The newly-created Government Digital Service (GDS) is to oversee the merger of all government websites into one single channel, Cabinet Office chief operating officer Ian Watmore said last week at Civil Service Live – The Midlands.

Speaking to CSW at the event, Watmore explained that the GDS is “not suddenly going to take over line-managing every website in government – that would be crazy – but the idea is that departments with [a] major website presence will migrate their website onto the single domain that we specify and oversee at the centre.”

Watmore said that the Cabinet Office aims to get all departmental transactions with citizens onto this website, stating that “I can go and look up how to do almost anything today [on Directgov], but then doing it online might be in a different place – we want to get that all on there.”

Three transactions will be moved solely online, Watmore said: the forthcoming universal credit, Companies House transactions, and student loans. “Those are the three that we want to do a hundred per cent effectively online, and close all the alternate routes of so doing,” he said.

The GDS is currently headed by Chris Chant, but is recruiting externally for a permanent boss.

Watmore also explained why the government’s new chief information officer (CIO), Joe Harley, is retaining his role as CIO of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) while taking on his new responsibilities at the Cabinet Office. “If you’re going to make a success of the CIO role, about half of what you have to do is DWP and HMRC, because they are disproportionately big users of the systems,” he said. “Having the DWP CIO leading on that is more likely to get real traction in implementation over the next few years.”

He added: “I can’t think of a single reason why you’d want to take the CIO of DWP out of his current job when you’ve got universal credits and all the rest of it [to deliver], and then put him in a different role and have somebody else doing that job – it’s a pointless exercise.”

Plans to combine all departmental websites into one were first proposed in Martha Lane Fox’s report for the coalition on Directgov last year. At the time Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude accepted the proposals “in principle”, but said he would have to consult “before we make a final decision”.

Click here for an analysis of the IT strategy. Civil Service Live – The Midlands is produced by CSLN publisher Dods.

Written by Joshua Chambers, CSW