What can you buy for £40m a year? Well with the help of a small
loan you could run the Business Link and UKTI websites for
a year, apparently. That'd be Business Link, the costliest of all
government-funded websites, and UKTI, the least cost-effective.
The full extent of spending on the two sites surfaced in this
morning's report by the Central Office of Information, which
outlined plans to axe 75% of government websites and force
surviving sites to cut costs by more than half.
Having burned through a whopping £35.78m at a rate of £2.15 per
user, BusinessLink.gov.uk accounted for a third of all government
spend on websites, while UKTI.gov.uk, which cost just a mere £4.7m,
looked to be the least efficient, costing £11.78 for each of its
399,501 visits.
By comparison, the most cost-efficient government websites
included the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs
which cost 2p per visit, Revenue and Customs at 11p and the
Department for Culture, Media and Sport at 5p per visit. A decision
on which sites will be saved will be made in September.
Now as an independent business advice site run at a fraction of
the cost of Business Link, you could possibly expect Smarta to be
gleefully putting the boot in at the expense of its
publically-funded rival. Not so.
Should Business Link restructure? Yes. Cut costs? Certainly.
Should the government scrap it completely? No.
Why? Let's be clear I'm no big fan of Business Link, but to
scrap it or its website altogether would be a crazy waste of
millions already spent.
As the government's official site for business, Business Link
should provide the factual administrative information people
starting and running businesses need to access. It should clearly
explain and display all the legal, tax and regulatory obligations
of business owners - and that's it.
It should stop trying to tell people how to run businesses
because it doesn't know how to do that and that's not what people
need it to do.
Business people look to each other, mentors, their online and
offline networks for advice on business decisions because they
value first-hand experience. They don't ask the government and
never will.
In turn, it's hard to believe many people would happily reply on
recommendation to find out VAT codes or licensing protocol - that's
where official information is needed and what should be Business
Link's domain.
Similarly, the new government shouldn't rush to conclusions over
UKTI's role on the back of its apparent inefficiency. Having placed
export at the heart of its emergency budget and economic recovery
plans it'd seem foolhardy to lose all online support for would-be
exporters.
Better to measure effectiveness and return on investment. While
expenditure per user may seem extraordinarily high, if UKTI is
helping businesses successfully trade overseas (and it is by no
means clear that it is), then its role could actually be returning
handsome profit to the economy and taxpayer, albeit via a small
number of contributors. And if that's not happening, perhaps it is
the site itself not the need for the site which needs
addressing.
What is clear is that government sites (read also departments,
quangos etc) need to stop trying to do everything and be cut back
to their core functions.
Let's keep the Business Link and UKTI websites, but strip them
down, carve them up, maybe even combine them so they're running at
costs closer to £4m than £40m! They shouldn't do or cost any
more.