Last month the Cabinet Office recruited Mike Bracken, the director of digital development at The Guardian, in what is – given The Guardian’s reputation in this field – a coup for the civil service. The appointment signals the coalition’s resolve to drive a new agenda in its digital engagement with citizens, communities and businesses: the so-called ‘digital by default’ agenda to improve services and provide them much more cheaply.

Martha Lane Fox recently completed a review of the government’s digital approach, and this has informed the government’s analysis and recommendations of the way forward.
Mike will start with a reasonably strong, but somewhat dated, government web presence, which is good in parts but still needs a lot of work.

Only seven years ago, Directgov did not exist at all; less than a third of UK taxpayers were filing online; and going to the post office was the main way to get your car tax disc renewed. Yet there were over 3,000 government websites in total.

Today, more than 30m people visit Directgov every month; around four in every five taxpayers file online; you can renew your tax disc over the web in under two minutes – and more than half of all motorists do so. Meanwhile, Businesslink has created a web domain for business transactions. Departments all have corporate websites that are essential for them to engage with their stakeholders. And the number of government sites has declined by more than half.  
Ministers are increasingly using social media to interact with the public. And there are a growing number of businesses and social enterprises, such as Mumsnet, which signpost and interpret government information for their users.

But the web is a fast-moving world, and one in which we have much to do to stay ahead of citizens’ expectations. Too many government sites are looking tired, are hard to navigate, and fail to join up around the citizen’s needs. And there remain too many sites in total.

Many good online transactions (such as car tax) exist, but too many are difficult to use because a web version has been bolted on to the original clerical or visit-based transaction, and not redesigned with the user and the web in mind. The internet channel has often been added to the other channels – such as telephone, face-to-face or paper-based – so, while web-based contacts are much cheaper, there have been limited cost savings.

Government is becoming more transparent in its dealings with the public, but too often the information it holds is inaccessible to those businesses and social enterprises which could use the information to spark economic growth and might be able to do a better job of reaching citizens than the government. What’s more, the number of people who never or rarely use the internet is still more than 9m in the UK.

So what is the government aiming to do about this? Ministers recently signed off an agenda which Mike and I are charged with leading from a civil service point of view.

First, we are charged with becoming the ‘customer champion with teeth’, to improve and simplify the experience that citizens and businesses have when dealing with the government’s online services.

Second, we have to modernise, converging most sites on to a single web domain for government – for which we have built an early prototype, the excellent alpha.gov.uk.
Third, government has signed up to a policy of ‘digital by default’, whereby all new policies will be expected to be delivered digitally from the outset – as the Department for Work and Pensions  is doing with its Universal Credit policy.

Fourth, to save real costs, there will be a programme of decommissioning expensive legacy channels – which are usually paper-based or use office visits – in favour of the digital channels, which are an order of magnitude cheaper to run.

Fifth, there will be a policy of ensuring that online government information and services are available wherever people are on the web, by opening up services to other organisations such as Mumsnet.

Finally, we will create a credible programme of digital access that leaves no-one behind. The government remains committed to supporting Martha Lane Fox’s role as the UK’s digital champion, and her Race Online 2012 initiative. As part of this, we will provide an ‘assisted digital’ service for those who remain digitally-excluded, through post offices, libraries, community centres and commercial outlets.

In summary, this is an exciting time for those who – like Martha, Mike and myself – believe passionately in the web’s transformational capability. Government’s commitment to the web as a better means of providing public services and digital engagement, combined with the relentless need to find ways of saving money, means the opportunity for that transformation has never been greater.

Written by Ian Watmore