Power to the e-people

By 2005, we should all be able to access every central and local government service electronically. This was the commitment made by Tony Blair back in March 2000.

With that deadline fast approaching it's maybe a good time to turn our attention to the benefits of e-government for Joe Public. After all, this isn't an initiative conceived to benefit politicians or even those with a particular interest in politics; the aim of e-government is to keep citizens better informed and to involve them more in the democratic process.

It also has the potential to make life a lot simpler by reducing trips to the post office, the polling station, the tax office and the town hall.

If the reality of e-democracy lives up to its promise, there will be real benefits for real people. But what exactly is on offer, what can we already do online and how much progress has Britain made towards that 2005 deadline? Join us as we investigate.

The master plan
When the government first outlined its plans to get central and local government services and information online, the prime minister defined the aim of the initiative as using IT to improve the efficiency and quality of public services. Equally important was the push to offer the public more convenient access to those services.

While this sort of rhetoric might sound great in theory, what does it mean in practice? To get a better idea of the potential benefits of e-government, let's turn our attention to the two areas in which great strides have already been made: health and education.

The government likes to quote NHS Direct and the associated website, NHS Direct Online, as an example of a major success story in improving the public's access to healthcare information. And there's more to come.

In addition to disseminating information on everything from Aids to giving up smoking, patients will be able to make bookings for outpatient appointments and in-patient elective admissions online. There have also been trials of a scheme that allows patients to access their own medical records online using a secure internet connection.

When it comes to education, there's already no shortage of information and services that are available online, and plenty more is to come. The DfES Parent Centre brings together information for parents about educational places to visit and online search facilities for local schools and performance league tables.

Seven- to 11-year-olds can access the Grid Club website, which has over 90 online clubs, plus games and resources based on the national curriculum.

Adult learners can access hundreds of online or locally delivered courses using the Learndirect site, and students can search and apply for university places on the UCAS website.

It all sounds good but what about the 50 per cent of British households that don't have internet access? Does this mean that half of the population won't be able to engage in e-government? That would most certainly make a mockery of an initiative designed to get more of us involved in the political process.

Well, not exactly. Local councils differ in how they're addressing this issue and later on in this feature we'll look at what some local authorities are doing to bring services to outlying areas and to those without broadband internet access.

Central government services are already being rolled out via digital TV, while Sky viewers already have access to e-government via their TV sets. Plans are currently underway to extend this to Telewest and NTL cable subscribers.

As things stand
We may still be several months away from the 2005 deadline but many central government services are already available online through the Directgov website.

Right now the main purpose of the site is to disseminate information. So whether you want an A-to-Z directory of central government, information on child safety, details of how to pay your road tax or on your rights as a disabled person, you'll find it plus a whole lot more at Directgov.

But this site isn't only for obtaining information, there's also a 'Do it online' section. Many of the links in this section provide yet more information or direct you to other government websites, but you can file your tax returns, report suspicious activity to MI5, book a driving test, and search family records online here.

So what about our MPs? Any initiative to use the internet to improve access to a local member of parliament would be down to the MPs themselves, so it can't strictly be considered under the banner of the government's e-democracy initiative.

But how accessible an MP is online says something about how seriously our politicians take the whole concept of e-government. The figures make interesting reading. Of the 659 MPs, 549 can be contacted by email and 411 have their own websites. In other words, a majority have embraced the electronic age but there is still a one-in-six chance that you can't even send an email to your MP.

As far as local government is concerned, e-government adoption is a bit of a mixed bag. While many councils are well down the road to e-government, there's little doubt that a few will struggle to meet the 2005 deadline.

In a government report dated December 2003, 35 out of 399 local authorities were considered to have made unsatisfactory progress. But there are certainly plenty of success stories.

Wandsworth Borough Council has received acclaim for its online planning permission application service, where residents can make online planning applications and follow the progress of the application on the council's website.

The East Riding of Yorkshire Council's e-government programme has also been praised by the Minister for e-Government, Phil Hope, for focusing on the practical benefits this new technology can bring to local residents.

Residents can use the council's website to access a variety of services such as information about councillors and council services, make online payments for council-run services and report street-lighting faults.

The story so far
In May this year, Britain's e-Envoy Andrew Pinder painted a rosy picture of the progress of e-government implementation, stating that over two thirds of central government services were already accessible online and that every council in Britain had set up a basic website at the very least.

One of the main problems holding back the progress of e-government schemes has been integrating the many different government websites already in existence.

With over 3,000 government websites (those with a URL ending in .gov.uk), 900 of which are run by central government departments, people just didn't know where to go to find specific information or to access a particular service.

So one of the first jobs of the e-government initiative was to set up a central gateway to all government services. Initially this was the UK Online website but this was really just a search engine of government websites, and user surveys indicated that it really didn't meet people's needs.

This website has now been replaced by the Directgov website, which provides direct links to various government websites grouped according to their interest to specific groups of people, such as parents and motorists.

The government also blames data protection issues and internet privacy concerns for holding things up. The Data Protection Act prevents information about an individual that has been recorded for one purpose being used for any other reason.

In some cases, however, sharing this information between government departments would speed up the process of allowing an individual to have access to a range of different e-government services.

Cast your vote online
Surely the ultimate demonstration of e-government in action would be elections held electronically and online. Already voters in Belgium and Switzerland can vote from the comfort of their own homes, so how is the UK gearing up for e-voting?

To date, e-voting has been used only in council elections in the UK. In 2003, 17 local authorities provided e-voting facilities to 1.9 million voters, via internet kiosks, home PCs, text messaging and digital TV.

But the results were not encouraging, with only a marginal increase in voter numbers. Furthermore, technology think-tank the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR) is far from convinced of the advisability of using these voting systems nationwide.

One of the leading concerns with e-voting is the lack of a paper trail, which allows you to go back and check the outcome of an election after the event. The FIPR warned that it would be impossible to prove afterwards that an election had been carried out correctly if a situation such as the need for a recount occurred.

To further underline how far we are from voting online in the next general election, the Electoral Commission advised the government against trialling e-voting in some areas for the June elections to the European Parliament, citing concerns over security and software development.

Get involved
For those who enthuse about politics, take the trouble to keep themselves informed politically on a local and national level and who always vote, e-government might not make a huge difference.

But the majority of the UK population are unlikely to fall into this category and it is this group that stands to benefit the most from e-government, along with those with restricted mobility for whom online access to local services would be a godsend.

Not only will we be able to keep a finger on the political pulse online, it should also be easier to become more fully involved in the democratic process without having to spend ages on the phone, writing letters or visiting council offices.

And although eight other countries have made better progress towards e-government implementation, the UK fares well compared to most of the world.

Of course, this shouldn't be grounds for complacency; that 2005 deadline isn't far away and a lot has yet to be done. The case for online access to government information and services is compelling, so let's hope that the reality lives up to the rhetoric.

The international picture
Each year, management consultancy firm Accenture publishes a report showing how well governments around the world are doing in providing public services via the internet.

In its latest report, published in May this year, the UK ranked ninth out of the 22 countries surveyed, dropping from eighth place in 2003 and sixth in 2002.

Canada took first place and the other countries ahead of the UK, in descending order, were Singapore, USA, Australia, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and France.

Perhaps ironically, neither Switzerland nor Belgium, the two countries that have made the greatest headway in implementing online voting in general and local elections, are placed ahead of the UK in the Accenture e-government poll.

Where the other eight countries ranked ahead of the UK really excel is in having a more unified approach to offering access to government services, making services and information more accessible and easy to use for the public in these countries.

It is only relatively recently that the UK has recognised the need to offer the public a single website that provides access to a range of central government services. Hopefully, this will pave the way for the further development of e-government in this country.