Have you ever gone shopping and bought more than you need? Not much. Maybe the 3 for 2 on strawberries when you know at least one punnet will rot in the fridge; another sneaky packet of biscuits that looked nice on the shelf? Ever thought about how much that adds up to at the end of the year? A lot, probably, but I bet you don’t like thinking about it.
Well, those of us who don’t go shopping with a strict list will know exactly how the former Labour government feels right now. Since coming to office, the new coalition has been doing the macroeconomic equivalent of going through the bank statements with a highlighter pen. But instead of pinning passive aggressive notes saying “£200 at Sainsbury’s! Have you got a tapeworm?” to the fridge door, the government has been publishing all this lovely information to the web.
And this week it has the last government’s expenditure on websites in its sights. The raw data, which has been summarised and interpreted by The Guardian can be seen here, is worth a look. At first glance it fits nicely with the coalition’s line on the last Labour government’s fiscal policy, which can be loosely translated as “they sold our lovely cow for magic beans!” But putting aside a couple of pricey anomalies, quite a few of these websites look very cost-effective indeed.
Take Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) for example. It may have cost £10m to build, but thanks to it you can submit your tax returns online – a process which we’re all agreed is not perfect, but still a darn sight better than the paper old forms. Per visitor it costs us a mere penny – a sixtieth of what we all pay towards Her Majesty’s upkeep. We could say the same of Direct Gov. A substantial investment, but it’s a site relevant to millions, and probably saves more than that in unprinted information leaflets and spurious phone calls.
Where the last government’s web strategy did come unstuck, however, was around activity targeting businesses. The costs per visitor speak for themselves, but I’m not entirely sure whether this represents credit card happiness among government officials, or just the fact that these websites naturally reach smaller audiences. More or less everyone checked Direct-Gov at the height of the swine flu epidemic, but I bet you probably only visited the Research and Development site if you were worked in development.
Which brings us to the last point. This might be raw data, but it’s data that’s been released to make a political point, so interpret it carefully. The coalition wants tech audiences to think some of these websites were a waste of money. But, to paraphrase a player in an earlier political scandal, Mandy Rice-Davies “they would, wouldn’t they?” It’s in their best interests to make the last lot look like chumps, even if they did get a few things right. Yes, some questionable decisions were made during the last 13 years, but I’d rather have most of these websites than not, wouldn’t you?
