The talk from the Treasury is all about improved efficiency and financial constraints. The government wants more for less, and the prevailing view is that technology is the way to do it.

The Chancellor announced last week that once the Gershon efficiency target to strip more than £21bn a year and 84,000 jobs out of public sector administration by 2007-8 is achieved, departments and agencies will then aim for an extra 2.5 per cent of savings a year.

Yet the government is committed to continued investment in key public services such as health, education and transport. And the place to find the money, without breaking the Chancellor’s golden rule, is administration budgets.

As the Treasury Chief Secretary told Computing, IT is crucial to the improved efficiency on which such a balance relies.

It all sounds straightforward, but experience too often proves otherwise. For on the same day as the Chancellor’s report, MPs were debating Jobcentre Plus (JC+) in the House of Commons.

The combination of technology and staffing issues at JC+, which Computing has covered for the past year, has seen a doubling in crisis loan applications, and new benefits claimants unable to get through to contact centres and having to wait up to two months for the much-needed financial support to start.

The problems were branded a ‘catastrophic failure’ by the Work and Pensions Committee in March. The committee also concluded that some of society’s most vulnerable were suffering because JC+ was trying to do too much at once.

The path to achieving more efficient processes, and the technology that underpins them, must be one of slow and steady progress.

The government’s Utopian vision of less money, fewer people, but improved services is not impossible. But it cannot be rushed, to a political timetable.

Citizens, government and IT industry alike should be crossing their fingers that time is taken to get these programmes right, or JC+ will be the first of many.

What do you think? Email us at: feedback@computing.co.uk