CABINET OFFICE & CENTRAL OFFICE OF INFORMATION

28 NOVEMBER 2007

  Chairman: Good afternoon. Welcome to the Committee of Public Accounts where today we are considering the Comptroller and Auditor General's Report, Government on the internet: progress in delivering information and services online. I will be introducing our witnesses in a moment but first of all I would like to welcome to our Committee the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, Angela Eagle. You are very welcome. She of course uniquely, although a government minister, is a Member of this Committee but that has been a custom since time immemorial and is a very delightful custom. It is not part of her duty to sit through all these Committee meetings so she will be leaving in a moment to go back to the front bench. However, as she has just joined our Committee as a new Member, we have to deal with her interests and I just want to ask if there is any change to her interests as published in the Register of Members' Interests.

  Angela Eagle: No.

  Q1 Chairman: Thank you very much. We welcome to this hearing Alan Bishop, who is Accounting Officer and Chief Executive of the Central Office of Information, John Suffolk, the Government's Chief Information officer, and Alexis Cleveland, Director General of the Transformational Delivery Group in the Cabinet Office. Perhaps I could start with Alexis Cleveland, if I may. As you know, we did a Report in 2002 and we found then that very few of these government websites could give us any reliable information as to cost. This was a formal recommendation of the Committee. It was formally accepted by the government in a Treasury Minute. It is all noted down in the appendix to this Report but until this recent inquiry by the NAO unearthed these costs apparently government had very little information so that rather begs the question as to whether your office took seriously the Treasury Minute in the first place, because until the NAO came back to this issue the government appeared to be unaware of the cost of these websites.

  Ms Cleveland: The Cabinet Office takes very seriously any recommendation from this Committee as we will the recommendations at the front of this Report as well. We have tried in the past to get a good grip on the costs of these websites. It is very difficult to get a clear view. In some departments they see it as part of a communication budget; in other parts, they are in an IT budget. Trying to break those down to get the full costs of individual websites and then the applications that run across them is just very difficult. It is partly because of the view of trying to get a better grip on costs and to secure better value for money for the taxpayer that we have adopted the new strategy which is looking at combining many of the websites.

  Q2  Chairman: I am sure we will be making a similar recommendation. It is absolutely essential, to understand whether you are achieving value for money, to know what the costs of a particular project is. If the NAO can provide a guesstimate, as they have in this Report, I would have thought that the government or its resources could do so as well. John Suffolk, could I ask you the next question about the number of websites? We are already a bit vague about what they cost. Apparently, we are also rather vague about how many there are. I am told in a briefing by the National Audit Office that nobody knows for certain how many government websites there are. There could be 2,500 but nobody quite knows. What we do know is that again, despite recommendations we made in our Report, there are no fewer than 1,000 surplus websites. Is that right?

  Mr Suffolk: In relation to the number of websites, it is difficult for us to identify all the government websites because they are not always with the extension .gov.uk. Those are the ones we can easily identify. If a department or an agency or a non-departmental public body puts a different extension on, that can be quite difficult to track. This really is one of the reasons why we are going down the website rationalisation process which is about getting a handle on how many websites we have, what value they are adding to citizens and also coalescing our resources around our two key websites, which are direct.gov and business link.

  Q3  Chairman: Why has the government allowed ten years of uncoordinated growth in the number of websites?

  Mr Suffolk: I do not think this is a government issue. When we look at website growth around the world, what has happened is that people have automatically created a website for a particular purpose. You see this in every walk of life. There is a balance that we have to strike between central, how many websites do we have, versus very targeted websites such as Talk to Frank. Therefore, when we look at the new work that we are doing, it is about saying let us look at things through the eyes of the citizen or the business. This is where the citizens are saying to us that we now need to coalesce and reduce the number of websites that we have.

  Q4  Chairman: What is Talk to Frank about?

  Mr Suffolk: Talk to Frank is about people avoiding taking drugs.

  Q5  Chairman: Alan Bishop, surely the key now is to link more and more of these websites to direct.gov, is it not?

  Mr Bishop: Absolutely. It is the main driver for direct.gov.

  Q6  Chairman: If that is right, the next question is why are so few linked to direct.gov?

  Mr Bishop: The programme is now well under way. There were 951 central government websites identified. Of those, 551, 56%, are already scheduled for closure. So far, there have only been 26 agreed exceptions out of the 951 and they are mainly for the single, departmental, corporate websites which will continue on into the future.

  Q7  Chairman: That all sounds great but, as we read in paragraph 3.13, "Links to the Directgov website are found in fewer than a third of other government sites although Directgov is relevant to the work of most government organisations."

  Mr Bishop: That is absolutely right, but right now what we are doing is, rather than creating links from those websites, we are closing them down.

  Q8  Chairman: It sounds very grand but I understand the only thing you can do at direct.gov is renew your car tax. It is more like "Not me, guv". It is hardly a very awe inspiring site, is it, if the only thing you can do on it is renew your car tax?

  Mr Bishop: I would say this, wouldn't I, but it is seen by people to be a far more useful website than that. First of all, just the idea of having information about the whole of government gathered together in one place gets tremendous enthusiasm.

  Q9  Chairman: Let us assume for a moment that this works and you do manage to concentrate everything onto two websites. Are we not just letting ourselves in for another IT disaster in a few years' time when the whole thing crashes?

  Mr Bishop: No.

  Q10  Chairman: How can you be so sure about that?

  Mr Bishop: Obviously it is always difficult to say you are absolutely, 100% sure, but everything in direct.gov is replicated so there is back-up for everything. We have hardly any outage over the last four years. The only time availability has gone below the high 99 point something per cent over that period of time has been when we had the change of platform back in February. At that time, it was still 96% availability.

  Q11  Chairman: As well as knowing the costs of your websites, how many you have and all the rest of it, it is absolutely crucial to know what the usage is or what is the point of having one if you do not know who is using it? We see in paragraph 2.8 that unbelievably one in six government departments, despite the fact that the Committee of Public Accounts in their last Report recommended that departments should improve their knowledge of their website use level, still have no data and where data has been collected many organisations are not analysing them to inform the design of sites. This is absolutely key, is it not?

  Mr Bishop: It is.

  Q12  Chairman: You have to know what are the costs of your websites, how many people are using them, what are they using them for and then you can improve the service. It is unbelievable that one in six of these websites have no data.

  Ms Cleveland: The direct.gov website itself does have good metrics and does know about the number of people visiting it.

  Q13  Chairman: I did not ask you about direct.gov. I asked you a specific question, in a Report that you have agreed on. One in six of these websites have no data at all.

  Ms Cleveland: That is why we are not looking to expand those websites. It is much better value for money to build around direct.gov where we do have those and then we can have common standards across the whole of government.

  Q14  Chairman: This is just good practice. I understand even in the public sector Transport for London has a very sophisticated website. They know exactly who is using it; they can trace how many people are buying Oyster cards for what reason and all this sort of thing. In the private sector nobody would dream of designing a website if they did not know exactly what its purpose was and how many people were using it. Often these websites are deliberately designed, as you enter them, to find out about your consumer preferences. This is central, is it not? Why should we be less professional in the public sector than in the private sector?

  Ms Cleveland: We should not be. We should be absolutely as professional and that is part of what we are looking to get through the internet channel, so we need to have insight into our customer usage there, as we do with all our other channels, so that we can say how do we influence people to use our services in a cost effective way.

  Q15  Keith Hill: Let me take up this issue of direct.gov, the super site which is evidently regarded as a radical—I presume that means potentially impressive—development. The Report does find that the team supporting the super sites is small compared with those managing commercial sites and other large sites such as the BBC website. It concludes there is a risk that the capacity behind the sites will be insufficient to support the sites' expansion. What is your reaction to that and what are you going to do about it?

  Mr Bishop: The capacity is there. It is scalable for what we are anticipating to be the level of usage in the future.

  Q16  Keith Hill: I notice that in contrast to the USA.gov site in America, which can search all federal, state, local tribal and territorial websites, the direct.gov search engine only searches within the site itself. Would it be helpful to have that extension to other government and quasi-government websites and, if not, why not?

  Mr Bishop: It will be helpful to have that extension. On the other hand though, if we are ultimately going to be closing down the vast majority of other government websites, it is essentially unnecessary. As long as the direct.gov site is easily navigable, easily searchable—and it is—that will be the most important thing.

  Q17  Keith Hill: The Report is pretty negative on the quality of government websites which probably explains why you are aiming to close them down. It notes that one in six has become significantly worse since the last Report. Why have these websites got worse?

  Mr Bishop: I suppose in one sense, when you know that you are going to be closed down, there might naturally be less attention to making an investment in resources and money to keep it up to speed.

  Ms Cleveland: Also, there are some issues about how you measure the quality of the sites, so it might be the number of clicks you have to use to navigate a site. I think it is true to say that some of the sites have grown a bit like Topsy, so they become more complex to navigate through. One of the virtues about moving into the direct.gov domain—and the same with business link—is that we are going to try to design the service around the citizen rather than around the supply side, which is a feature of many of the sites we have at the moment.

  Q18  Keith Hill: That sounds like a good idea because on accessibility Southampton University research has found that a third of departmental agency websites have failed to meet the government's own accessibility standards, which again is not very good.

  Ms Cleveland: I personally take accessibility very seriously. Again, being able to concentrate on just two sites that we can impose standards within, there is a lot of work that Alan's people have been doing with various representative groups who I think are very pleased with the sort of accessibility standards that we are looking to put into that. There have been criticisms about being too text heavy so we are looking at ways we can make them more accessible, but you always have to get the balance about how you make it accessible for someone perhaps with partial sight that also makes it usable for someone with normal abilities.

  Mr Bishop: I would like to underline that. That is an absolute priority. Direct.gov is currently of double A standard which is the recommended standard and, as Alexis says, we are constantly in consultation.

  Q19  Keith Hill: The issue is not only those with physical disabilities like partial sight; it is those with low skills because so much of what is on offer from government is precisely directed at people whose internet skills may be very limited. What work are you doing to try and open up the internet to all of those people? We have been thinking in this Committee a lot about Welfare to Work people who want to get on to education and training programmes and that sort of thing.

  Ms Cleveland: The main element is working with the experts in the other sectors to look at what is best practice in terms of design of these sites, but we have to recognise that the internet will not be the channel of choice of some people. Therefore, it has to form part of a whole channel strategy that we need to build up, based on what we understand about our customers. While we want to make internet access as accessible as we can, we have to recognise there will be some people that will need either face to face telephony or paper channels to deal with this.

  Mr Suffolk: The UK online centres play a very important role in terms of bringing in other communities. They do have over 6,000 centres in some of the most deprived wards in terms of the UK. Many of those centres are staffed with people providing one to one support. You find a fair proportion of those people are unemployed or have numeracy and literacy issues. Places like the UK online centres play a big role in terms of bringing people to the technology as well.

  Mr Bishop: UK online centres are bringing two to three million people through their doors every year. We have a number of other strategies where direct.gov is in a place where people go to, to help that place use that tool. Citizens' Advice Bureaux would be a great example.