MONDAY 13 MARCH 2000

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

  40. How do you ensure compliance?
  (Mr Allan) I am not sure at the moment. Before the new guidelines came out we did not have a mechanism for ensuring that but we will have one now.
  (Mr Bender) Can I help by saying, as I said earlier to the Chairman, we recognise the pendulum of decentralisation has swung too far and that is why we are increasing the resourcing at the centre to deal with just this point of concern.

  41. What the Report suggests is that most permanent secretaries do not consider the targets for electronic transactions to be particularly demanding—that is of 25 per cent or 50 per cent—that is because they think that somebody telephoning in is making an electronic transaction. That beggars believe, does it not?
  (Mr Allan) When the guidelines were set up in October 1997 there was a lot of concern about having guidelines that would force people to use the Web and the Internet at a time when that was certainly something that was very much a minority usage. Certainly, as time has gone on the desire to push more on to the Internet has increased. I think when we do review the guidelines we will make it clearer what the targets are for on-line access via the Internet and what the targets are for access via other channels such as call centres. The evidence we have in terms of the Central IT Unit commissioning surveys on what people want reveals, at the moment, anyway, still a strong preference for access services via telephone rather than the Internet. However I think that will change.

  42. This Report is very critical of the methodology of trying to ensure that what the Government wants is being achieved. On targets, for instance, it says that targets are expressed in terms of increasing the electronic capability rather than what people use it for. Normally it is the number of hits on a website that the national sector would look at. It seems to me that this has now all been rolled into how many people actually phone a department.
  (Mr Bender) As I said earlier to the Chairman, we are looking—ministers have asked us to look—at the targets to make them more challenging, to look at the methodology.

  43. They could hardly be less challenging. They are not challenging at all, are they?
  (Mr Bender) I do not agree. We are not at the 25 per cent figure yet. One hundred per cent by 2008, at the time we published the Modernising Government White Paper in some parts of the commentary it is regarded as very challenging and in others as not challenging enough.

  44. Paragraph 4.20 basically implies that it makes no difference whether people use the new technology or telephone in, the response time makes no difference. In other words, it does not matter if you are somebody in a small business or somebody else, a private individual making an enquiry, whether you send a letter or not you are likely to wait a fairly long time.
  (Mr Allan) We do see considerable cost savings within the departments. If they can process more transactions electronically—the Report identifies the potential savings that might be there—that is something that we want to see achieved.

  45. I am trying to get to grips with why this has not been done, that is what I am having difficulty with. For example, the Department of Agriculture does not put press releases on the web.
  (Mr Allan) It does.

  46. It does and it has saved.
  (Mr Allan) It does and it has, however some do not.
  (Mr Bender) They all do.

  47. In terms of key departments like Social Security the figures are fairly staggering of what can be achieved in savings by cutting down the number of telephone calls. If two per cent of the 160 million telephone calls to the DSS was switched, it could save £7.7 million annually. How quickly do you think that sort of thing can be implemented?
  (Mr Czerniawski) I think part of the answer to that is that we are already doing just that. There is a lot of information on various Social Security websites and the traffic on the websites is increasing at a very substantial rate, it is already well above the level recorded in this Report. What we do not know, and is very hard to pin down, is how much of that displaces telephone traffic and how much of it is an addition to telephone traffic. At the moment we are getting something like 600,000 phone calls a day and we are getting something like 70,000 user sessions on the website each month. The proportion of telephone calls we can displace with our present level of traffic is actually very small but the trend is very strongly upwards and that is exactly why we are working to put more material on the website so that as far as possible we can satisfy people.

  48. I was pleased to hear you, Mr Allan, refer to digital television, smart television, are you making sure that any developments are likely to be transferable as painlessly as possible to smart television technology?
  (Mr Allan) Certainly. We have, again, issued guidelines to the departments to make sure that they develop their services in a way that can be transferred to that technology, and also talking to the various companies that are involved in interactive television to see which services are best put out most quickly on their services.

  49. 3.5 says there is no robust methodology for justifying the cost of web investments, is such a methodology in place now?
  (Mr Allan) We have just commissioned a study from PA consultants to look exactly at the question of what our methodology should be. The Treasury has set up a cross-cutting spending review, involving both the Treasury and officials from the Cabinet Office, looking at bids that have come in from departments in the IT field and how the investment appraisal of that should be done and where the benefits are to try and get a common view across departments. The answer to that is that we have made considerable progress since the Report was published.

  Mr Griffiths: Thank you.

  50. Is not there a danger, gentlemen, that just as soon as you get Whitehall used to PCs and laptops—what Mr Griffiths was talking about—digital televisions and the new generation of mobile phones is going to have overtaken us?
  (Mr Allan) All I can say is we are pushing forward to make sure that departmental services can be accessed over as wide a variety of different technologies as possible.

  51. I am thinking in terms of the users, because you talked about the limited amount of expertise in Whitehall at the moment, I am thinking about practitioners.
  (Mr Bender) The input as far as civil servants are concerned will be their screen. However, the user in the outside world is accessing the—

  52. I am talking about the habit of using the Net. One of you said a little earlier that usage is still small but the trend is sharply upwards, that is true in the world and every projection about this in the world as a whole. What I am really asking is, have you thought through—I would be astonished if you have not—to the next generation or two of technology? Do you think that Whitehall personnel have done so as well?
  (Mr Bender) I think we have more to do on it, that is the honest answer to that. We have more to do in terms of skilling people to handle what is a fundamental change in the way the Government and business do business.

  53. If new media expertise is still relatively rare what incentives are there, what training provisions are there, not for the great and good, not for the generals of Whitehall but for your ordinary rank and file civil servants who may be going home to boot-up at home and spend an exciting evening where the day had not been quite so exciting? To what extent can you bring that into the work place by encouraging ordinary people to train and move on in their careers?
  (Mr Bender) I think we have to think about how to do that.

  54. But you have not done so yet?
  (Mr Bender) There is a generational point. For most of my colleagues who are still in their 20s, this is second nature to them now. The skills gap, if it exists, is for the older ones now.

  55. I am sure that is true, but perhaps you can just enlarge on that. I am slumped in my chair and I cannot see you all, but one of you was saying that we are still with the generation that expects more of a letter than an e-mail. If you take kids of eight and 10 in school now, in 15 years' time those kids are going to be paying taxes, they are going to be using the web all of the time, they are going to be shopping on the web, they are going to expect to, if they become civil servants, communicate by e-mail. What else can you do on that front to expand the generation thing so that the older ones are able to keep up before they are overtaken by the teenies?
  (Mr Allan) We are doing a huge amount of internal training in all departments, because, increasingly, a lot of departmental business is conducted electronically internally. Almost all departments have Intranets and more and more material is going on the Intranet and more and more material is circulated by e-mail.

  56. Can I just think of the typical ministerial office network? Think of the average government minister who is informed about a subject, the chances are that if it is a junior minister, a Minister of State, the Secretary of State and their private offices will be copied on a normal memo, as well as, perhaps, anything up to 20 for 30 other people. Is that kind of humdrum routine everyday communication being done on the Intranet within a government department now?
  (Mr Bender) Within most, yes. Certainly within the Cabinet Office, I do not think I have received a printed version of a submission to a minister since I have been in—

  57. That is because of who you are.
  (Mr Bender) They are mostly circulated electronically.
  (Mr Czerniawski) Certainly within Social Security, they have been for some time.

  58. I will come back to Social Security, because I saw in paragraph 21 that there is still a lot of progress to be made at the DSS and I just want you to specify that, so far as the Benefits Agency is concerned. Using the other sense of the word "security", so far as the encryption is concerned, how secure can memos or communications, that need to be secured, be kept on the Intranet?
  (Mr Bender) Shall I begin to answer that, and then Mr Allan may want to add something? The Government Secure Intranet has been devised on the basis of advice from the Security Services and the advice that we have had is that it is fine for material up to restricted level. For material of confidentiality, we have another layer of security which is presently known as xGSI. Obviously there is a human error possibility for release of the material to the outside world. So far as hacking is concerned, internally, then we have operated on the basis of advice from the Security Agencies.

  59. That is reassuring. Can we go onto the DSS and a comment that I saw somewhere in there, that it tends to be slower than other departments? I would have thought that for the Benefits Agency, in particular, if they were to make rapid progress, the best way is to familiarise the general public with this whole new process and assure even older people that it is not quite as terrifying as they might think it is?
  (Mr Czerniawski) I certainly agree with the general approach. Our big problem in Social Security is one that Mr Rendel referred to earlier, which is that we are very heavily constrained by our mainframe computer systems, which are a generation, in some cases two generations, older than the Internet really supports. We have got, in effect, a two stage process that we need to go through. The first stage, which is where we are at the moment, is putting as much information as possible on the website and making it available to the public to provide them with information. We have plans in the near future to build on that with more forms going on and with giving people the ability to get a rough calculation of their entitlement on line. What we cannot do, until we have dramatically upgraded the back-end systems, is allow people to interact directly with the benefits system.