The price of a website
The House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts has released its report into government websites, and it is not impressed. It found the Government is not sure exactly how many websites it has, but believes there could be as many as 2,500. Nor does it know how much these websites costs or if anyone is using them.
After 10 years of uncoordinated growth, the total government website expenditure is believed to be in the region of £208 million a year spent providing information and services online, although 25% of government organisations could not provide the Committee with information on how much their websites were costing, and 30% could only come up with estimates. Now some of those websites are huge, such as the Inland Revenue's system for filing tax returns online, or the DVLC system to allow renewal of tax discs, and some websites are tiny, but still we are talking about an overall average of £83,200 per website per year.
Whilst some sites are well regarded by the public, such as London Transport's site, it was found that the overall quality of government websites has improved little since the last study in 2002. It found that one in six of the sites did not have information about who was using the site, and a third of sites do not meet the Cabinet Office's own standards for accessibility. In the coming year, the government aims to rationalise its structure by closing up to a thousand unnecessary websites, and no new government websites are to be created without the approval of the Government's Chief Information Officer.
Whilst the cost of running web sites is high, it is still cheaper than delivering the equivalent information by paper and some of the government sites make huge economic sense. However, the committee expressed a concern that 75% of socially excluded people and 51% of people on low incomes do not use the internet. There is a risk that these groups, who are often major users of public services, the people who most need access to some of this information, will not benefit from the government's drive to expand the use of the internet.
16th May 2008
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.