Tobias Escher at the OII

Today the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of the UK parliament heard evidence about the current state of UK government on the Internet. The PAC scrutinizes the spending of government and has the National Audit Office to gather data for them. In this case, the report was produced by a co-operation between the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Oxford Internet Institute (an effort in which I have been involved as well). The report is available from our governmentontheweb.org site.

While it was very interesting to see parliamentary work, it is fair to say that the debate did not hold many surprises. The few interesting points worth mentioning are:

• The (usual) excuse for why government sites are just not as good as commercial sites: because governments are far more complex. While there is surely something different about governments and businesses (or so you would hope…), eBay, Amazon and Facebook are not exactly trivial as well and still reliably cater to millions of people in a simple and straight forward way.
• Alexis Cleveland, the Director General for Transformational Government (the ones that close down websites and move the rewritten content to Directgov) said that she would like to see more opportunities for citizens to give their views on sites and services which can only be welcomed. (As a side note, really a bit of a give-away for the government. Searching for “Transformational Government Cabinet Office” on Google brings as the number one hit an error page at the Cabinet Office website)
• There was a lot of discussion about how the move to more online channels will disadvantage those who are not capable of using the Internet who are often the ones who need public services the most. While it is surely a problem if attention (and hence money) is focused on online interactions on the expense of options for traditional face to face contacts, I was surprised that nobody mentioned the obvious benefit of the online strategy:
  1. most people do not want interpersonal communication (ie. queuing at inconvenient opening hours) but turn to the Web as hassle-free way to get things done quickly,
  2. which should in turn leave staff in offices with more time to deal with the people who really need and appreciate their help. Now one might argue that the whole point of government web services is to save money by getting rid of civil servants but you still have cost-savings by having people volunteer their information in electronic form (although I reckon it is probably printed out and then again keyed in by someone…)

You can listen to the full discussion here (should you REALLY wish so) but only for the next 28 days. You wonder why that is. Cannot be that difficult to keep the stuff. But it seems not uncommon these days for UK officials to get rid of important data …