Direct.gov.uk, the Government’s flagship digital service portal, supports the Prime Minister’s Transformational Government agenda of amalgamating all public services online on Directgov by 2011. The citizen-focused digital channel for government offers a single point of entry for citizens to all key government services, information, tools and transactions through Digital TV, mobile phones, and the Internet. Currently, 18 departments contribute to the development on Directgov, with links to 240 local services covering 388 local authorities. Benefits for departments include reaching a larger audience and reducing costs. Citizens benefit from faster government transactions, making services more accessible, easier, and clearer.

Policy Context

At the UK e-summit in November 2002, the Prime Minister stated “For the public services, the real opportunity is to use technology to help create fundamental improvement in the efficiency, convenience and quality of our services…Our plan is not only to offer more convenient access to services but also to transform how we organise mainstream delivery (…) a new relationship between citizen and state and the way we interact with each other”. The Transformational Government strategy published in 2006 sets out a six-year improvement journey for public services. The principles of Transformational Government are at the core of Sir David Varney’s review of service transformation, which the Chancellor has published as part of the analysis informing the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review: Service transformation: A better service for citizens and businesses, a better deal for the taxpayer. The Government has commissioned a delivery plan to implement the report’s findings, to be published in 2007. Sir David Varney’s review states in 2007, that for customer information, self-service transactions and campaign support, online services should converge on Directgov for customers and Business Link for employers as the primary online entry points. The Government’s objective is to have strong, strategically effective communications and service delivery via the internet, designed around the needs and lifestyles of citizens. Ministers commissioned the main central government departments to review their websites and develop plans for their rationalisation and the migration of content to the Directgov website for citizens and the Business Link website for businesses. In the first phase of departmental reviews, 951 websites were considered across 18 central government departments. Decisions have already been taken to close 551 (58 per cent) of these websites.

Description of target users and groups

Our overall target audiences for Directgov are all UK citizens UK citizens living and working abroad as well as all public servants in all government departments.

Description of the way to implement the initiative

The management approach was to establish appropriate business streams to address Directgov’s needs and keep a flexible approach to changing business requirements. Directgov has restructured several times to account for business development needs and consists of proposition and strategy, business and operations, editorial including a dedicated search team and stakeholder and marketing teams. We don’t have direct partnerships. Multi-channel issues: Multi-channel facilities enable citizens to access Directgov in wider variety of situations allowing for greater flexibility of content, for example, planning for emergencies, content on the move, reaching socially excluded groups but most importantly Directgov allows the citizen to access the service when they want to and how they want to. The Directgov offer is available on: - Mobile: Any internet enabled mobile phone. There are different versions for different handsets, both for WAP and 3G phones. Through Directgov mobile people can receive traffic alerts and plan journeys through public transport information, receiving the next departing train times from chosen routes, as well as offering certain booking callback facilities from advisors. Directgov mobile has the only postcode mobile look up facilities for NHS services, allowing the public to find their nearest hospital, pharmacy or legal service on the move. - Digital Television: Users of the Directgov TV service are more likely to be older (63% over 35, 40% over 45, 17% over 55 respectively), the majority not working (67%) and half (48%) rarely or never use the internet on a PC. With 60% Sky’s 8 million subscribers access interactive services each month and just over half of digital television users (56%) aware of Directgov website but only 16% having visited it. Directgov digital services include ordering forms and location based searches.

Main results, benefits and impacts

Citizens save time and money by using Directgov online service over alternative methods and their experience is improved as services are easy to use, easy to find, and all in one place. As citizens use the site an improved and trusted relationship with Government develops. Government departments and agencies achieve efficiencies enabled by Directgov by shifting traditional channels online; cross-selling information and services from different Departments to the citizen; shared Infrastructure and Website Rationalisation. More specifically by sharing technical infrastructure, reducing resource, moving traditional resources online and take advantage of Directgov’s marketing resource for government campaigns and information, reaching more customers through Directgov Government departments and agencies save money in development and hosting of service as Directgov will be continuously developed, available, and benefit from collaborative working. The total running cost for Directgov for financial year 2007/08 is £8.6million. Directgov has 4,942,810 visits for the month of May 2007 which is growing month on month and is an 82% increase from May 2006. An additional 3.1 million visits in May 07 went to one particular popular service, electronic vehicle licensing. At launch, May 2004 we started from 800,000 monthly visits. We have been consistently the third most visited government site, included in The Guardian national newspaper survey of the UK’s top 100 most useful sites and, as at May 2007, ranked 88 out of 112000 most visited site in the UK of all UK sites through the independent metrics package Hitwise. Over 9 million English adults are aware of the Directgov and visitors rate our site better than sites such as BBC, Ebay, Amazon and Tesco for being helpful and on a par with the BBC for being a trust source of information, up-to-date, comprehensive and easy to use. 76% of customers are likely to recommend the site. 83% of people who visit Directgov agree that it is a ‘good place to start’ 80% agree that it offers ‘useful information’. With 70 per cent of people feel that it is ‘a site I trust’. Whist we are still calculating the financial cost directly to government departments, which rests on accurate cost reporting on a department by department basis, conservative estimates indicate that the value to Government from Directgov driving additional take-up in electronic services and as an enabler for website rationalisation of 551 government sites would generate a significantly more substantial saving to government than our total costs. We are now the preferred channel by citizens for many transactions, saving them time and money. Enabling many government transactions to be completed online as opposed to the usual routes of using government call centres applying by post or queuing in post offices for forms. Increasingly we will change how society interacts with government as a whole, currently the government gateway project, enabling individuals and businesses to interact with government has issued 9million separate user identifications. Directgov is looking at how we can use our interface to support citizens interacting with government. Innovation: We are the first and only international government to approach web rationalisation on this scale, closing 551 government sites and resurfacing that information in one place for the citizen online, through web and mobile.

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Track record of sharing

Directgov regularly and proactively undertakes up skilling seminars for government communicators to share learning and help support government communicators learn from Directgov experiences in fields that may be applicable to other government work. Directgov speaks at Public Service national events. We also present and take questions on topics such as: How do you solve the dilemma between raising brand awareness whilst promoting multiple products and services? How can Directgov help to promote campaigns? Directgov marketing teams aim to up skill the team of marketers promoting Directgov across government and support their communications by producing a how to toolkit both physical and electronic to help ensure all communication planning is uniform. Directgov is regularly consulted and invited by industry to represent government at innovation forums, UK web entrepreneurs meetings, changing democracy debates and national UK tradeshows. Following Sir Davis Varney’s report, the advisor to the Chancellor, in January 2007, the recommendation that 551 public service websites close and are appropriately resurfaced on Directgov or Business Link attracted nationwide on and offline news coverage. As a direct result of this public declaration we attracted interest from USA, Luxembourg, Denmark and the EU Commission government officials to share our learning on Directgov and public service information online. We held an hour teleconference with 100 top e-communicators in the US for a presentation and Q+A session, a visit from Luxembourg officials was postponed owing to changes in ministers and we hosted delegations from both Denmark and the EU Commission.

Lessons learnt

Lesson 1 - Ministerial and senior backing. It is important to have robust senior level backing and ministerial support for a project, programme or business of this size from the outset. This advice would be useful for any government or national e-comms project to take on board. Lesson 2 - Flexibility to deliver changing departments requirements. In the planning of an initiative of this size and complexity it is important to build the facility to be extremely flexible to be proactive and reactive with changing departmental requirements. Many communication and convergence priorities are steered by individual departments changing and adapting needs which this business needs to account for. Lesson 3 - Adequate funding. At the outset of this undertaking, ensure you have a robust and appropriate funding model. Contributory or voluntary funding from departments can lead to continual re-scoping of plans and more robust funding enables great effective planning and forecast of business development and communications.

Scope: Local (city or municipality), National, Regional (sub-national)