MONDAY 13 MARCH 2000

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

  140. I will be very brief, because I am quite certain that I am the only dinosaur sitting in this room. I was very interested in page 54, paragraph 4.20, about dealing with e-mails to government departments. E-mails are one of my pet hates. It states that e-mails to government departments are required to get a response within the same time as an ordinary e-mail, ie, 15 days. That is joke for a start, 15 days, try 15 weeks. There is an argument that e-mails should be answered immediately. Do you think they should?
  (Mr Bender) Forgive me if I am repeating what I said earlier.

  141. I do apologise for being late. Again, the privatisation of the railway by the previous Government means that I was an hour late.
  (Mr Bender) If a civil servant or, indeed, a minister has been invited to reply to an e-mail from the general public which requires an authoritative government reply, then the analysis and the checking of that is the same whether the reply is given by ordinary letter or by e-mail. Therefore, what our internal guidelines say on this is that because, as you say, people expect a quicker reply, they should either get a reply within a couple of days, if a full reply can be given, or if it cannot, for the sort of reasons that I have described, then the citizen should get an e-mail acknowledgement that says when they can expect a full reply.

  142. How would you reply?
  (Mr Bender) If they had written in by e-mail, we would reply by e-mail, I would assume, unless there was some enclosure that could not be added by e-mail.

  Mr Steinberg: E-mails are my pet hates. My experience was that somebody offered to me a website and e-mail address and I said, "Yes, go on and do that", I did not know what he was talking about at the time, but he did it, and I started getting hundreds of e-mails coming in, absolute dross. People must just sit there all day with nothing to do except hammer away sending nuisance letters to people, so I took it off, I got rid of it, and since then I have not got anywhere near the amount of dross that I used to get. I had people sending me e-mails who I had never heard from before and I have never heard from since. So I think it actually encourages people to give dross. This is an example, but I think this must come from this Report. The Daily Mirror did an article and it says here, "Security guard Terrence Mills had an instant reply from President Bill Clinton to an e-mail query, but when he e-mailed the Prime Minister via the Labour Party the advice came by post two weeks later. `I couldn't believe it', said Terrence." What was he writing to the President of the United States of America for? It is a good example of people just sitting on a computer all day with nothing to do except waste time.

  Chairman: I take it that that was a rhetorical question? I do not think you are responsible for the e-mail.

  143. Do you think people who write in the conventional way to government departments should get priority over those who are sending e-mails?
  (Mr Allan) The policy is that in the case of e-mails, if they can be answered quickly, they should be. Equally, if a letter can be answered quickly, it should be. The reason we have set common guidelines, if a reply takes a bit of work and a bit of checking and perhaps clearance, is that we do treat people equally, regardless of how they send in a particular query.
  (Mr Bender) I have to say that it is not unusual for written letters that are fairly eccentric in character to arrive in government departments.

  144. What I am really putting to you is that you do not really think that e-mail should be classed as a telephone message or a short memo that should be dealt with immediately, or that they should not get preferential treatment?
  (Mr Bender) They should not get preferential treatment. I think that there is an expectation that they will get quicker treatment, which is why we have this 48 hour acknowledgement rule.

  145. What effect does this have on staffing levels? If you have somebody who has got to be answering all the e-mails that come in, does this mean that the department have to take on extra staff? I would have had to take on an extra two secretaries to answer the e-mails I got for the short period of time, until I eventually just binned them.
  (Mr Bender) We have not faced that as an issue, and I think in reply to Mr Rendel earlier I was mentioning the figure that Bill Gates gave, that he can expect American Senators to receive a million e-mails a day. We have not faced that world of the future yet. At the moment these issues are dealt with in the departments by the same staff that are dealing with written correspondence, but there are savings in terms of enveloping replies.

  146. Is that why I have to wait 15 weeks for an answer, rather than 15 days?
  (Mr Bender) I hope not.

  147. Continuing the magnificent piece of reporting from the Mirror, it says here that the Prime Minister is very keen on electronic mail, et cetera, yet he has not got an e-mail address. Why is that?
  (Mr Bender) The straight reply to that refers to the point that you raised earlier. The Prime Minister receives tens of thousands of paper letters every week and up until now the reason why the Prime Minister has not got a specific e-mail address is because of the potential staff costs. Number 10 are thinking about how to address that.

  148. It says here that he sends out 25,000 letters a week. That would double, would it not?
  (Mr Bender) There might be some postage and stationery savings down the track if more was done on e-mail. So, it is not all one way.

  149. In terms of staffing, you need extra staff?
  (Mr Bender) There are issues for people who receive that volume, yes.

  150. I noticed, also, in this Report I was interested in the "Web of Power. US President Bill Clinton, Canadian PM Chretien, Czech President, Columbian President, Hungarian President, Latvian President and the Icelandic President." That is the Daily Mirror's interpretation. I go onto something a little bit more serious now. What worries me, and I think Mr Czerniawski tried to answer this, is regarding the use of the Internet and the web and the clear inequality that there seems to be on those who actually have access to a computer. Figure 28, for example, on page 27. If you look at these figures they do not surprise me in the least. It is actually what I would expect. In fact, I actually thought it was better than I expected, to be quite honest. It appears to me, and again we are told there is no such thing as class issues any more, but it seems to me that using the Internet certainly is a class issue, because if you have a look at the figures of those who actually use the Internet and those who do not, it is quite clear that for the social and economic groupings of people who are in the unemployment class there certainly seems to be a huge disadvantage compared to those people who are in a higher social and economic grouping. So there is a dash to the Internet by those people who want to get out and use it, there does seem to be a lot of people being left behind. I got the impression that although you accepted that there was a problem, I do not think you seem to address the problem in the way that I would have thought was necessary. Some of the examples you gave I thought were pretty weak examples. I do not mean any disrespect to you, but I just think that in the real world of Mr Davidson and in the real world of some of my constituents, the way you were talking about access as a way of paying is not going to happen. What do you intend to do about this, because we cannot have a huge gap appearing where there are those who have it and those who do not have and will never have it, frankly, in the foreseeable future?
  (Mr Allan) This is one of the issues the Prime Minister addressed in his speech to the joint conference with the TUC and CBI last week. That is why he set a goal of universal access across the whole of the country by 2005 with a specific aim of not just improving competitiveness but also making sure that we tackled social exclusion, and that it was both good for the economy and fair. There are a number of ways we are moving forward to make sure that everybody can have access.

  151. What worries me is that as well as having access in your own home or in a library, there are lots of people in my constituency who would never dream of going into a library—I suspect there are lots of people who do not know where the libraries are—it is just a culture, they do not use libraries. Some of these people also tend to be on benefits. Now if we are going to get a situation where benefits are going to be paid through the Internet and we are going to move to that situation, then there are going to be lots of people who again are going to be left behind and there are lots of people who do not want to be paid that way. All of the members sitting here have felt the wrath of the electorate in terms of post offices, people thinking they were going to get their benefits withdrawn from the post office and they had to be paid into the bank. Even the thought of having their money paid into the bank rather than going to the post office caused uproar. It seems to me if people have to depend on the Internet for their benefits, it is going to cause a huge amount of problems, even if it is only a perception.
  (Mr Czerniawski) Yes. Let me first underline a point I made earlier, yes, we are changing the way that our systems work but in a way that will still allow anybody who wants to collect cash at the post office to do so just as they do now. The route by which the cash gets to the post office will be different. From the point of view of your constituents and others in a similar position, they will be able to go to the post office to get cash and we have no plans to withdraw that service. We are very conscious that not everybody has access to these technologies nor will have in the immediate future and therefore they are being offered as additions, they are not a way of moving away from the services we provide at the moment. People will still be able to get benefits, claim benefits and be paid without going through the Internet, if that is their preference.

  152. We will not get a two-tier system, a two class system of people who use the Internet will get their benefit and those who do not want to will be left behind?
  (Mr Czerniawski) I do not think so.

  153. You do not think so?
  (Mr Czerniawski) We are inevitably speculating on that point, we are not doing it. Within the department we are using these technologies internally as well as externally through the Internet, so if somebody in a position you describe goes to a local office or rings up an office then the person they speak to will have access to much richer information than they do at the moment. Your constituents will get the benefit of the service, at least in some measure, without themselves using the Internet directly.

  154. Another example of people who frankly do not understand the system—very much like myself, and I expect there are other members here—since the television licence has just gone up another £3 I have had loads of letters from people who say, "Why should I pay extra for digital television when I do not want it? What good is digital television to me? I am happy to watch BBC and ITV, I do not want dozens of channels." Everybody is not convinced about the Internet and the advantages of digital television, and so forth. There are lots of people who are actually, like myself, dinosaurs in this and by virtue of that they must not be left behind, they must not be ignored, I do not think. I have this great fear that everybody is going massive strides ahead and that we are all being left behind. I hope they are not, I hope that technology does not leave them behind.
  (Mr Czerniawski) I accept that point completely.

  155. Just a couple of very brief questions, first of all, if you look at page 5, B.3, it says: "Agencies may need to consider the introduction of partly automated systems for handling the most frequent and most straightforward forms of e-mail contact." It goes on to say the aim should be to, "Answer people's questions first time in an accessible way without creating a need for further communication." We agreed about zero touch transactions. Can I ask you, Mr Bender, what is your current assessment of the employment impact of all of this on the Civil Service?
  (Mr Bender) The direct answer to that is that it is too early to say. As part of the cross-cutting review that is taking place we may get a better feel for the overall investment needs, costs savings and employment impact by the summer. We do not have an answer to that at this stage.

  156. That sounds somewhat improbable, I would have thought. We can see that thirty per cent of agency chief executives anticipate cost-cutting. I would assume that a significant part of that, if we are talking semi-automation, must be on the steep side.
  (Mr Bender) We have not collected that information. That is information that individual chief executives will have views on in their organisations. We have not, at this stage, collected that centrally. That is something that the new media team, referred to earlier, will want to get a grip on but it is not available in a coordinated and collective way at this moment.

  157. How soon do you expect that to be available?
  (Mr Bender) We will be looking to have some results by the end of the summer from the work of the new media team.

  158. That would be across Government? Can I ask Social Security, have you done estimates within your department of the effect on manpower of these changes?
  (Mr Czerniawski) No. We are conscious that it is likely to change the pattern of employment but the reason we have not done a detailed assessment is that we are at the very early stages of this and it is very hard to predict how much traffic will be moved from one way of doing business to another. Until we have a firm basis for making those estimates we cannot do more than speculate at the moment.

  159. Again, how soon do you expect to be able to draw conclusions?
  (Mr Czerniawski) I think our estimates are bound to get more robust over time. As is clear from the Report, in Social Security we are not doing those transactions on-line at the moment, so it is very hard to be specific about what the numbers will turn out to be.