The government is to convert its 951 websites into two
supersites to save money, a meeting of Parliament's
Public Accounts Committeeheard
yesterday.
All government websites except 26 corporate departmental sites
will be merged into either
Directgov or
BusinessLink by 2011,
a spokesmen for the
Cabinet Office told
the committee. It will take that long to ensure that no valuable
information is lost, the PAC heard.
Alexis Cleveland, director general of
Transformational Government, the government's project to
improve service delivery by increasing data-sharing between
departments, said it was not possible to say how much money the
government might save.
She said it was "very difficult" to establish the costs of
setting up the websites in the first place because they were
distributed between capital and operational budgets. "We have no
audit trail of costs, and, therefore, cannot establish the
savings," she told PAC chairman Edward Leigh.
However, a
National Audit Office report said in July it put the annual
running cost of government websites at £208m, or about 3.2% of all
central government IT spending. It agreed with earlier estimates
that reducing the number of websites could save the government up
to £400m.
The PAC heard that the aim of the project was to make the
websites more customer-driven. Cleveland said that in the past
government felt that every department needed its own website.
However, the government was now guided by how the public actually
supplies and looks for data. But Leigh noted it had no usage data
for one in six sites.
Asked if this project would not turn into "another government IT
disaster", Alan Bishop, chief executive of the Central Office of
Information, said he could not guarantee it would not. He said the
Directgov website was highly rated by independent sources, and that
uptimes for government websites were better than 99%, except for
when they changed platforms, when availability dropped to 96%.