Directgov supersite swallows hundreds of government websites

Outraged tub thumping was the reaction on some library and information discussion lists to the announcement at the start of 2007 that the government intended to axe hundreds of its websites. But the tub thumpers turned out to be wrong; the rationalisation of unhelpfully proliferating government websites, and their absorption into one of two super sites – Directgov and Business Link – has actually been a success story. So much so, indeed, that the death list has expanded from a modest 550 or so at the start to over 1,700 now.

Why the carnage? Because, as cabinet secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell said at the time, people aren’t interested in whether their needs are met by department X or agency Y: “They just want a good, joined-up service.”

But the path to website Nirvana hasn’t always been easy for Directgov; in fact, it’s sometimes seemed that government doesn’t really know what to do with it.

Shift happens

Following attempts to raise Directgov’s hit rate from a dismal two million a month, in March 2006 the Cabinet Office moved it from the strategic centre of the Cabinet Office into a delivery arm of government, to the Central Office of Information (COI).

But not for long. Two years later it was shifted again, this time, perhaps bizzarely, to the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) – and with a quadrupling of its annual budget from £8 million to £30 million. Sir David Varney, the former executive chairman of HM Revenue & Customs who had called for the reduction in government websites in the first place, had argued for DWP, as a large service delivery department with a vested interest in communicating with citizens.

As well as surviving three moves in as many years, Directgov had also been putting the politicians right about its effectiveness. Grilled by the Commons Public Accounts Committee in November 2007, Alan Bishop of the COI made short work of Tory chairman Edward Leigh’s guffawing “Sounds more like ‘not me, guv’” by pointing out that Directgov had had next to no down time in four years. And he also slapped down Labour heavyweight Austin Mitchell by saying that, far from being less efficient than the private sector, public sector websites actually scored as well as Amazon for usability – and rather better than Tesco.

But there’s been plenty of remedial work for Directgov to do nevertheless. In its July 2007 report ‘Government on the Internet’, the National Audit Office estimated the annual cost of running central government websites at £208 million and said that some departments knew little about either their own costs or their usage. And in a June 2008 survey, the public sector information consultancy Kable found that only a third of the key ‘life events’ round which Directgov was originally structured could be completely transacted online.

Both these issues are now being addressed. The COI is requiring all government websites that will still be around by April 2010 to come up with auditable figures on their cost, quality and usage. And Directgov has an integration strategy for transactions, with quality of user experience as its priority, plus – unusually for the public sector perhaps – an emphasis on co-branding, to reflect the Directgov ‘experience’ while also identifying the part of government actually providing the service.

Make or break

Transactions are in fact the make-or-break factor for Directgov; one high profile hack into the transactions database could blow it. So the Cabinet Office is developing a Government Gateway to enable people to enrol for services, and it’s guarding its security jealously. The services available through the Gateway are still a bit of a hotch-potch at the moment – but if it continues to gain confidence among users then it can only grow.

Directgov is also embracing the mashing culture, positively encouraging citizens to show what more can be done with its data by supporting events organised by the ginger group Rewired State. It’s started its own blog, so it can talk more easily to developers about new ways of exploiting the technology. And – coming as it does under a government department especially concerned with social exclusion – its services are also available on the media of choice for the less technologically savvy: digital television, mobile phones and (while it lasts) teletext.

sounds good

So what could go wrong? Plenty, actually. The Directgov project is all about consolidation and grand designs, and the government doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to large scale technological initiatives.

Directgov comes under a single function government department – albeit a large one – and there’s no guarantee that it will continue to secure the degree of co-operation from other departments and quangos that it has achieved hitherto. An incoming Conservative government could scupper it – although, since the Tories’ new media whizz-kid Craig Elder was on the panel that judged the Young Rewired State projects, this seems unlikely.

For now, though, it seems to be doing all the right things. And, as its chief executive Jayne Nickalls told the Guardian in 2007, ‘people want it’. Let’s hope they continue to get it.

Tim Buckley Owen is a journalist

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