CABINET OFFICE & CENTRAL OFFICE OF INFORMATION

28 NOVEMBER 2007

  Q20  Nigel Griffiths: Can you just talk me through what steps you are taking to prune redundant websites within government?

  Mr Bishop: Yes. There is a plan going ahead where websites have to be closed down and converge on direct.gov or business link, unless you can prove an exceptional case. As I said, so far, out of the 951 central government websites, there are 26 agreed exceptional cases so it is a very, very small proportion indeed. As I said earlier, most of them are the remaining departmental, corporate websites.

  Q21  Nigel Griffiths: Has the plug been pulled on some of the redundant sites already?

  Mr Bishop: Yes. Already 90 have closed so we have made a good start.

  Q22  Nigel Griffiths: When do you expect this process to be completed?

  Mr Bishop: By the end of 2011.

  Ms Cleveland: We may keep the address because people will have it bookmarked as part of their favourites already, but it will just automatically feed people through into direct.gov. You might still find the address but it will just be a front end to direct.gov with no content in it.

  Q23  Nigel Griffiths: Explain to me why it is going to take another four years on sites that are agreed as having redundant information.

  Mr Bishop: First of all, it is very important that we safeguard a huge quantity of information that is on that vast array of sites. One of the questions that was originally asked this year was to say, "We must make sure that important information is not lost for ever", so there has obviously been consultation going on with the parliamentary library, the chief librarian, and with the national archives to make sure that we do not lose any of the data that is in that wide range of sites.

  Q24  Nigel Griffiths: I can imagine that some sites have historical records which you would not want to lose. I take it they are not being treated in the same way as a site that perhaps contains yesterday's housing benefit scale tables.

  Mr Bishop: That is absolutely correct. If you like, the citizen facing content is what needs to be converged and made available on direct.gov and business link. That is a very big project and we need to do it very carefully, first of all so that we get it right and, secondly, so we do not overload the process while we are doing it.

  Mr Suffolk: The key issue here is what is it that the citizen and the business want? It is not about just translating what we have from site A onto direct.gov. Otherwise, it serves no purpose whatsoever. This is about saying, first of all, how do citizens look for information? Is it by health, family, going on holiday or emigrating? Then it is about taking that information and putting it into a format that they find the easiest to deal with, not too text heavy but not too rich in terms of content. It is about the indexing and the signposting. It is about dealing with other organisations like Citizens' Advice Bureaux and putting it in as a package. When we look at this, we have a lot less information but the information is more useful to the end user and we have to go through that process from a design perspective.

  Q25  Nigel Griffiths: I have just written a booklet for senior citizens on the 15 key things they might want to apply for from the veterans' badge to tax credits. I used a well known search engine to get into that. Most of it was exceptionally helpful but certain sites like tax credits did not give information on how much capital you should have, stuff that should be readily available in a scale of figures. Do you have the chance to monitor the quality of information at that level?

  Mr Bishop: We do indeed. We have an ongoing customer satisfaction study which is monitoring exactly that sort of thing. It is the usability of the site, whether it gives anybody any problems. We get very good scores on that, by the way, but it does allow us also to turn the dial and make improvements.

  Q26  Nigel Griffiths: In a case like that, do you find departments receptive to your independent monitoring suggestions?

  Mr Bishop: Yes. It is a rather different situation from independent monitoring because we are working in conjunction with departments at that point to try and make sure that what they want to put out is as user friendly as possible.

  Ms Cleveland: This is one of the advantages of trying to put these into groupings because you might be pulling tax credit information together with housing benefit information for someone to see them together. When looking at designing that site, you would want to make sure you had the similar information for all the benefits that someone might be entitled to.

  Q27  Nigel Griffiths: I recollect that the business link website was an award winning site. Are you aware of having other sites of that nature?

  Mr Bishop: Direct.gov has also been an award winning site. Over the last few years we have had six or seven major awards.

  Q28  Nigel Griffiths: Which of the Report's criticisms do you think are the most serious in terms of ones that you regret showing up that require the most urgent attention?

  Ms Cleveland: The issue of not understanding the costs and how customers use it are the two that I would pick out.

  Q29  Nigel Griffiths: When do you think that will be resolved?

  Ms Cleveland: The strategy we have is migrating onto a site which has those metrics, so it will take the full roll out period that we have for direct.gov to really address it.

  Q30  Nigel Griffiths: We could have a critical Report in the meantime?

  Ms Cleveland: I would hope not.

  Mr Bishop: I would also hope not and I would hope that the migration to direct.gov and business link would be fast enough to avoid another one.

  Ms Cleveland: We are also issuing some new guidance to people that run on the websites on the sorts of metrics and how we think they could cost up their websites. That is going out I think in the new year. I am hoping that we will have the feedback from that in time for any further NAO scrutiny.

  Q31  Nigel Griffiths: Does each of the websites have a website manager or director or something like that?

  Mr Bishop: Direct.gov and business link?

  Q32  Nigel Griffiths: No, the present set-up.

  Ms Cleveland: There will be an owner in each department or NDPD.

  Q33  Nigel Griffiths: How many people are you dealing with?

  Ms Cleveland: At the moment we are mainly dealing with the ones directly in the programme so it will be a couple of thousand.

  Mr Bishop: If each department has a large number of websites, that would be a relatively small number of people because there would not be that many web managers within each department.

  Mr Suffolk: One of the challenges that we face in terms of the web world is that it is all pervasive. When we are producing content for the internet, we are frequently producing the content for paper. It is the same information. We are frequently using that on other systems. Whilst we may be talking about the web here, one of the challenges of everything to do with the internet is that it is all pervasive and therefore I think, as the Report says, on average each team has four in a team supporting their websites but you do have marketing people, production people, technology people, people dealing with other channels. Part of our role when we are doing the rationalisation is to bring all of those in as well in terms of what does this mean from a closure perspective.

  Q34  Nigel Griffiths: Finally, when you look at the way websites are run by other governments, do you look with envy at any one in particular of comparable size to the UK?

  Mr Suffolk: We deal with America, Australia, New Zealand and Canada as our primary sites, and we deal with Singapore as well. Every country is fundamentally different. If you take America, they have 22,000 websites and they watch with some interest our closure programme because they say to me, "We wish we could go down that route but with 22,000 we do not even known where to start." They have gone for the different route, which I think you mentioned earlier, which is this very hand built, sophisticated search across the government websites. Canada is very good from the Service Canada perspective and they have invested a significant amount of time, effort and money from a citizen perspective, which is the key issue in terms of positioning their citizens on their Service Canada. When you look at the European research that came out in September, the UK is positioned in the top five in terms of all of the European states. We have the second highest penetration in terms of internet usage. The UK does very well across all other governments.

  Q35  Chairman: You say that but if you look at figure 4a on page 15 you will see that we are behind. "The proportion of the population who have used an internet site to look for government information": we are behind Iceland, Sweden, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Estonia, Austria and Slovakia. We are not that high up, are we?

  Mr Suffolk: From the ONS statistics published in terms of September, I think the latest figure was 67% of the UK population have used the internet every day or almost every day. When I compare the latest ONS figures to this Report, we can see how quickly the world is shifting from an internet perspective.

  Q36  Mr Mitchell: Mr Suffolk said at the start that it was not a government issue. What did you mean by that? What were you saying?

  Mr Suffolk: From a technology perspective and the internet, whether you are public sector or private sector—I have just come from 25 years in the private sector—we are all addressing the same issues from the pervasive nature of technology.

  Q37  Mr Mitchell: You were not saying there is not a central policy and a central driver?

  Mr Suffolk: No.

  Q38  Mr Mitchell: You are head of transformational government. You could be a head of super power status. What does that mean your role is? To get them all to use these systems in common usage or what?

  Ms Cleveland: I am responsible for the delivery of the service transformation agreement that was published alongside the Pre-Budget Report and the PSA targets in there. Very much what we are looking to do there is encourage departments to really have a much better view of their customer insight and to have channelled strategies to meet those customer needs.

  Q39  Mr Mitchell: There is therefore a central government drive to provide more information and to provide it in a more effective fashion. How is it done in individual departments? In my office, I am fortunate to have a lad who knows something about this. I look at the website and all sorts of rubbish appears. Eventually, I found it necessary to employ a consultant. Is it always done by the employment of outside consultants coming in?

  Ms Cleveland: No. I cannot give you the split.