Tax credits were an obscure approach to returning public money to those most in need, but often the least likely to understand how get them. The system complexity justifies a tax credits section in the Revenue and Customs website.

Cutting VAT by 2.5% in order to stimulate the economy never seemed very likely to work. Unless ‘work’ is defined as creating additional work for businesses that need to cut cost. Several market analysts speculated this tax cut was administratively simpler than trying to get the Treasury to work out how to give tax refunds.

Finally, there’s the latest plan to encourage the employment of long term unemployed by offering employers £2500 for each individual. On Bloomberg this morning, Hugo Sellert — Head of Economic research at Monster Worldwide — was less than convinced. He was a little concerned about skewing the labour market: shouldn’t individual employment be determined on experience and skills, not whether there’s a handout?

My thoughts turned to another key discipline of Agile development, refactoring: leaving code cleaner, and easier to understand, than you found it. This isn’t done as a separate activity. Whenever you’re working on a particular piece of code, look at it as a whole and ask yourself, “could this be improved”?

Refactoring the legislative system of the Country would be a huge job, but done incrementally not impossible. Take an Agile approach and one day we might find we have a much less buggy society.