In her role as Digital Champion, Martha Lane Fox has called for Government to take radical and revolutionary steps to ensure that it becomes easier to access government services and make payments over the internet.
In a report to Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maud she highlighted the inefficient and bureaucratic nature of many DirectGov services, and contrasts those with the more straightforward online transactions commonly experienced with private sector companies. The Government, she claims, are missing out on significant efficiency savings from channel shift because of this.
Key recommendations in the report include;
- Make Directgov the government front end for all departments’ transactional online services to citizens and businesses, with the teeth to mandate cross government solutions, set standards and force departments to improve citizens’ experience of key transactions.
- Simplifying the user experience of digital public services by making all of government’s transactional services available through Directgov.
- Ensuring online government information and services are available wherever people are on the web by opening up applications and services to other organisations
- Appointing a new CEO for Digital in the Cabinet Office to drive change and bring together existing teams working in this area.
- Asking Directgov and Business Link to create a plan of what would be involved to converge the sites into a single domain
Francis Maud has responded to the report agreeing in principle to take forward the recommendations saying;
“There is no excuse for not making quality online services the default solution for people needing government services.”