By Dan Ilett, 15 August 2005 16:20
NEWS More than two-thirds of silicon.com readers have seen no change in the way their local council communicates with them, despite looming deadlines for local authorities to improve e-government services by December.
According to a silicon.com reader poll, 71 per cent of the 141 respondents said they had noticed no new interaction from their local authority.
Only 21 per cent said they had seen changes in the council's online approach to the public while the remaining seven per cent said they were unsure.
Prime Minister Tony Blair has defined e-government as "ensuring that IT supports the business transformation of government itself so that we can provide better, more efficient, public services".
Neil Barrett, visiting professor at the centre for forensic computing at Cranfield University, said: "I personally haven't seen any differences. If you look at things you might have expected to change, such as not putting in your name more than once, I can't see any that have changed."
Just last week, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) claimed that 166 councils are on track to beat efficiency targets.
The drive towards e-government is linked to a spending review on the public sector published last year by ex-CEO of the Office of Government Commerce, Sir Peter Gershon.
In the report, Gershon said local governments must save £6.45bn through improved efficiency by 2008. Councils have also been told that services must not suffer as result of these cutbacks and that a maximum of 50 per cent of the savings can be achieved by squeezing existing resources.
Comments
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1. Richard Davies
I think its less to do with IT and more to do with old councillors that create stupid layers of bureaucracy which in turn means that nothing ever gets done thats worth while (they do waste alot of money). It seems that the same problem exists with both IT and non-IT local / central government projects.
My council has employees that are so IT iliterate that they dictate e-mails etc. for secretaries to then type up for them...I mean...fire that person and come into the real world.
2. anonymous
If there is any danger of them not being met, then the targets will be changed to ensure that they are
3. Tony Sygrove
I thought that the IT infrastructure and applications had to be on-line by June 2005. If this is what this article and survey is asking then, from the evidence of contacting the council and its effeciency then the answer has to be NO.
What good will the Gershon report be, as there will be numerous moving of goal post etc before 2008 that the target of the report to save 6bn plus pounds will not be achieved.
Local & Central Government cannot put together any form of proposal and stick rigidly to it, they have to change it to save face knowning full well that they will not achieve what they set out to achieve. Its the same old story. It costs us the tax payers a fortune and we are the ones that suffer for it, the government just go on to the next catastrophe.