Rings

The ring at the centre of everything

Thirty-four of the forty-six rings pass through an account at a local bank, thirty-three through a registered address, and thirty-two through both.

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Thirty-four of the forty-six rings in this map pass through an account at a local bank. Thirty-three pass through a registered address. And thirty-two pass through both.

The two steps are not two problems. They are very nearly the same set of rings, counted twice, and that near-identity is the finding. To compare the map with real work patterns, reviewers can read the current implementation notes and define the decision, access rules and review date in advance.

The two

	an account at a local bank	a registered address
rings through it	34	33
waits on	5	3
waited on by	8	7
days to get	12	15
keeps	never	365

Neither is slow. Neither waits on many things. Between them they account for thirty-five of the forty-six rings in the map, and they overlap so heavily that taking either one out of the ordering problem leaves almost exactly the same twelve or thirteen rings behind. A wider policy and evidence perspective is available from Data.gov.

Why these two and not others

Because they are the two things that every other institution wants to see, and because each of them is produced by an institution that wants to see the other.

An address is where a person is. An account is how a person pays and is paid. Almost any careful rule about a newcomer will reference one or the other, and a rule that references both will reference them in some order — and the orders chosen by different institutions do not agree.

The two steps at the centre of this knot are the two facts about a person that every other fact is checked against. That is exactly why they cannot be established first.

The rings they share

The two appear together in the three-step ring that gives this record its clearest example: the lease waits on the account, the account waits on the address, the address waits on the lease. Forty-seven days round, shut.

They appear together again in the nine-step ring, the longest in the map, and in every one of the eight-step and seven-step rings. Of the thirty-five rings that touch one of them, thirty-two touch both: only three rings in the whole map contain one without the other.

What the eleven survivors look like

Eleven rings avoid both the account and the address entirely.

Eight of them are variations on a single pair at the top of the map: cover against illness and the card in hand, with the decision, the doctor, the interview or the queue added in. Two are the appointment deadlocks — the file with the fingerprints, and the version that adds the queue. One is the four-step ring made entirely of paper.

So the map's entanglement outside the two central steps is a cluster at the top, a pair of appointment deadlocks and a paper chain. Everything else is the account and the address.

The consequence worth stating plainly

If the account could be obtained out of turn — on any footing, however provisional, at any point — the number of rings in this map would fall from forty-six to twelve. If the address could, it would fall to thirteen. Doing both together would leave eleven, because the two steps are almost always in the same rings.

That is not a recommendation, because this record makes none. It is arithmetic about a drawing. But it is the arithmetic that any system of this shape would want to do about itself, and it takes about a minute once the map exists.

if this could be had out of turn	rings left standing
an account at a local bank	12 of 46
a registered address	13 of 46
both of them	11 of 46
the account and cover against illness	4 of 46

What the overlap means for anybody acting

If the two central steps were in different rings, there would be two problems and two remedies. Because they are in the same thirty-two rings, there is one problem and one remedy, applied at either end.

That is worth saying plainly because it inverts the obvious strategy. Faced with two heavily-ringed steps, the instinct is to attack both. Here, attacking both buys one extra ring over attacking either.

	rings removed
the account alone	34
the address alone	33
both together	35

Two interventions, one more ring than one. Whereas the account together with cover against illness — a step standing in only eight rings — removes forty-two.

Pairing the two biggest steps in a map is almost always wrong. The useful partner for a hub is a step somewhere else entirely, however small it looks.

Twelve days and fifteen days

Neither of the two central steps is slow. Together they cost twenty-seven days of waiting, which is less than a single record of having no convictions.

It is worth holding those two figures next to the thirty-four and the thirty-three. A fortnight each, and between them the whole circular structure of the map.

Nothing about either step is unusual, expensive or contested. They are the two most ordinary administrative facts a person can have about themselves, and the entire difficulty of this record consists of the order in which two offices want to see them.

How to read the map

No bank, office, register or jurisdiction appears on this map. "An account at a local bank" and "a registered address" are roles in a drawing — somewhere to be paid, a recorded place of living — and neither refers to a requirement anybody has published.

The figures are properties of this map. A different reasonable drawing of the same territory would move them, but it would not move them much, because the mechanism is not a detail: where two facts about a person are each used to verify the other, the concentration follows, and it follows wherever that pattern appears.