The PatrickPost

The UK Cabinet Office is widely reported as intending to scrap huge numbers of government ‘official’ websites, as part of the stringency measures following on from last week’s emergency budget.

In a move that will mean significant job losses among civil servants, not only will websites be shut down, but remaining sites are expected to cut budgets in half.  That will mean that many external tech companies will lose out on potential or existing business (depending on contract details).  The coalition is looking to the private sector to take up the slack on civil service job losses.  Hardly likely when much of the private sector is predicated against government tendering.

I have no argument with looking at the cost of resourcing these facilities, but also to look at redistributing expertise within government departments.  No-one could argue that a cost per visit analysis will throw up spanners – e.g., the Guardian Tech blog quotes a government report that one site costs £11.78 per visit (uktradeinvest.gov.uk).  The body disputes this, saying that this related to an old site, and they’ve installed a new, more cost-efficient website.

As with any government, you’ve got to look at the fine print viz. the Coalition’s claim of issuing a ‘Progressive Budget’, versus the (independent) IFS analysis of the detail as ‘regressive’, because of a disproportionate impact on the poor.  There is no doubt that there have been eye-watering amounts spent on Government IT contracts over the last decade (see the UK’s NHS technology spend, for example).  However, this is baby and bathwater time: be careful that useful IT resources like DirectGov and single department websites don’t get lost in a sea of self-righteous slashing.  Websites might seem virtual, but there’s real people behind the technology, and real needs being served by websites.