Authors:
Ministers of European Union (EU) Member States, Accession States and Candidate Countries and Ministers of the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) Countries, responsible for eGovernment policy, meeting in Manchester on the occasion of the Ministerial eGovernment Conference ‘Transforming Public Services’ held on 24-25 November 2005 and hosted by the United Kingdom Presidency of the European Council and the European Commission.

Description (short summary):
Ministers responsible for eGovernment meeting in Manchester on the occasion of the 3rd Ministerial eGovernment Conference signed this Ministerial Declaration on 24 November 2005.

This declaration sets out a new strategic direction for European eGovernment until 2010 in the aim to include every citizen, business and government in the social and economic benefits IT-enabled public services can deliver.

The declaration sets out four key challenges to governments:

• No citizen left behind: To build IT innovatively into policy design, public service delivery, and information provision to actively include the disadvantaged.
• Effective and efficient government: To use IT to improve the consumer’s experience of public services; reduce costs – especially to business – of dealing with government; improve administrative efficiency; and improve the transparency of government.
• High impact European services: To identify and implement services that most benefit the freedom of movement of labour, services, goods and capital. eProcurement has been identified for immediate action because of known benefits for markets, suppliers, and value for money in public purchasing.
• Simple and secure access to online public services: To work together at EU level to address the issues of complexity, security and public confidence around electronic authentication to access public services.

This Declaration proposes Member States integrate these objectives into their national strategies for eGovernment, and set out in 2006 the activities they propose in order to meet these goals.

Original URL:
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/egovernment/conferences/2005/index_en.htm

Number of pages:
6 (EN version)
8 (FR version)

Related article: 
EU: Are e-procurement objectives in the Manchester Ministerial Declaration realistic?

Nature of documentation: Policy/Strategy papers