MONDAY 13 MARCH 2000

MR BRIAN BENDER, MR ALEX ALLAN, MR PETER BURKE AND MR STEFAN CZERNIAWSKI

  1. Good afternoon, gentlemen, I do not know quite what you have done wrong but you have the Financial Secretary here today to keep an eye on you. I welcome the Financial Secretary for his formal visit to the Committee, thank you. He will not be with us for all of it, however he will stay for the interesting start. Today we are looking at the Comptroller and Auditor General's Report on Government on the Web and we welcome Mr Brian Bender, the Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet Office, who is responsible for coordinating the work on the Modernising Government Programme and he is accompanied by Mr Alex Allan, the Government e-Envoy—a more cheerful subject than the last time you were here, Mr Bender. Would you care to introduce your colleagues and then we can get underway on the questions?

  (Mr Bender) We have Mr Peter Burke from the Department of Trade and Industry and Mr Czerniawski from the Department of Social Security, in each case in the event the Committee would like to ask particular questions relating to the chapters in the Report dealing with those two departments' websites.

  2. Belt and braces today. You are familiar with our approach. I am going to start with paragraph 11, one of the key commitments of the Modernising Government White Paper is the greater use of information and communication technology to achieve "information government". Paragraph 11 of the summary states: "In 1995-6 Britain was ahead of the other European governments and much of the private business in the United Kingdom in creating a basic Web presence for a large number of agencies. But the central impetus has now flagged and British government Web sites currently look disconnected and relatively hard to navigate." This suggests a piecemeal approach, why is this so and what are you doing to remedy the situation?
  (Mr Bender) Chairman, thank you. I think we recognised a year or so ago that the pendulum of decentralisation to departments that happened over the last decade, rightly giving increasing management responsibility to departments, has swung too far in the area of IT. For that reason the Modernising Government White Paper and a significant number of the actions that have been set out since then foresaw the pendulum swinging back a little bit, not to take powers away from departments but to coordinate, set frameworks and then drive the programme from the centre. That is the sort of action we have taken and we are very happy to outline in more detail to the Committee today.

  3. I will pick up on some of those points in my questions, and I am sure others will too. My next question is on paragraph 4.22. The Government has set a series of targets so that by 2002 25 per cent of citizens' transactions with government should be capable of being done electronically, rising to 50 per cent by 2005 and one hundred per cent by 2008. Those targets only cover electronic capability and not actual usage of websites. Furthermore the permanent secretary's and the chief executive's responses to the NAO survey indicate that they do not see those targets as very demanding. Are these targets going to have a real impact? By not covering usage, what incentive is there for departments to promote greater use of the web?
  (Mr Bender) I think there are two answers to that. First of all we believe that setting the targets initially, now a couple of years ago, has been a valuable stimulus to the departments. We have been asked by ministers to look at them again to try and make them more challenging, and we are doing that in two respects. First of all, whether the one hundred per cent target by 2008 is sufficiently challenging and demanding and, secondly, the whole question of methodology, how we measure provision, whether we do it by transaction or by whole service. As you say yourself, whether we should be also looking at take-up and not just capability. I would expect announcements on that from the Government in the near future.

  4. One of the problems about "electronically" is that it covers phone calls as well as websites. This point about incentive, Permanent Secretary, what are you doing about that? It is in the PSA.
  (Mr Bender) I would expect as part of Spending Review 2000 the next round of Public Service Agreements and the underpinning Service Delivery Agreements to have objectives by departments as to what they need to be achieving when it comes to delivery. Without giving away too many confidences, I would not be surprised if the Cabinet Office's own Public Service Agreement had some overview objectives in that area.

  5. I notice you look at the Financial Secretary. The next question I have is in relation to paragraph 5 and 4.14: "Intranets can significantly improve communications within departments with considerable potential to reduce departments' admin costs. To date progress across Government has been limited", paragraph 17 covers that, I think. What are you doing to encourage top management to make the Intranet central to the life of their organisation?
  (Mr Bender) We had discussions at Permanent Secretary level in Sunningdale in late January on the whole question of the use of the Web, and this is one important part of it. I am not sure the departments need very much encouragement on Intranet development, that is something they are increasingly seeing for themselves but it is something that we do attach importance to and they attach importance to as a means of communicating internally as well as linking into their external websites.

  6. Is not the Intranet developed in Whitehall so far somewhat piecemeal itself?
  (Mr Allan) We now have over forty departments linked into the Government Secure Intranet and we are gradually expanding services available on that. I think more and more departments are seeing the advantages. For example, when they have complex rule books, if they can get that on the Intranet and not have to send around paper updates every week or so there are huge savings to be made.

  7. Let us come to you, Mr Allan, I want to pick up with you paragraphs 2.29 and 2.30, comparisons with similar departments overseas. It shows that United Kingdom departments are investing significantly less in web-based technologies and a few staff in the Department of Social Security are unable to see their own websites. How many people in departments have access to computers to use web-based technologies and what are you doing to improve it?
  (Mr Allan) The website guidelines we have sent around say that departments should ensure that as many of their staff as possible do have access to their own website, either directly through the Internet or through a departmental Intranet, if that is the way they want to go. We now have something like 120,000 government users on the Government Secure Intranet and we are adding more all of the time.

  8. Is that a very recent figure? At the time this Report went to press I think in the Benefits Agency it was 100 out of 167,000 staff.
  (Mr Allan) I do not know if we have more up-to-date figures about the Benefit Agency but certainly across Government as a whole we now have 120,000 users[1].

  9. I will press on. Paragraph 2, Mr Allan: "The Web should allow departments to improve significantly the service they provide to citizens whilst also producing cost cuts for service delivery." In paragraph 18 it suggests that so far the Cabinet Office have played a very restricted role in promoting and adopting web technology, why is this and what are you doing about it?
  (Mr Allan) I think we are assuming a greater control now. There has been my appointment as e-Envoy and also within the Central IT Unit we are now setting up a specific team to look at monitoring the new web guidelines that we have put out. I think we are going to be more proactive in the future and have rather more central checking of departments to see if they are implementing the web guidelines.

  10. Let us talk about some of those. Paragraph 14: "Very few departments have so far developed web-based transactions, such as facilities for citizens to get and download electronic forms", that is the most fundamental thing for Government to do. It is obviously important if citizens are going to be encouraged to make use of websites, why is that facility not more widely available at the moment?
  (Mr Allan) We would like to see it more widely available. There are some departments that have made quite extensive use of that. The Court Service has something like 230 forms and I think all of the forms they produce are available on-line. For example the Foreign Office has the visa forms that people overseas might need available on-line now. It is something that is increasing all of the time. It is clearly one of the areas we see scope for, doing more, so most departmental forms are online.

  11. How do we compare with the country of your old posting?
  (Mr Allan) I think in many services they are ahead of us, though we are catching up. They are ahead on things like on-line tax returns, but we are introducing that from April. Similarly they have had a rather extensive job search on-line but the Department for Education and Employment is now piloting one here. Interestingly, it is different in different states of Australia: there are some states that are doing well and other states that have done rather little.

  12. In paragraph 18 it says it costs the Department of Social Security £2.40 to handle a single telephone call. If only one in fifty calls could be shifted to people looking up material on department websites that would be a saving of £7.7 million by itself. This illustrates just one way the Department can save money by encouraging citizens to seek information through the website. What progress have departments made for realising those efficiency savings via the web?
  (Mr Allan) One of the interesting things is that they have not been very good at measuring what they have been doing up to now, and that is one of the things we are also encouraging. I think the Report makes a helpful contribution to encouraging that. I was getting some information from the Ministry of Agriculture just last week and they reckon that putting copies of news releases on their website had saved them £180,000 a year in stationery and mailing out from an old manual list. I think there are very extensive savings to be made, and that is certainly something that we want to investigate with departments so that they measure what they are saving and also to look for more areas where they can make savings.

  13. Given that greater web usage will obviously increase the traffic, that will require that they are sufficiently well organised and have the capacity to deal with the increase volume, particularly in delivering front line services to citizens. The staffing expertise in communicating via the Web is rare in central government and, I suspect, in severe short supply. Are you confident that you have enough staff with the right skills to use the Web, and if not, what are you doing about it?
  (Mr Bender) I think there are a number of different strands of this, and it is clearly an important issue for the future. First of all, as part of the Civil Service reform programme, the recommendation is to bring in, from outside the Civil Service, staff to do 100 prominent key tasks. I would anticipate that IT skills will be one of those areas where we will want to bring people in. We are developing senior development programmes for top level Civil Servants an Internet node is being developed, and further down the line there are all sorts of activities going on for training civil servants in this area. We need to make sure that the staff have the right training and development to be able to cope with it.

  Chairman: It is an issue that this Committee is particularly conscious of. The litany of IT problems we have had in front of us is often caused by IT weaknesses in individual departments. Let us widen our Committee and start with Mr David Rendel.

  13. The whole of the Government and, indeed, the whole of society is moving into electronic forms of communication at a rapid rate. What is the down side to that, as far as you are concerned?

  (Mr Allan) One of the down sides is if it creates a digital divide and worsens the problems of social exclusion, and that is an area that we are very keen to make sure we address. I think it is interesting that we are increasingly seeing different ways of delivering these services, for example, digital television will grow as a more important means. There may be quite a lot of people who would not dream of accessing the Internet through a PC but might well feel comfortable using digital television.

  15. What about the complexity of bureaucracy? Some of your forms are quite difficult for even relatively intelligent people to understand. Are you sure that when you produce them on the Internet it is going to be easy for people to understand them without having to come back to you and ask lots of questions?
  (Mr Allan) I do not think so. One of the advantages of these technologies and, so called, intelligent forms is that one of the benefits of filling in forms on-line is that they can take note of how you have answered some questions and skip the irrelevant questions. So, in principle, you will not need to wade through some of the horrendous forms that you do nowadays, simply because they are all printed on paper.

  16. When you put your forms onto the Web do you check that they are so easily understandable that you will not have a lot of problems with people who for the first time, perhaps, are seeing these forms on the Web?
  (Mr Allan) I would like to think we do. I suspect that for quite a lot of them, at the moment, the first priority is simply getting versions of the existing forms on-line, but certainly that is one of the areas that we believe should happen as they move forward. I think the first priority in many cases is simply getting the form online, but that is an important point.

  17. You mentioned one answer which I was going to come onto any way. Do you find that there is another down side in terms of electronic communications—talking perhaps more of Intranet—that people are inclined to send out massive amounts of communications, perhaps rather more than they used to?
  (Mr Bender) I think one of the underlying points which I think you are making, which I accept, is that the use of this sort of technology is going to need some discipline inside the Government and in government relations with the public as well. It is very common these days to get back to the office and find hundreds of e-mails, many of which were not necessary. So we do need some internal discipline and guidelines as to how we operate. We certainly need them externally as well.

  18. Are you doing anything to implement that at present?
  (Mr Bender) We are working in the Cabinet Office on some guidance, including guidance for dealing with the public by e-mail, because the public expect, rightly, much quicker responses to e-mails than they would to letters. Yet, if a civil servant responds with the authority of the Government, then that will need some clearance to ensure that the answer is right. So the guidance we are giving on that, and we have given on that, is that if we cannot reply within 48 hours we should send an acknowledgement saying when the citizen could expect a full reply. That is the sort of issue we are working on.

  19. Do you foresee any possibility that as the citizens of the country get more used to using this sort of the technology they will be firing so much stuff at you that the Civil Service will simply be overwhelmed?
  (Mr Bender) Bill Gates said recently that the days when an American Senator receives a million e-mails a day are quite possible. I think we are going to have to think about how we handle that sort of traffic, yes.