You may have seen an article on BBC News about the Government reviewing hundreds of unncessary websites and the even more extraordinary cost of the Business Link website at £35m/year. We can’t believe it either but thought we’d comment to give it a bit of context.
Is such spend justifiable?
There can be a case for spending 100s of thousands of pounds on a website, but there aren’t all that many cases where this is true. For example a site at comprehensive and popular as BBC, Facebook or YouTube will all have probably millions input into their development.
The main cost though isn’t graphic design but the development of the database structure and the IT hardware that runs it all. The more processing you need to do the more rules and code you need to run it, plus all the people to keep updating the information (most of which is manually done).
What about the UK Department of Trade and Industry’s site?
Like anyone in the UK, we’re happy for this department to be successful and want it to put on the best and most helpful front to potential investors in the UK, so they need a good site. But as the BBC suggest should it have cost £4million+ for only 28,000 monthly users (or possibly up to 140,000 as UKTI suggest)?
Perhaps you should judge for yourself (thinking like an investor) whether http://www.ukti.gov.uk/ works for you. It certainly looks clean, is regularly updated and so on but perhaps it could have been done for a fraction of the cost, say £1m, without losing any of that.
Keep on culling those sites
Of course no goverment department really wants their web presence added into a bigger site where they have less control over it but that is the current government’s policy. 820 seperate sites does sound like a lot, especially as we’re hard-pressed to identify more than 20 departments, though most are probably regional and one-off initiatives.
We say ‘keep going’, not because we thing annoyed civil servants are funny (rather they’re friends) but because these sites are supposed to help the public get information/ interact with about their government. And having lots of sites with varying quality of information, different structures and so on just doesn’t achieve that.
All sorted then?
Don’t be fooled into thinking we’ll reach some form of e-government utopia anytime soon. There are too many paper records, systems and stakeholders to make it all that easy. Indeed the change to going online is a massive cultural shift that has only been present the last 10 years in government.
It is also fair to say that there are some genuine attempts to really save money with government sites. The HMRC (taxman) has put a lot of options online over the last few years, saving on paper returns, better record keeping, etc. It’s not perfect (try changing your address!) but not bad.
