CABINET OFFICE & CENTRAL OFFICE OF INFORMATION

28 NOVEMBER 2007

  Q40  Mr Mitchell: Do most departments use that?

  Ms Cleveland: A lot of departments have their own in-house resource that works at building up their expertise. I am sure some are supported by external help but—

  Q41  Mr Mitchell: Why are commercial sites so much superior and so much more efficient?

  Ms Cleveland: Some are and some are not. Is it true we are further behind some at the moment?

  Q42  Mr Mitchell: The Report says that people find commercial sites easy to deal with and more useful. I just wonder why that is. Are you employing the wrong people or is it the usual tendency of civil servants to cover their backsides and deluge people with words to obfuscate what they are really doing?

  Ms Cleveland: Is there part of the culture that probably puts too many words in? At times, yes, I think I would certainly concede that. A lot of it is to do with the complexity and the scope of things that government departments cover.

  Q43  Mr Mitchell: And the regulations presumably?

  Ms Cleveland: Absolutely, and they are much broader than many private sector companies would have.

  Q44  Mr Mitchell: Mr Bishop was about to demur on that.

  Mr Bishop: I was not going to demur at all. In our brand tracking study, we do measure ourselves versus other popular, commercial websites. For example, on that particular measure, easy to use, we get a score slightly below Ebay and the same as Amazon. We are well ahead of Tesco.

  Q45  Mr Mitchell: What is wrong with the COI? Why is not the COI doing this? Why has it been transferred to Work and Pensions?

  Mr Bishop: The rationale for that was that it should have one of the major departments.

  Q46  Mr Mitchell: Surely you are the Central Office of Information? You are the ones who should be doing this and who have all the expertise.

  Mr Bishop: As you can imagine, it breaks my heart in some ways but I understand the rationale.

  Q47  Mr Mitchell: Does it break your heart because you are doing it inefficiently? Were there complaints about the service you provided?

  Mr Bishop: Far from it. I think we have been doing an extremely good job, so I am sorry to be handing it on at this stage.

  Q48  Mr Mitchell: Why is there so little provision for user responses, either abusive or helpful? Why are not users invited to say how they find the service?

  Ms Cleveland: I personally would like to see far more of that coming through. I am not sure what is planned for the future, but direct.gov—

  Q49  Mr Mitchell: Surely you should provide that universally. My wife handles all this. When I saw the vituperative stuff that was passing from her (a) to a bank and (b) to Scottish Gas or whatever, I was appalled but you need that kind of response to know how people find the sites, do you not?

  Ms Cleveland: From my perspective and from a transformational government point of view I would like to see more of that because you can use the citizen's experience as a way to drive the way we develop not just the internet channel but all our channels to give them a better service.

  Q50  Mr Mitchell: Has that not been provided by the COI as well, user response? Is it to open yourself to abuse, the kind of abuse that comes from my wife, or is it that you have not thought of that?

  Ms Cleveland: There are feedback sites.

  Mr Bishop: No. We do get feedback and we constantly monitor customer satisfaction on an ongoing basis.

  Q51  Mr Mitchell: I see that the Report considers direct.gov understaffed. Why is that? Is there not enough money being provided for it? Who is paying for direct.gov?

  Mr Bishop: Currently it is being paid for essentially by subscription from all the departments who are contributing to it. One of the reasons again for the transfer to the DWP was to secure better funding going into the future.

  Ms Cleveland: Direct.gov is now going to be centrally funded rather than through subscription.

  Q52  Mr Mitchell: When it goes on to direct.gov, will there still be departmental sites as well?

  Ms Cleveland: There will be departmental sites relating to some of the nature of the departments for publication and consultation. They will link in where appropriate but they will be much smaller sites than they are now and there will not be what I would call customer or business facing transactions within them. They will all be on to direct.gov.

  Q53  Mr Mitchell: There is going to be a massive transfer therefore?

  Ms Cleveland: Yes, there is a big programme of work.

  Q54  Mr Mitchell: Is it within the resources of the system to cope with that?

  Ms Cleveland: Those were the resources we bid for as part of the spending review settlement.

  Q55  Mr Mitchell: I see that the Report is critical about departmental search engines. What will happen when you have one overall site? Who will provide those for references between things?

  Ms Cleveland: I am not going to pretend to bluff my way on the technology of the search engines. I will let John perhaps give you a bit more detail on that but we are working a lot on search engines. There is no point in putting all the information together if people cannot find it. It should be a lot easier because of the way we group the information together. One of the problems you have with some of the external searches is that you have to know what you are looking for to be able to find it. Part of the construction of the direct.gov site is that if you are going on holiday, you should be able to find everything you need, your passport, visas, inoculations, insurance. In an external search engine you might have to look for all those things separately. What we are hoping with the structure of direct.gov is you will find those things all together but there is a lot of technical work going on on search engines which is beyond my capability.

  Q56  Mr Mitchell: We should have a note from the Treasury saying, "In view of the balance of payments, do not go." Mr Suffolk, what is the main nature of search engines?

  Mr Suffolk: We probably all use searches in this room and if you key in almost anything you will get two million references and 1,999,000 are complete gobbledygook. That is because all the search engines do not really know in a sensible way what you are looking for. This comes back down to the website rationalisation which says that, for you to be able to search, the engines must know the structure of the information you are searching for and it has to be designed in such a way. When we are moving all the information over, the first thing we do is to structure it in a way that the search engines can find the information. The Report talks quite a lot about the more external links that you have the better it is. That is fine but that is only one very small element in terms of what is going on. We structure the information correctly. We begin to make sure it is written correctly from the information you wrap around it and the third thing we do—this is what we are doing now—is we work with Google themselves to come up with a model.

  Q57  Mr Mitchell: I see there are 6,000 centres where people can go. Where are these and what assistance do people get? The problem, I would imagine, with usage is older people and deprived people who do not have internet access. What are the centres?

  Ms Cleveland: These are the UK online centres that my colleague mentioned.

  Q58  Mr Mitchell: Where are they?

  Ms Cleveland: Libraries. They are freely available where people go in communities.

  Q59  Mr Mitchell: That could be public toilets.

  Ms Cleveland: When my 80 year old parents went to their UK online centre to learn how to use the internet, they went to a course that was run in their local library very successfully. They have been browsing ever since.