In 1997 the prime minister Tony Blair established a broad target
that 25% of the Government's dealings with people should be capable
of being carried out electronically by 2002.
A year later, the Modernising Government White Paper set targets of
50% by 2005 and 100% by 2008. Then, in March 2000, Blair brought
forward the target to full electronic service by 2005, write
Paul Mason and
Bruce Ackland.
Some electronic services have advanced under the Labour Government.
The Department for Trade & Industry recorded in 1999 that 23%
of its services were available electronically compared to 8% in
1997. By January 2001, the Minister of State at the Cabinet Office
announced that the latest progress report showed that 42% of
services were electronically available.
This target-driven definition of e-government has been called into
question, however. The case of the Inland Revenue's online
self-assessment scheme shows how far removed the figures can be
from the desired outcome.
Online self-assessment has been dogged by technical difficulties.
Downloading the software for self-assessment in the financial year
2000 could take a modem user up to half an hour. The first
generation of the software contained no error correction, so any
mistakes input by users would lead to the breakdown of the online
process. This meant Revenue staff had to print out online
submissions and re-key them, adding further possibilities for error
and prompting the jibe from one analyst that it was adopting
"swivel chair technology".
Last month, the Revenue confirmed that just 39,284 returns were
filed electronically out of 128,603 taxpayers who had registered an
interest in filing online. That represents 0.5% of the 9.1 million
people eligible for self-assessment.
The reasons cited for the low take up - despite hundreds of
thousands of pounds spent in advertising - were long download
times, confusing questions and the fact that only basic
self-assessment was available online, ruling out anyone who needed
to fill out supplementary forms.
In addition, users needed to input a password forwarded through the
post. But some letters took up to eight weeks to arrive.
The Revenue has said it intends to learn from its early mistakes.
This year's self-assessment scheme will use a browser-based
questionnaire. The same approach will be applied to a new service
for employers to file year-end PAYE figures. The Revenue describes
its approach to e-business as "build and learn". That is arguably a
legitimate approach - though it implies that the 40,000 online
taxpayers were being used as crash test dummies.
However, it calls into question the accuracy of Blair's
e-government targets. According to the Inland Revenue, as a result
of online self assessment, together with initiatives by the
Valuation Service, "Today we are already capable of offering 30% of
our services electronically and are therefore well on the way to
meeting the Government's targets of offering 50% by 2002 on the way
to 100% by 2005."
On that definition the Revenue could meet its e-government targets
while just a small fraction of taxpayers are actually able to use
the service. This must call into question the validity of the
targets.
There are other, more fundamental objections to Labour's
e-government strategy. When senior managers in local government
were surveyed last year, more than 50% cited the main benefit of
e-government to be "improved relationships with the public". But
the benefits of these improved relationships are difficult to
quantify. Very few saw the Internet as a means of achieving cost
reduction in the delivery of services.
Despite strong acceptance of the e-government message, about half
of local government managers thought it would be impossible to
achieve 25% of services online
by 2002. However, 67% thought it was possible that, with extra
funding, local government could hit the 100% target by 2005 - but
this only highlights the fragmented nature of local government
spend on Internet projects. About half of the organisations
surveyed had no specific e-government budget.
Another report, released in April 2001 by the Society of IT
Management (Socitm) and the Improvement and Development Agency
(IDeA), confirmed that only a handful of local authorities were
capably handling the transition to e-government.
IT managers at local councils are being hit by poor funding and
frustrated by having to compete with the private sector for top IT
staff, the report said. According to the report, while a small
number of authorities had been able to develop medium-term
budgeting regimes, "for most seeking new ways of investing has
either not been considered, has been rejected as impractical, or is
severely constrained by tightly squeezed capital regimes and
revenue budget capacity."
The report warned that, while 77% of councils now have
e-strategies, few understood the "true seismic nature" of the
change ahead.
The report advocated that local government organisations should
learn systematically from 20 trailblazer councils. However, the
pressing need to show progress in meeting online service targets
could conflict with this, with hundreds of local councils - which
include everything from social care and environmental health to
council tax collection - rushing to reinvent the wheel in time for
2005. Council IT chiefs were worried about their organisations'
role in providing the means to access online services.
And the scale of change is in many ways obscured by the 100% online
target. The Socitm report described the challenge as "nothing short
of a fundamental transformation of government as a whole, at a
scale not witnessed since the beginning of the industrial era". Few
large corporations would see a 2005 deadline as realistic for
completing that change.
The danger is that councils will rush to automate bad processes
rather than look at processes and relationships in a more
fundamental way.
Finally, two major developments have occurred over the past 12
months in the e-government agenda with the launch of the UK Online
Citizens' Portal and the Government Gateway.
Portals are areas where information can be found connected to major
life episodes. There are currently six - having a baby, moving
home, going away, dealing with crime, death and bereavement and
learning to drive - and a further six will be launched by July
2001.
The Government Gateway, launched in January 2001, provides real
transactions with government agencies. The first of these includes
the Inland Revenue, Customs and Excise and the Ministry of
Agriculture Fisheries and Food.
The middleware project allows legacy systems in different
departments to talk to each other and offers information focused on
citizens rather than civil servants, and services to the public.
The full impact of the Citizens' Portal and the Government Gateway
have yet to be assessed.
However, all e-government projects have to take account of the
digital divide, which is not only persisting, but threatens to
widen once broadband access increases. If mass broadband access
fails to materialise, no matter how many services are available
online, Blair's e-target victories may begin to look as plausible
as the industrial production achievements of Brezhnev's
Russia.
Bridging the digital divide
In 1999, the Government began to give consideration to the problem
of those people who may miss out on the benefits of the
e-revolution because they do not have access to computers and the
Internet, writes
Bruce Ackland.
The Government stated its commitment to "a truly inclusive
information society" to address the problem of people who do not
have regular access to a computer at work, cannot afford Internet
access at home or are unwilling to use computers.
It listed initiatives to tackle the information poor including IT
for All centres, IT Learning Centres and the recycling of computers
to 200,000 deprived families. Concern over the digital divide was
increased following the publication of the e-minister's first
annual report. It contained Office of National Statistics figures
which revealed that up to 62% of households in high income bands
had Internet access compared to less than 10% of households in
lower income bands.
Government initiatives aimed at tackling the "information poor"
concentrate on addressing the availability of hardware for poorer
households, access to infrastructure where there is no commercial
case for it and spreading knowledge and confidence in electronic
communications.
In October 2000, the Computers Within Reach Initiative set out to
provide low-cost recycled PCs, costing £60 each, to 100,000
low-income families. News of the scheme had been announced by the
chancellor in March 1999 but it took 18 months of discussions to
get the group of seven suppliers to sign up to the project. Two
years after the initial announcement of the initiative, less than
one third of the proposed number of households had received their
computers.
The next scheme to tackle the divide was the Wired up Communities
initiative which set out to provide Internet access to deprived
communities with the help of a £10m boost from the Capital
Modernisation Fund (CMF).
This was backed up by the Government's commitment to establishing
600 UK Online centres, also funded by the CMF, to provide
community-based Internet access and training in IT skills. This
number is targeted to rise to 6,000 by the end of 2002.
Some of the centres are new, while others are established in public
libraries. Pilot trials have also been initiated to provide
Internet access in post offices following the publication of the
Counter Revolution - Modernising the Post Office Network report by
the Performance and Innovation Unit.
The Government has also encouraged employers to provide PCs and
Internet access for home use, a move aided by tax breaks for
employees provided with home computers by their employers. Low-cost
PC leasing schemes for public sector employees have also been
encouraged.
There can be no question that the Government has moved to tackle
the digital divide, but implementation is once again the key issue
The various schemes created to bridge the divide have reached only
thousands while millions are still being left in information
poverty.