'Evening All.

Hot off the press, Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary has sent me this statement on the MyPolice 'web heist' fandango which rocked the Twitterverse to its foundations today.

Here it is in its full glory:

"We spoke with the owners of mypolice.org, and it is clear that we offer very different online products. Both however aim to improve engagement between the public and their police; and this is to be applauded.

"We remain very happy to work with www.mypolice.org to offer the best possible service to the public."

A quick peruse of MySociety’s excellent TheyWorkForYou.com reveals the Conservatives have been rather busy lately tabling a raft of parliamentary questions (PQs) – several dozen in fact – about the cost of redesigning government websites.   Specifically, the sums spent by Whitehall on revamping their web offerings since 27 June 2007, the date Tony Blair handed over the reins of power to Gordon Brown.

Sure enough, the PQ responses made brief headlines towards the tail-end of last year, when the Telegraph reported that government departments had spent £4m on redesigning their websites.  The Taxpayers' Alliance lobby group immediately jumped on what they saw as yet another example of Whitehall waste, with Campaign Director Matthew Elliot commenting:  ”This astonishing £4 million figure shows departments must concentrate on content rather than the appearance of government websites. Many of these sites look a lot better than they actually are.”

However the outrage may have been slightly premature. Because since then, a further 13 government departments and agencies have come forward with details of their spending.  And as UKAuthority.com reports, their responses bring the total cost of Whitehall’s website redesigns to £10m – more than double the £4m sum previously thought.

The figures include a £513,000 redesign of the Department for Health website and £216,000 spent by the Department for Work and Pensions on a web redesign last year.  Work by the Department for International Development to redevelop its website has also cost close to £1 million, according to the figures ministers disclosed.

Some of this work was clearly important to improve the quality of government websites. For example the Ministry of Justice, which redeveloped its site last year, reported that visitor numbers to justice.gov.uk had more than doubled since the Department was formed in 2007.

Other departments’ responses were somewhat more difficult to comprehend, such as how the Communities and Local Government managed to run up a whopping £1.2m bill developing its new – and very unremarkable – departmental website. Or why the Office for National Statistics, say, needed to pay £218,000 in July 2009 to enhance its online ‘Publication Hub’, after already spending £4m on improving its online operations.

An interesting footnote to this is that the Central Office of Information is drawing up guidance to help departments evaluate whether their websites are useful, usable and deliver value for money.

This comes in response to a National Audit Office report several years ago which found ‘little improvement’ in the quality of government websites since 2002, noting around a quarter of organisations could not say how much their site cost.   Judging by a number of responses to the Tories’ PQ, many departments and agencies still can’t.  And if costs can’t be measured, can they be managed?  It might finally be time for some answers.

While penning an update for Public Sector Forums on the 'Effective Partnership Data Management' project I blogged about recently, I was alerted to the fact that a government review of information sharing legislation around benefits data is currently underway.

Given the public kerfuffle and subsequent climb-down earlier this year over the Coroners Bill, I hunted high and low for press releases, reports, or in fact  anything about this new review. I found nothing, well except for a mention buried away in the latest Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit General Information Bulletin [PDF] from the Department for Work and Pensions to council benefit staff, dated 23 November.

The review, says the bulletin, commenced 'recently' and' was prompted by growing requests from LAs keen to make use of customer data in order to deliver joined up services, or to provide more targeted take up campaigns'. It goes on to say

"The review aims to find out more about the circumstances where sharing data could be beneficial to customers and LAs. What would LAs like to do with customer data if the law allowed it? How far could service delivery be improved? What would customers be happy with in terms of sharing their personal data? We would like to build up a good picture of how customer data could be used to good effect, and how this might impact on LAs and on customers. We would also like to hear about any schemes where LAs have been able to deliver services more effectively by re-using customer data. Are there any models that can be replicated in other areas? Does customer consent work? Are these schemes operating as well as they might, or is the legal framework still proving difficult to work within?"

Councils (or those of the audience who picked on this) have been duly invited to give their input, though the consultation appears to be working to condensed timescales, as the deadline for LAs to respond to DWP is Wednesday, 16 December 2009 (i.e. now two weeks away).  By which time, the final version of the  Government's new IT Strategy will, of course, have already been published.  Unfortunately there's no mention of when the DWP plans to go about asking customers what they think about this. Though if they do, it'll have to be pretty sharpish as according to the bulletin, the Department is due to report the findings of its data sharing review in the New Year.

Now call me old-fashioned, but from a public/citizen point of view, I don't see how I  can possibly follow what's going on with my data any more.

We all want digital inclusion - so I was delighted to see the launch this week of the Race Online 2012 campaign by Martha Lane Fox, the Government's Champion for Digital Inclusion.

Of particular note is new research unveiled by the campaign which attempts, possibly for the first time, to quantify the potential financial benefits to the UK ( including government) from achieving greater digital inclusion.  The Economic Case for Digital Inclusion – an independent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers - estimates this to be worth a staggering £22 billion.

One of the 'key findings' highlighted in this report is that:

Government could save at least £900 million a year [their emphasis] in customer contact costs if all digitally excluded adults got online and made just one electronic contact per month.

The actual estimate is some £918m which, by anyone's measure, represents a significant sum of hitherto-unidentified government efficiency savings.  So how did they arrive at this?

According to the report, the figure refers to 'the potential efficiencies that can be derived from switching contacts and transactions to online channels' from more expensive ones.  As the research says, interestingly, in a section headed 'Evidence', 'from the perspective of public service transformation, digital inclusion is primarily an issue of channel strategy and migration.'

The £918m sum, says the report, is based on 'evidence from 19 local authorities' on 'average costs of transactions in different channels' gathered in 2008.

And unfortunately, this is where things start to get a little confused.

It begins on p.47 where an interesting table is provided giving a side-by-side comparison of these relative costs-to-serve. This apparently shows that on average, 'face-to-face' costs a hefty £10.53, 'telephone' £3.39, while 'online' comes in at an amazing 8p.

These are, of course, only one of many, often widely-varying estimates of transaction costs as Mick Phythian documented recently.  PwC could, for instance, just as easily taken figures derived from Socitm's national benchmarking exercise, which sampled far more councils, and were published in March this year and quoted by Martin Greenwood in his presentation a few days ago at the Government 2010 conference.  (Socitm's research, just for reference, put the average cost of servicing face-to-face enquiries at £6.56 and web transactions at £0.27.)

The source of PwC's research is given in a footnote as 'Customer Contact Profiling Report – ESD Toolkit' by 'Aston Campbell Associates 2008'.  Sadly the link given in the report doesn't work, however following some quick Googling I was able to track down this particular research. I believe PwC meant to link to what this PowerPoint presentation from June 2008.

Slide 7 of the presentation, headed 'Channel Costs' indeed shows face-to-face contact costing on average around £10.56. But on closer inspection, it transpires this was just the figure reported by the London Borough of Lambeth, one of the 19 councils surveyed.  Next to this is an entirely different figure from Chorley Borough Council who put the cost at £6.49 - tying in nicely with Socitm's estimate. PwC seem to have chosen to ignore this, which is slightly odd.

The 8p cost for 'online' contact and transactions cited in The Economic Case for Digital inclusion is also a complete mis-reading of the original research.  The 8p doesn't refer to 'online' - it's for contact solely via web forms that are integrated with councils' back-office systems.  In fact, this same presentation highlights that when councils measured the average cost of dealing with email enquiries, this came out at a whopping £6.33.  Which according to the research, makes email actually more expensive than face-to-face contact.

Another rather significant finding of the research, which I failed to find in the PwC report, was that those most likely to be among the 'digitally excluded' were also those least likely to shift channels, which would dampen expectations for potential efficiency savings.

None of this should really come as a surprise to anyone with an interest in customer contact in government, not least PwC as a major provider of consultancy on Transformational Government.  As this landmark UK government study highlighted back in 2006, if electronic services aren't integrated, meaning that councils have to manually re-key electronic data into back-office systems (still extremely common in local government), the true cost of a web transaction can exceed contact by other 'traditional' channels.

Channel shift isn't simply a case of getting people who don't use the web to make electronic contact with government and bingo, efficiency savings. As Bad Science would say, I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.

You can download the PwC report here.

I'm hugely excited by this. Sir David Varney, Gordon Brown's personal advisor on Transformational Government and architect of the Government's approach to data sharing, personalised public services and transformation in general is to face his critics in a public debate next month.

In a rare public appearance, Sir David - a man with a whole agenda and industry named after him - will go head-to-head with, amongst others, none other than arch-nemesis Ian Brown, one of the authors of the Rowntree Database State report.

The discussion, going by the title of Data Sharing or Database State? takes place as part of this year's forthcoming Battle of Ideas festival.

All very timely too, given a whole new public discussion on government data sharing, public privacy and the implications of the 'transformational' agenda now seems to be taking shape. Even to the point where I turned on the TV the other day to see Philip Schofield moderating a debate about the Vetting and Barring Register on the This Morning sofa, as only he can.

Following the Government's point-blank dismissal of the Rowntree report, it's encouraging (if not nothing short of a miracle) to see very senior policy makers, for once, actually being willing to engage in public debate about data sharing, particularly at a forum such as Battle of Ideas.  It brings to mind a memorable moment last year at a Public Sector Forums conference on identity when Meg Hillier, the ID Cards minister at the time, pronounced:

"The debate has already happened, the 2006 [Identity Cards] Act is passed and further opposition is pointless"

– a view apparently not appreciated or endorsed by all those present.

So congrats to Jo Herlihy, organiser and chair of the Database State debate session for securing Sir David's attendance. This should definitely be one to watch. The only thing is, why do I get visions of Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom addressing Open Tech 2009?

Very quietly last week, the Government published this report. It's worth reading because it sets out plans to build what is effectively the ultimate 'Big Brother' database.

The project, being led by the Department for Communities and Local Government, is called EPDM, short for 'Effective Partnership Data Management'.

Though sounding fairly innocuous, EPDM has been described by those involved in the project as the 'silver bullet' for the public sector's data sharing problems.

The remark came from consultants Xantura, who were commissioned by the Department for Communities and Local Government last year to develop what they called

'a strategy and programme of work to challenge assumptions and constraints to the sharing of data between public sector agencies'.

The plan, it now transpires, is to give every individual an ''Integrated Citizen Record' which will track their every interaction with government and trigger automatic alerts to other databases on any change.

At the centre of this is the 'data-sharing platform' which will enable police, councils, NHS bodies and other government agencies to exchange personal information they hold on citizens.

According to the report, information currently stored in separate databases will be funnelled into a network of local 'data hubs' run by Local Strategic Partnerships. (LSPs by the way are non-statutory bodies, led by councils, which bring together government, voluntary groups and private businesses to tackle local issues).

Like a souped-up version of the Identity Cards database, EPDM will create a central record of all information held on a citizen using, says the report, 'regularly refreshed data sets extracted from LSP partners' systems'.

Similar to an advanced version of Gordon Brown's Tell Us Once project, the single change of circumstances service currently being trialled by government, EDPM will notify each partner agency of any changes to any database.

Proponents of the project claim the plans will 'significantly improve service delivery' and lead to 'improved outcomes' by 'proactive targeting of services' based on 'advanced analytics' and 'automatic triggering of citizen event notifications'.

In other words, public bodies would have such detailed information about citizens they would able to 'predict' needs and take pre-emptive action.  The project proposes to test a series of what it calls 'intervention campaigns'.

However there is a further twist in that the EPDM system will have a further, core explicit purpose, namely to spot benefit fraud.

The EPDM 'data hubs' will enable records in different databases to be linked, helping to identify irregularities and discrepancies which could indicate fraud, similar to the National Fraud Initiative's 'fishing expeditions'.

According to the plans, a prototype system would be built to enable 'controlled searching across partnership data'.

The CLG report estimates that trialling the system with five Local Strategic Partnerships could save over £1 million alone in reducing fraud and overpayment of Housing Benefit.

The Department last week invited bodies to come forward to volunteer to act as pilots 'as part of a coordinated EPDM programme'.

The legal basis of the project is, however, not yet clear, as are the details of exactly who (and how many people) will be able to access these extensive – and potentially lucrative – pools of detailed personal data.

The CLG stated in its report that access would be 'strictly' controlled and the chosen solution would need 'to implement a rigorous set of control and audit reporting to eliminate inappropriate use of data. These reports will enable administrative users to view all data accesses that have been made – by whom and by data sharing protocol.'

It added: 'In this respect the solution will implement a data sharing control infrastructure that will limit access to data through either pre-approved data sharing protocols, created and managed in the system and through data sharing consents, once again recorded and managed within the system. '

The detailed report on the EPDM programme published on 30 July can be downloaded here.