I SPENT Millennium Eve watching men watching planes land. It was great fun. I laughed a lot. I suspect most of you spent the evening in the same way. But since there may have been a few of you who were out doing other things, I suppose I’d better explain. In future, though, keep up.

Throughout 1999 we were assailed with scare stories about the millennium bug. Your toaster will stop working, your insurance records will disappear, the economy will collapse, bury your savings, lock up your children and please, please don’t fly on New Year’s Eve.

My brother is a professor of software engineering and determined early on that this was all nonsense. He found himself briefly a media darling. He was treated politely, but as a bit of nutter, by presenters who barely knew how to turn on a PC.

One TV crew asked him to walk across the university quad wearing a white coat. When he refused, they hit on an alternative. Could he open up a computer and point out the bug to viewers?

So I found myself at my brother’s Millennium Eve party watching TV with him as he was vindicated and the bug failed to bite. We particularly enjoyed the gloomy journalist standing in an empty Zurich airport at 1am announcing that the Oslo flight had just landed safely. Fun, don’t you agree? Well, each to their own.

The millennium bug was basically a big con. A multimillion-pound con. Software engineers who had designed poor systems were given even more money to fix the problems they’d caused. They were able to do it all while pretending that it wasn’t their fault. Your company needed to be “Y2K compliant”, after all, or disaster might strike. And then, when nothing happened, the software engineers claimed it was because they had fixed the problem.

It reminded me (as most things do) of an old joke. “Why do elephants paint their toenails red?” “I don’t know.” “To hide in cherry trees.” “But I’ve never seen an elephant in a cherry tree.” “Precisely.”

I’m bringing this up now because, while the millennium bug may be history and nobody, ahem, brings it up any more, the fiasco goes on.

Last week, when I was trying to file my tax return online, I found it almost impossible to log on. The day after the deadline expired, the Inland Revenue acknowledged the problem, extended the deadline and (to give it credit) apologised. But a spokesman added: “The moral is, don’t leave it until the last minute to file your tax return.”

Well, no. That is not the moral. The moral is that the Inland Revenue should buy a computer that works.

And its system is better than many. Almost every day brings a story about another large IT failure. Monday’s Times, for instance, reported that 9,000 soldiers have been deprived of their full pay by a systems error at the Ministry of Defence. This joins foul-ups at the Child Support Agency and the Passport Agency, as well as the rising cost of NHS computerisation.

Don’t think it’s only the public sector that faces this problem. “Public sector inefficiency” is just another diversion, like the millennium bug. A recent Oxford University/Computer Weekly survey of IT projects in the UK found that only 16 per cent were considered successful. There was little difference between the public and private sectors. A British Computer Society study of projects in all sectors judged only three out of 500 a success.

It would be understandable if the problems were caused by the complexity of the technology involved. But they aren’t. As the Royal Academy of Engineering has put it in a new report, “there is an exceptionally large discrepancy between best practice and common practice in IT”. In other words, the industry is sloppy.

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