Councils ease art of communication

Sue Devlin is the programme director for Government Connect (GC), the secure communication system for local government. Using XML messaging, the system allows local authorities to plug into a national infrastructure to communicate with each other and with central government, and to make citizen services more efficient.

Q What are the advantages for local authorities being able to connect to central government?

A It is essentially about reusing public assets much more economically – getting much more value out of existing assets. You can look at all the business processes and there is a massive amount of business that central and local government do on behalf of citizens and businesses. Benefit processes, management information and performance information collection are currently done manually or by sending files, but it could be more efficient and economical to use XML messaging.

Q Could you give an example?

A Take parking permits in London. We’d use XML messaging to create a link between the parking permits application system at the local authority with the DVLA database. It would save local authorities time in the authentication process at the town hall and gives the customer the convenience of being able to do it when they want online from anywhere.

Q Why should a local authority use Government Connect?

A The infrastructure meets the Government Secure Intranet (GSI) code of practice, so it gives them all the facilities central government has at the moment in transporting information up to a restricted classification. It is the big one really in terms of connecting us all up together.

Q How much interest has there been in Government Connect?

A We have had very high levels of interest from 30 authorities that want to be early adopters. The important thing is being focused on making electronic services to customers consistent and easy to use, so the GC register process is a central process and the look and feel of each authority is embedded into it.

Q The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister has been criticised for its management of local government IT transformation. Do you agree?

A The egovernment agenda has been an evolution. At the start of this programme no one could have foreseen what the results would be. Maybe in hindsight you might do it differently, but at the time that was the right way to do it. The whole agenda is the size of an elephant and you can’t understand it all at once. It is huge, and so I don’t think there was any other way they could have done it really.