UK.gov shutters half its websites
Direct to the bin, guv'
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907 of the government's 1,700 websites have closed following the recommendations of the Varney report in 2006.
A further 479 are "committed to be closed", according to a written answer from Cabinet Office minister Angela Smith on 27 January 2010.
She was responding to a request for information from shadow Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude, who also asked for details of the numbers of websites operated by different organisations in Whitehall.
Smith said that as of 31 December 2009, 793 central government websites remain open and of these 182 are run by departments and 611 by executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies.
Two years after his Service Transformation report, Sir David Varney called on the government to speed the transformation processes he had recommended.
He said that progress had been made on combining government websites with Directgov and Businesslink, but added that four unnamed departments were responsible for 80 per cent of sites that had not been planned for closure.
This article was originally published at Kable.
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COMMENTS
Planning? They've heard of it (or have they?)
So a total of 1386 sites will be closed, out of 1700. That's 81% of them.
As a taxpayer, I would sincerely like to know what clown(s) set up those Web sites in the first place, only to have them shut down again within a few years. That must represent a large waste of public money (although admittedly everything else pales into insignificance alongside the vast cost of the bank bailout, the NHS "reforms", the wars in Asia, etc. etc.)
any details?
while that is quite interesting news, why are they closing them? what were the ones that are getting closed.. etc? enquiring minds want to know...
Why?
You mean you can think of at least one good reason why the British government needs to maintain 1,700 separate websites and the infrastructure overhead and costs that go with them?
It is called "Mission Creep", and British civil servants are true experts at it.
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