MR TOM STEINBERG, MR ROSS FERGUSON, MR WILLIAM HEATH AND MS RUTH KENNEDY

8 MARCH 2007

  Q120  Mr Liddell-Grainger: Is that an ongoing contract?

  Mr Steinberg: That covered the development and some hosting. It will need to be extended and it will cost more.

  Q121  Mr Liddell-Grainger: Is it a yearly contract?

  Mr Steinberg: No. That covered the cost of the development and a certain number of days looking after it. There will be a support contract signed to look after it in the future.

  Q122  Mr Liddell-Grainger: How much do you think it will be?

  Mr Steinberg: We have not done it yet, so I do not know.

  Q123  Mr Liddell-Grainger: How much do you think? What are you worth?

  Mr Steinberg: Obviously, way more than we have charged, and that is the nature of things.

  Q124  Mr Liddell-Grainger: Remember that you are working for Downing Street, so put in some good figures.

  Mr Steinberg: How much do we want? I will give you an order of magnitude cost because you want to know. We will probably charge about £30,000 to £50,000 to run this for another year. On the day that the site received most traffic in relation to the road petitions the responses were about twice those of Directgov which cost £50 million. I think that for £25,000 that was exemplary value for money in terms of government e-services.

  Q125  Mr Liddell-Grainger: I am sure that you look at the Cabinet Office accounts.

  Mr Steinberg: No.

  Q126  Mr Liddell-Grainger: They are revealing. I suggest that you do look at them. They have computer assets of £122 million. We asked what that was. Can you enlighten us as to why they would have such massive computer assets? We know about True North because we brought it up here. They were sued for £24 million by a company called CompuServe. What is the cost of e.Government? Is e.Government getting out of control on cost?

  Mr Steinberg: I run an NGO which employs three or four people. Perhaps you would like to ask the Cabinet Secretary or an expert in the industry.

  Q127  Mr Liddell-Grainger: I thought you might know because you worked at Number 10.

  Mr Steinberg: I have never worked at Number 10.

  Mr Heath: The reason we set up Kable was because government had lost track of what it had spent on IT in 1990. Obviously, there is a market demand for good figures. We produced some figures and we are very happy to share them with the Committee. That can be arranged through your Clerk. Whether government IT spend is justifiable is a big, deep question that I am happy to go into. To make a comparison with the sort of work that Mr Steinberg and MySociety does, we have now probably spent over £50 million on a series of portals or a primary website for accessing government services. Initially, it was OpenGov and then UKonline; now it is Directgov. One of Mr Steinberg's volunteers constructed in 75 minutes for about £60 a search engine which is more effective on government websites than Directgov. If one searches for the word "goat" on DirectionlessGov one gets guidance from Defra about how to register a goat. If one searches for "goat" on the official website one gets information about how to marry a foreign national. There are quick wins which are inexpensive and which can provide people with something much more valid.

  Q128  Mr Liddell-Grainger: Is that not the crux of it? For £60 instead of £50 million, or whatever was the figure, we can make e.Government work in the private sector as opposed to the government sector. Is that not the answer?

  Mr Heath: My observation from engaging in the Ideal Government conversation and with a community of online people who are quite switched on in this field is that, first, there are loads of quick wins that the contemporary Internet offers because a lot of the tools are shared and made freely available. For example, when Google mapped the whole world it allowed anybody to tap into those interfaces and use its maps. There is a philosophy of shared co-creation of which government could avail itself if it had that mentality and mindset. But it is a very challenging mindset for government to adopt because it assumes that everything is top down and it has responsibility for delivering everything and in the chaotic world in which we work together that is culturally quite difficult.

  Q129  Mr Liddell-Grainger: That has been created. We have had the road tax debate, but there is also on the site the image of the Prime Minister eating ice cream and standing on his head on top of a double-decker bus. I do not have a particular problem with that. I am sure that the Prime Minister would love to do it, but it is not exactly helping democracy. Surely, there should be a cut off. That is—dare I say—blatantly silly.

  Mr Heath: That is what people are like.

  Mr Steinberg: Everything about the site changed lots and lots in the first four months. That is how one is supposed to build websites. One does not write a spec which says exactly how it will work and after two years it will be evaluated. One needs to respond. There were two very interesting and different responses from the community. There were users who wrote enormous amounts of emails and said that one should add this and take away that and change it. Lots of members of the public wrote to us and said that people should be stopped from putting on silly petitions.

  Q130  Mr Liddell-Grainger: Who are the users? Are you referring to Number 10?

  Mr Steinberg: No; the users are members of the public. Therefore, loads of things changed, some technological and some policy. Number 10 changed the policy and said that it would not have silly petitions any more, partly because it did not think they were a good idea and partly because they were getting complaints from members of the public who also did not think they were a good idea. The one you have quoted is a legacy; it is left over because it would have been wrong to delete something that was already on there given the principle of transparency that everything that goes on the site appears either online or, if it is rejected, one explains why. Nothing ever vanishes like that, which is a very important part of the design. But there was another community which consisted largely of journalists and academics who did not write to us to say what they wanted, unlike all the members of the public; they just complained on their own. Strangely, the things that they complained about were not changed because they did not write to us. I implore you to note that there is a support email address. If you want features changed you as well as citizens have the right to write to us and Number 10 and they will get put on the stack of things that can be changed.

  Q131  Mr Liddell-Grainger: I had a spat with you over emails. I told you that you were sending them to the wrong number but you did not change it. You must remember.

  Mr Steinberg: Yes. You are the only person ever to have gone on record as imputing that my site takes a non-partisan position.

  Q132  Mr Liddell-Grainger: Because you were sending them to the wrong place. I did not mind that, but when I said that you were sending them to another number which was not mine and asked that you readdress them it did not happen.

  Mr Steinberg: Dare I say that this probably does not belong in this particular session? I stand exactly by that position. If you moved house and office and did not tell people that you had done that your constituents would feel disappointed that their mail was landing on a dead doormat. Your details were on the Conservative Party website, but this is really outside the remit of the Committee.

  Mr Liddell-Grainger: The only reason I bring it up is that you started it.

  Mr Walker: Mr Steinberg, you do not decide the remit of this Committee; the Members and Chairman decide it.

  Chairman: I think I will decide, if you do not mind. I am trying to work out whether there is a wider public interest in this point.

  Q133  Mr Liddell-Grainger: There is a public interest. The whole idea of this is to communicate with the public—that is what you and we want to do—and to make sure that it is done on a fair, open basis.

  Mr Steinberg: Yes.

  Q134  Mr Liddell-Grainger: If there is a mistake or problem with it you try to redress it.

  Mr Steinberg: Obviously we do. We take feedback all the time and make changes as fast as we can, but we are human and in some cases it takes time.

  Q135  Mr Liddell-Grainger: It is the "human" bit that I am happy with.

  Mr Steinberg: I believe that nevertheless we are as good at what we do as any group anywhere, and it must be said that is why the things we do are quite often popular among politicians of different kinds.

  Q136  Mr Liddell-Grainger: As a matter of interest from my point of view, why have you not put in any accounts to the Charity Commission over the past five years?

  Mr Steinberg: Before 2003/04 there was a pre-existing charity that had been set up by some other people. It had the right memorandum and articles of incorporation; it was about democracy and the Internet. It was called UK Citizens Online Democracy. It was set up, did some work and then it was mothballed. For several years the trustees of that organisation said to a couple of people, including me, that setting up a charity was hard and time-consuming and asked whether we could do this. We took it on a couple of years ago. We are now piecing it together. This year's accounts should be there.

  Q137  Mr Liddell-Grainger: You did file accounts for 2005.

  Mr Steinberg: And you will get them for 2006 and 2007. As I say, it was a different group of people who gave us the organisation. My site started only at the end of 2003/beginning of 2004.

  Q138  Mr Liddell-Grainger: And do try to get them to the right place! To move to the Hansard Society, one of the matters that interests all MPs is that the society becomes more e.available and e.open. What would be the cost of opening up the Hansard Society totally to enable it to operate on an open basis rather like Mr Steinberg and Mr Heath?

  Mr Ferguson: As a point of clarification, we were named after the Hansard parliamentary record itself but the Hansard Society is a non-partisan independent charity.

  Chairman: Are you asking about the Hansard parliamentary report?

  Q139  Mr Liddell-Grainger: No; I am asking about Hansard as a parliamentary organisation. You are trying to open it up as an e.port, if that is the right terminology.

  Mr Ferguson: No.