IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

With the exception of the occasional thunderclap from the NHS National Programme, the past couple of years may have been the calm before the storm for government technology.

There have obviously been problems, and not just in the health service ≠ the Rural Payments Agency, for example, or Jobcentre Plus. But it has been some time since the heyday of the public sector IT disaster.

In April the government changed the basis on which it will calculate the new Single Payment, which farmers in England will receive from next year. Secretary of State Margaret Beckett introduced a third region - moorland within the upland Severely Disadvantaged Area (SDA), a move backed by all the main farming bodies.

This is in addition to the £435,000 funding already available for service improvements.

A briefing paper from the Whole System Demonstrator Action Network, Sustaining innovation in telehealth and telecare, says England has taken the lead among European countries in trialling new products and services and between 1.6 million and 1.7 million people in England now use telecare.

Channel fears that public-sector cash could run out after the December 2005 deadlines were laid to rest last week, when the government pledged further investment in local councils' e-government initiatives.

Schools should take steps to address the digital divide by providing "portable technologies" to be used by children beyond the classroom, Baroness Estelle Morris said on 29 September 2005.

The former education secretary was launching a campaign to bridge the digital divide on behalf of the e-Learning Foundation. The campaign aims to raise awareness across education, in government and the private sector of the impact of the digital divide on young people.

A report from the Commons Health Select Committee on the e-patient record - a key project in the 10-year NHS national programme for IT - highlights a series of problems with the management, security and timescale of the scheme.

Many government agencies and public sector bodies are unprepared to deal with data requests under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, which comes into force on 1 January 2005, according to MPs.

The House of Commons health select committee criticised the deployment of the system, a key part of the £12.7 billion national programme for IT. They said the planned completion date of 2014-15 – already four years late – is “in doubt”.

A government internet scheme to attract overseas students to UK universities failed because it had no understanding of consumer demand, got carried away by the dotcom boom and allowed technology to drive its strategy, according to a report released by MPs on 3 March 2005.

But the lack of experience of senior responsible owners (SROs) and the failure of advising bodies to support them could result in a project failing, the Commons public accounts committee said on Tuesday.

Committee chairman Edward Leigh said: "Not all major government IT projects end up on the rocks: as the successful Payment Modernisation Programme and Pension Credit have shown.

But despite the problems, the Office of Government Commerce, the watchdog for government spending, is resisting pressure to make the relevant reports public. Perhaps the reports make such ugly reading that the British public would be too upset by the gross wasting of public money.

The Public Accounts Committee wants the reports published and all projects to go through all stages of Gateway Review, unless the OGC agrees they can skip them. The committee believes the Treasury should have the power to withold funding for projects which "consistently ignore stages of the Gateway process."

The number of multi-channel contact centres will treble in the UK over the next four years, providing a huge opportunity for resellers to cash in on the market.

Cityspace was formed eight years ago to help councils execute the national government’s plan to offer e-government services as an efficiency measure. The company developed outdoor kiosks to provide self-service municipal information in public places. The idea was that citizens wouldn’t have to call into council offices as much and take up city workers’ valuable time. The iPlus kiosks also provided access to the public Internet.