem.