Rank and File
Britain's multibillion pound effort to create electronic government received a confidence boost this week. It is officially the most advanced large European country at making public services available online. In the latest regular survey of e-government progress, covering 28 countries, only Sweden and Austria beat Britain in a league table of sophistication. Previous surveys placed the UK in the middle of a field led by Nordic countries, with their small and technically savvy populations. It echoes the findings of the latest United Nations survey of e-government, which placed the UK behind only the US and Denmark in a league table of 191 countries' "e-government readiness". Article continues Evidence that the UK is relatively good at something to do with computers in government will surprise people who assume that widely reported disasters are uniquely British. It is welcome news for the government, which is betting on IT to crack a range of difficult national issues, from fuel taxation to doctors' productivity. The bad news is that there is little evidence that e-government makes public services more efficient, or contributes to overall national wellbeing. The author of the European survey, Graham Colclough, of consultancy Cap Gemini, warned this week that the most difficult challenges for e-government lie before us. The European Commission "benchmarks" e-government progress as part of an "e-Europe action plan" designed to catch up with north America and east Asia. The latest survey is the fifth, and the first since the EU's expansion to 25 member states. It also covers non-members Iceland, Norway and Switzerland. Researchers working for Cap Gemini, a French-based company, tested the extent to which 20 basic public services were available online: 12 for citizens, eight for businesses. The results show that most public organisations in Europe are on the web - across the 28 states, 84% of "service providers" had a website. Almost all offline bodies are local organisations such as hospitals. Different functions of government are moving online at different rates. Not surprisingly, the most advanced group contains processes for collecting taxes. The least developed group covers "permits and licences"; in most of Europe, applying for planning permission cannot be done online. In country rankings, the five most sophisticated e-governments are Sweden, Austria, the UK, Ireland and Finland. The UK's jump from seventh position places it among the pioneers. Another fast mover is Estonia, a new member state. It comes eighth, ahead of France, the Netherlands and Germany. Latvia is bottom of the 28, while Luxembourg, at 23, is the least developed of established EU members. Luxembourg breaks the rule that small rich countries are generally good at e-government because its population is simply too small to make investment worthwhile. Among individual online services, the UK scores well in passport applications. It is the only country apart from Portugal to offer a service ranked 100% for sophistication. The 100% score does not mean that it is possible to apply online for a passport, only that the website "offers an official electronic form to start the procedure to obtain an international passport". Along with Norway, Britain also scores 100% for the sophistication in its online driving licence applications. In public libraries, however, Britain is well down the league, with 17 states ahead in the sophistication of services. The UK is 10th in the sophistication of procedures for registering businesses and is also well down the league in electronic public procurement. The study offers several examples of services that might be usefully adopted elsewhere in Europe. One is the UK Customs and Excise's Chief system for processing customs duties. Britain's planning portal also won praise for its ability to submit planning applications electronically to some local authorities. Elsewhere in Europe, the German federal border police apparently have a sophisticated website for collecting "hints or observations" on border security, while the French education ministry runs a national site for holders of the French baccalauréat to enrol in university. Norwegians do not have to apply for birth certificates - they are issued automatically on the basis of data that hospitals submit to the population register. In Finland, likewise, all authorities have access to a population register if they need proof of identity. Belgians claiming social security do not have to notify the authorities when their status changes - an organisation called the Crossroads Bank receives the information automatically and changes the benefit accordingly. Europe's approach to benchmarking e-government has several weaknesses. By concentrating on the same set of services year after year, it creates a temptation for countries to boost their ratings by investing only in procedures that will be measured. A more serious weakness is that it does not differentiate between a website slapped on top of an existing process, and one truly integrated with it. It is only by the second approach that e-government can save money, and in most countries this process has scarcely begun. "We've done the easy bit," Colclough warned.
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