Rural councils slow on the e-uptake

Rural councils are falling behind in the race to get services online by 2005, according to a report on local authority websites by the Society of IT Managers (Socitm).

Its annual Better Connected survey highlighted London boroughs as responsible for the biggest improvements in the quality of their sites.

Last year, the survey gave its highest rating to just one site, run by Tameside metropolitan district council, east of Manchester. This year, Tameside is joined by Hertfordshire and the London boroughs of Camden and Westminster. County councils, previously the leading providers of websites, have made only marginal improvements.

District councils were four times more likely to have purely promotional sites than the larger bodies.

Top 20

Socitm has reviewed the sites of all UK local authorities each year since 1999. The differences in performance between types of council are clear in the list of the 20 best sites.

It includes 18 per cent of the London borough councils, 12 per cent of English shire county councils, two per cent of Scotland's all-unitary authorities, just one per cent of English shire district councils, and none from Wales or Northern Ireland. Thirteen are located in south east England.

"London, the metropolitan areas and the big unitary authorities have an infrastructure that is better supported by cable, broadband and PCs," explained Socitm president Robin Carsberg, who is also head of technical services at Braintree District Council in Essex.

"In rural areas, we're unlikely to get broadband unless it passes us on the way from one conurbation to another."

The report pointed out that smaller authorities benefit disproportionately from a flat £200,000 grant given by central government to help all local authorities implement e-government.

But Carsberg maintained that this must be set against overall reductions in government grants. "Many councils are looking at cutting back to avoid big increases in council tax," he said.

Cheaper alternatives

In this climate, website development is an obvious candidate for the back burner. But there are economical alternatives. Glyn Evans, head of ICT at top-rated Camden, thinks that London's strong showing last year was boosted by the Accessible Personalised Local Authority Web Site project.

Five London boroughs worked together to create open source standards for websites as part of the government's Pathfinder knowledge-sharing programme for local authorities. "Other authorities can pick it up for just the cost of implementation and training," explained Evans.

This kind of collaboration contributed to another of last year's success stories, which showed that even small shire borough councils can make rapid improvements.

Mid Suffolk District Council didn't have a web presence a year ago, but its new site won praise in Socitm's report. The council used functionality developed for Tameside's award winning site under the Pathfinder programme.

"We're a really small council, with only seven people in the IT section," said David Hammersley, head of policy and performance. "Setting up something like Tameside just wasn't possible."

But it was possible to adapt Tameside's structure, which the council provided free, as stipulated by the Pathfinder scheme. "They gave us a whole day and talked us through," said Hammersley.

The customisation wasn't straightforward, because Mid Suffolk, as a Microsoft shop, had to convert Tameside's Apache, Perl and PHP-based site. But Mid Suffolk had its site up in six weeks, and plans to provide more transactional functionality with further borrowing from Tameside.

Such collaboration looks like the way forward, especially for the English districts, which make up half of all UK local authorities.

Slow improvement

This year, Socitm is abandoning "authorities with websites" as a useful indicator because all but three of the UK's 467 local authorities now have a web presence. Three years ago, 124 had no site, and even a year ago 24 were still offline.

The quality of sites has continued to improve. Socitm grades sites as 'promotional', moving up through 'content' and 'content plus' to 'transactional', the last being highly interactive. More than 26 per cent of local authorities improved their standing this year, although 14 per cent moved down.

The report concluded: "The best of local government matches the best anywhere ... yet we have to accept that overall the rate of improvement has not yet accelerated."

The government expects all services to be available online by 2005. But fewer than one per cent of councils presently achieve this through websites, although the target also includes intranets at call centres.

Each year, Socitm's researchers email every council with a different question. This year, 96 per cent provided email addresses compared with 85 per cent last year. But only 41 per cent responded within 10 days, compared with 60 per cent last year.

Martin Greenwood, Socitm Insight programme manager, explained that this year's question - about electronic stationery procurement - was more difficult than last year's, with rising volumes of email possibly also causing a problem. "That's more worrying," he said.