MONDAY 13 MARCH 2000

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

  100. Why do a significant number of MPs find it more important to have an internal Intranet than an external website address? What does that say about the attitude today of people who work outside their organisation?
  (Mr Allan) I am not sure that that is necessarily true.

  101. Page 17 of your report shows that it is.
  (Mr Allan) Certainly most of the departments do have both an Intranet and a website and I think there must be relatively few, if any, who have Intranet and do not have a website at all.

  102. Why do less than half think that having a website for the taxpaying customer or citizen is less important than having an Intranet system inside their own organisation? What does that say about the attitude of the organisation's leadership to the general public?
  (Mr Bender) I cannot answer that at all. I suspect that if that survey was re-done now and in six months' time it would be a different picture.

   (Mr Allan) This says 80 per cent in five years' time thought that a website was very important, whereas it was 68 per cent thought an Intranet was very important in five years' time.

  103. At present there are discrepancies there of 46 and 51. There is a discrepancy of attitudes between current chief executives about what is important, whether communicating internally only or externally only with citizens, is that acceptable?
  (Mr Bender) That is not right, and as I said just now, I believe that is something that new field work will show is changing, and for the new media team to debate about.

  104. I look forward to seeing those figures. My last question is about money. What investigations are taking place to enable the Government and Government agencies to prosper financially through the use of this technology?
  (Mr Allan) It is a key part of the current spending review, looking at what departments' plans are in terms of spending more money in the short-term in order to make very substantial savings in the longer term. That will be an increasingly important part of where we are looking at investment in IT and in similar technologies.

  105. My question is not really about savings it is about income. What investigations are taking place and what efforts are being made to attract private finance through the use of information technology and web pages from the Government? We read in the newspapers and my own experience is that that is where providers of private web pages are making the mass sum of their money, what are we doing to bring some money into the Government's coffers?
  (Mr Allan) Most of the IT projects are done under the private finance initiative. We are certainly not spending vast amounts of public money, saying this all has to be done for no return within Government.

  106. Have you ruled out advertising and that sort of thing?
  (Mr Bender) We have looked at it and so far we have ruled it out on the grounds of potential propriety on Government websites. The question has been asked and we have answered it to one specific department so far but we do not have general guidelines[5].

  The Committee suspended from 6.01 pm to 6.07 pm for a Division in the House

  107. Mr Czerniawski, the DSS does not know how much it costs to handle a telephone call, does it?
  (Mr Czerniawski) No.

  108. When will you?
  (Mr Czerniawski) The trouble at the moment is that we have people who are doing all sorts of different things and telephone calls are part of people's jobs rather than being concentrated. We do have units of activity which we count and measure. I do not know the level of detail and whether that could produce a more detailed costing for a telephone call than the NAO were able to establish.

  109. That is a very long answer to a very short question. The question was, when will you know how much it costs to handle a telephone call? If you do not know then please say so. If there is a date please say it and if there is not then let me know.
  (Mr Czerniawski) We will know when we manage telephone calls through call centres and bring together information so that call centre operators do that as their key job, then we are able to cost that. I cannot give you an immediate date.

  110. Can you give me a date for when you are going to have those call centres up and running for all of your transactions?
  (Mr Czerniawski) For all of them, no. The first stage is already in place, we are doing it for some pensioners at the moment and we have plans to extend that to all pensioners over the next twelve months. The second stage will be as part of the Child Support reforms, beyond that we do not have detailed plans at present.

  111. Okay. Until you do know what those costs are you also will not know what savings you can make by transferring people to website processing, will you?
  (Mr Czerniawski) Not precisely, no.

  112. You have made estimates of the savings for every one per cent shift to web access and that is £3 million for every one per cent shift; is that correct?
  (Mr Czerniawski) That is an estimate that was made by the NAO, we certainly accept that.

  113. You signed up to that.
  (Mr Czerniawski) Yes.

  114. I appreciate that it is not based on any knowledge you had.
  (Mr Czerniawski) Yes.

  115. How much are you currently spending in the DSS on promoting and servicing web access?
  (Mr Czerniawski) We are not at the moment spending very much directly on promoting it. The website address is going on to all new forms and leaflets as they are revised, increasingly appearing on stationery, and so on.

  116. Again, it is a very simple question, how much are you currently spending?
  (Mr Czerniawski) Because the promotion is through publications that we are doing anyway there is not a separately identifiable sum for promoting the website.

  117. The other part of my question was on servicing websites, how much are you spending on promoting web access?
  (Mr Czerniawski) At the moment we are spending about £1m to £1.5m a year directly on the website. There are also lots of other people involved in providing us with working information that goes into it, which I cannot give you a precise figure for.

  Mr Gardiner: Might it be helpful to the Committee if you provide precise figures for that?

  118. Could you do that, please?
  (Mr Czerniawski) I can provide the Committee with the information I can bring together, I am not sure it will go as far as is wanted[6].

  Chairman: See what you can do.

  119. What you told me so far implies that if you were able to achieve a one per cent shift onto web access you would actually free-up more money than you are currently spending, as far as have you been able to identify to this Committee, on promoting and servicing the total amount of web access that you have available?
  (Mr Czerniawski) I accept that, which is why we are working to improve information on the site.

6   Note by Witness: The figure given includes the costs of intranet activity, as well as those for the internet. The direct cost of the DSS internet sites was approximately £390,000 in the last financial year. This does not include indirect costs of material produced for other purposes, such as leaflets, on which separate data is not available. Back