Southampton aims for home access to council applications

Southampton City Council, last year's winner of Computing's Public Sector Project of the Year, is closely involved in the development of smartcard-accessed e-government applications.

The city has been developing a public key infrastructure (PKI) authentication system to give residents a certified digital identity stored on a smartcard, authorising access to online council services.

To demonstrate the concept, it introduced a pilot application and rolled out public kiosks that allow council tenants to report and track repairs over the internet.

Now, it is working to make the service accessible from citizens' home PCs, as well as looking to expand the range of public services to be accessible via smartcard.

Southampton was also one of the first participants in the European Commission-sponsored SmartCities project, working to introduce smartcards as a means of accessing city facilities and paying for goods and services.