Councils may fail to attract people to access services
electronically despite meeting the government's end-of year
deadline to get services online, public sector IT managers group
Socitm has warned.
The government set targets to make all council services
available online by the end of 2005 under the Best Value
Performance Indicator (BVPI), which it uses to assess how well
councils are being run. However, Socitm policy officer Adrian
Hancock said local authority IT managers were questioning whether
these artificial targets would lead to online services the public
want to use.
The latest Implementing Electronic Government (IEG) survey,
conducted by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, revealed that
most councils are on course to meet the e-government deadline, and
Hancock was optimistic that this would be achieved. "I think
councils will meet the BVPI by the end of the year," he said.
However, the BVPI fails to measure how many people are using online
services.
Councils could put all their services online by the year end,
attract no users and still comply with government targets. Hancock
said, "Good examples of popular online local government services
are not as thick on the ground as we thought they would be at this
time." This is compounded by the fact that local authorities are
still waiting for a common public sector authentication technology
to be developed.
The services that are furthest from being available online are
those that require complex authentication, such as social care.
Public sector agency Government Connect was given £7m last week to
develop several key services, including online authentication for
citizens. According to the IEG survey, just 61% of councils had
made regulation electronic and only 65% had made the payment of
goods and services electronic.