Where this came from
I did not pick this focus off a list of profitable specialties. I spent years inside public services, benefits processes, health records, and employment programs, as the person the system was supposedly for, and the same failure ran through all of them. Not rudeness, not incompetence, and rarely a crash. Silence.
The loop, as it actually runs
Every link in that chain is a decision an engineer, an architect, or a procurement team either made or declined to make. That is the hopeful part: a system that fails this way was built to, and can be built otherwise.
That loop rarely runs on paper anymore. Eligibility rules, payments, referrals, deadlines, and the steps of legal processes all live in software now, and software inherits whatever the institution built into it, its gaps included. Once a rule becomes code, it stops being a decision somebody makes each time and becomes a default nobody sees, applied to every person, every time. That is why I treat these as engineering failures, not only policy ones.
I have written up the cases: a passport application GOV.UK knew was invalid at question three and still walked to a non-refundable payment, an NHS rollout that moved the forms onto a screen and changed nothing underneath, and the question they forced: when is a system not fit for purpose? The answer became ADR-011, an engineering decision I hold my own work to, and the six musts below are that decision in plain language.
The standard
These are absolutes, not aspirations. A system missing any one of them is not fit for purpose, whatever its dashboards, its speed, or its own procedures say. Every must is an obligation the institution owes the person, never a requirement placed on the person, and that distinction is the whole argument.
Every system has a boundary: what it accepts, who it covers, its legal duties, the criteria it judges people by, and how to challenge a decision. The institution publishes all of it early, in language a person can act on. A hidden limit or an unstated criterion is a trap, since nobody can meet a standard they are left to guess, and a limit nobody enforces is decoration. The test: can a person hold the institution to it without years and a tribunal?
The system can conclude that it cannot help, say so, give the reason, and point onward. Refusal is a proper ending, not the absence of one. An early no with a reason beats indefinite processing, just as a clear error beats a request that dies ten services deep without naming the cause.
Activity counters are allowed, never alone: applications received, cases opened, and tickets closed are motion. The outcome is whether the person’s situation changed, and because it is harder to collect, it is the measure left out. It also means finding where the failure actually sits: polishing a later stage while the person is stuck at an earlier one is only motion.
The system can say what happened, when, why, where it failed, and what came next, including for the people it could not serve. How many were screened out, and what became of them? A system that only reports its happy path cannot be evaluated, because everyone it failed is invisible to it.
Records, history, and state belong to the system. When someone has to keep their own paper trail to stop a case falling apart, the system has outsourced its memory to the person least able to bear the cost. That is a defect, not diligence on their part.
A service built to remove a barrier must not require a person to clear that same barrier to use it: an employment program that only works for people who can already manage a full week, or a support line that needs a phone call somebody cannot make. Alternatives and reduced friction are design obligations, not favors.
Robustness and security are part of this, not a separate department. A system holds the least it needs, defends it as though the people in it cannot afford a breach (most cannot), and lets a person see and correct what is recorded about them. Data someone never agreed to, cannot see, and cannot fix is another silent failure waiting to happen.
Where a must genuinely cannot be met, the gap is written down as a known limitation, visible to everyone deciding whether to rely on the system, instead of left implicit for a person to discover the hard way.
Provenance
I am disabled and neurodivergent, and my route through education and work has been shaped far more by missing accommodation than by any limit on what I can build. I did not take these six musts from a textbook. Each one is a failure I lived through first and only later understood as architecture.
Without published limits, people are blindsided as a matter of routine. Disability benefit assessment is the clearest case I know: the decision arrives, the reasoning is not shown, the criteria were never published in a form you could check, and the only route to accountability is to challenge, wait, appeal, and wait again, sometimes for years, paying with your own health and time. Responsibility that only arrives at a tribunal is liability finally cornered. It corrects one case and leaves the structure that produced it unchanged.
Publishing is only half of it, because a limit nobody enforces is decoration. An employer can carry a disability-confident badge it largely awards itself, with nothing checking the practice behind it, while disabled applicants are still filtered out before a human reads the work. I have applied to those employers. A commitment with no audit, no consequence, and no route of redress describes an institution’s self-image, not its conduct.
Eighteen months of applications across nearly every route into tech, met mostly with silence or an automated filter before a human saw the work. A clear no with a reason costs a system almost nothing and gives a person back their planning. No answer at all is not neutral: it moves the cost onto whoever is waiting.
Support is so often counted in sessions attended and applications submitted, and both numbers can climb for months while nothing in a person’s situation moves. A system can report excellent health while everyone inside it is stuck. And support aimed at a later stage, while the person is stopped at an earlier one, is careful work on a step they never reach.
When I stopped being able to continue, nothing recorded why, and nothing followed what happened next. Disabled applicants get screened out early and quietly, which means the population a service fails is exactly the population it cannot see. You cannot fix what you do not count.
I have explained the same history to a new adviser, department, and form more times than I can count, and kept my own records because theirs did not survive the handover. Records split across systems that cannot talk to each other make the person the integration layer, the most expensive place to put it.
I left university because the environment was not built for the way I learn and recover, and the same pattern followed into work: burnout, health flare-ups, inaccessible spaces. At one point severe burnout left me unable to work for nearly two years. Support that only works for someone who can already sustain a full week asks for the capacity it was built to restore.
The same shape turns up wherever an environment only makes room for people who can perform an unwritten version of themselves: fit in, read the room, show the right personality. For someone already close to their limit, that performance is the capacity. It may get them through the door, but it has to be kept up every day, and when it slips, the failure lands on the person at a higher price.
The layer that is always missing
Every one of these musts has already been written down somewhere: statutory duties, equality law, codes of practice, accessibility standards, charters, and whole programs built to help. Little of it changes what happens to a person, because the same layer is missing everywhere: the one that enforces the rule when it is broken, not years later, on appeal, for the one person who still had the health to fight.
Help that cannot be enforced is not help. Where an institution or a company treats a person’s health and rights as optional, a scheme built to support that person is a statement of intent they can decline at no cost. Enforcement falls to the person, paid for with the very time, health, and money the help existed to protect. The stronger the need, the less capacity there is to enforce, so the failure lands hardest on the people the system was built for.
In software that layer has a name: validation, the check at the boundary that runs before the damage, refuses the invalid state, and says out loud what it refused and why. A right with no enforcement and a rule with no validation fail the same way, for the same reason: somebody decided the check was optional, and moved the cost onto whoever had least power to refuse it.
This is why I build the enforcement layer rather than write about the principle. A guardrail that rejects a bad state at the boundary is the same idea as a duty somebody can actually be held to, expressed in the one medium where I can make it real.
The barrier has almost never been capability. It has been role structure, accommodation, and routes never designed with people like me in mind. That is why I treat clear systems as an accessibility feature, not a nicety: predictable behavior, loud failures, and context the system holds for you decide whether a person takes part or is quietly filtered out. I build the thing I needed and could not find.
It was never only me. Every person is born with skills, talents, and something to give, and a great many of them are filtered out before anyone sees what they can do, often by institutions whose mission they share and would gladly have helped build. The talent is everywhere. The routes in are not.
A person’s place in the world is theirs by birth, not by a stranger’s judgment on paper. When people are free to be themselves and to contribute, much of what looks like scarcity turns out to be a design choice, and design choices can change. That is the world this standard points toward, one system at a time.
Take it
I would rather this standard spread than stay mine: a standard about removing gatekeepers that only I could apply, for a fee, would be a gatekeeper of its own. If you build, buy, commission, or run software people depend on, here are seven questions to ask about it this week, no consultant needed.
Seven questions for something you already own
If one of those lands badly, you have found real work worth doing, whether or not I am the one who does it.
The furthest I have taken this myself is the Social Resource Floor, an open blueprint for reaching the resources a person needs to survive on the basis of being human, not financial status. It is unpaid, long-term, and open to collaborators, built on the same argument as this page: the systems people’s lives run on should carry responsibility, not shed it. You can see it working in its Blueprint Explorer.
It is not a campaign to tear institutions down, and it does not pretend physical limits are imaginary. It targets institutional scarcity, where the resource and the capacity exist and only the route to them runs out. The floor adds redundancy, so the failure of one route never becomes the failure of the person. The aim is to need any one system less, not to swap one gatekeeper for another.
