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By Joey Gardiner, 18 October 2001 17:17

NEWS Despite the government's pledge to make the UK number one in the world for ecommerce, the British are still languishing in fifth place for e-government. The league table, provided by international risk analysis company World Markets Research Centre (WMRC), ranks 196 countries in terms of the provision of government services online. Unsurprisingly the US comes first, followed by Taiwan and Australia. The UK comes in at number 5, behind Canada, fulfilling less than half (47.1 per cent) of the criteria for the survey. The US scored 57.2 per cent. The survey, carried out for WMRC by the Taubman Public Policy Centre at Brown University, rated governments on 22 criteria including information availability, service delivery, public access, online payments, disabled access and security features. The UK lost points because of poor privacy policies, and a lack of fully executable services. However, it made up ground with the organisation of services into the UK Online portal. There were other surprising results. For example, the African Kingdom of Lesotho is ranked twelfth, fulfilling 40 per cent of the criteria, above many industrialised nations and most of Europe. Conversely, Portugal performs abysmally, rating 178th, behind such internet luminaries as Burkina Faso, Somalia, Uganda and Mali. Gino Ussi, CEO of WMRC, said the result was both good and bad news for the government: "Whilst the UK has made it to number five we are still a long, long way behind the US. However, we should be pleased that we are the highest ranked in Europe, above the Scandinavian early-adopters such as Finland." Jeremy Ward, one of the authors of the government's blueprint for e-government ecommerce@itsbest.uk, said it was disappointing the UK hadn't got higher up the scale: "This is certainly not the position we'd hoped to be in by this stage when we wrote ecommerce@itsbest.uk. The UK is the third or fourth largest economy in the world - we should be three or four in the rankings, if not higher." The e-envoy's office - responsible for the roll out of UK e-government - denied the report was bad news for the UK. In a statement it said: " We are pleased we have come out well in this survey overall. The UK already has 42 per cent of services online and we continue to work towards the clear target to make all government services to the citizen and business available electronically, in a customer-focused form by 2005."