Socitm Spring 2004 event reports
Local e-government minister Phil Hope used Socitm’s Spring seminar to unveil the final version of the government’s ‘priority outcomes’ policy for local e-government.
The document contains lists of ‘e-government outcomes for 2005 to support the delivery of priority services’, with a three-tier checklist of ‘required’, ‘good’ and ‘excellent’ e-services across seven priority areas from raising schools standards to improving transport services.
Hope, who has responsibility for local e-government, said the government had listened to Socitm’s objections to its draft priorities paper – the society had suggested the approach was overly prescriptive - and treated the organisation as a ‘critical friend’. However, grants to councils of £500,000 for delivery of the third wave of implementing e-government strategies would be linked to delivery of the priority outcomes, he said.
Hope denied the outcomes should be described as new ‘targets’ which clash with the overall target for all local services to be available online by the end of 2005. Instead, they add an ‘operational focus,’ he said.
Most councils were on course to hit the 2005 targets, he said, with just 13 still struggling with the whole e-agenda out of the 16 that had been previously identified as needing extra support from the ODPM.
Beyond the priority outcomes, the main challenge for IT managers and e-champions over the next 20 months will be to ensure every council benefits from the 23 national projects for local e-government which formed the core of the Egham event.
He said the projects were about far more than IT, they were “a framework for councils to follow for modernisation” and could be the catalyst for organisational transformation, “changes in the way councils think, in the way they work.”
He said: “It is up to Socitm members to use the products of the national projects to implement change in your authorities, your moment to step into the limelight and be the agent of change in your authority.”
The government expected every council to make use of at least some of the national project products, Hope said. “Not every council will take every product, but we expect councils to be aware of every product and make a decision about its use. In my view it is going to be the exception where people don’t use any of them.”
At a session later in the day, the ODPM’s Caroline Stanger, who is lead national officer for the national projects, told the conference that the department is currently in talks with the Audit Commission about adding formal evaluation of e-government work into the commission’s Comprehensive Performance Assessment regime for councils.
“We are aware there isn’t something headlined as ‘e’ in the CPA, and we are talking very closely with the Audit Commission to see if, when they are looking at organisations’ performance across the board, they are looking at how well authorities do in e-government,” she said. “We have backing from the Treasury for getting some measurement of e-government performance embedded into CPA.”
The ODPM was also aware that there is no national project looking specifically at measuring e-government success, Stanger said. To fill this gap, she said the department intended to look across all the national projects and draw together any work on benchmarking that had been produced.
Stanger, was joined by Socitm Vice-President and ODPM Local Government Modernisation Team Adviser Chris Haynes to field questions from the conference floor.
Brian Westcott of BW Consulting asked the two civil servants what could be done to ensure take-up of local e-government services.
Stanger said the new national project on take-up and marketing, led by Norwich City Council, was shortly to change its name to ‘e-citizen’. This project will be looking at ways to encourage take-up and to support citizens in using digital services through skills training. She said there was also a challenge to councils in the IEG process to boost the number of people using web and other services.
Haynes said the IEG process would look to play an even greater part in boosting take-up in future: “We’ve made significant hints in the IEG process that we are going to look more seriously at take-up, so I’d take that hint on board,” he said.
Andrew Stevens of Camden Council asked whether the ODPM had discussed with the Office of the e-Envoy whether the national network of 6,000 UK Online centres for public internet access and training could be used as e-government service access points. “It seems not to have been considered, and we are in danger of losing the opportunity as funding for the centres is starting to drop out,” he said.
Neither Haynes or Stanger were aware of any discussions in government to use the centres in this way. But Stanger said: “As a local authority, if you are aware of a UK Online centre that might make a good partner outlet, then go for it. But you need to consider it may not be a place that citizens will like going to access services.”