Friday 12 February 2010

Cost of government website revamps rises to £10m

Government departments have spent at least £10 million on website redesigns and upgrades over the last two and a half years - more than double the amount previously thought, according to new figures.

Data obtained by the Conservatives in December last year showed that Whitehall had spent £4m on revamping its websites since Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in June 2007. The costs came to light in responses to a string of parliamentary questions tabled by Tory backbencher, David Davies.

However since then, a further 13 departments and agencies have come forward with details of their spending - increasing the total by an additional £6m.

Figures disclosed by ministers reveal that the Department for Work and Pensions spent £216,000 on redesigning its website in February 2009, with one of its agencies, the Office of Disability Issues, also incurring £147,000 in redesign costs.

The Department for International Development confirmed it had spent £970,000 redeveloping its website "to allow greater scope for engagement with the UK and overseas public". The Department for Food and Rural Affairs, spent £181,000 on a single redesign of the DEFRA website, stating 'It is not possible to separate out the internal staff costs for this work.' And in February 2008, the Department for Health conducted a £513,000 redesign of its corporate website.

Elsewhere, the Ministry of Justice's reply gave details of a 'major refresh' of its website last year, adding that numbers of visitors to its site had more than doubled since the department was formed in 2007. The cost of the redesign was £92,000.

The costs do not include more than £10m being spent by the HM Revenues & Customs on improving its web offering. In a written answer, treasury minister, Stephen Timms, insisted that HMRC "had not undertaken a redesign of its website", but rather had made "significant incremental improvements" such as "improved navigation and a new look and feel in key sections of the site". The work, said Timms, was an integral part of HMRC's Service Transformation Agreement and its commitment to converge content and services to the Directgov and BusinessLink portals. He added: "Costs are projected at a total of £10.7 million over the period 2007-8 to 2010-11."

Another expensive reworking involved Communities and Local Government, which ran up a £1.2mn bill developing its new departmental website ahead of its launch in 2007.

By contrast, the Ministry of Defence was relatively parsimonious, with a total of £150,000 going on redesigning its website.

In a further disclosure, it transpired that the Office for National Statistics had paid £218,000 in July 2009 to enhance its online 'Publication Hub', after already spending £4m on improving its online operations.

However several departments, such as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, were unable to provide details or a simple break down of their spending. The FCO carried out a redesign of all 250 of its websites in 2008, but could not say what this had cost as the work formed part of a wider online project, details of which were commercially confidential.

On a related note, the Central Office of Information is developing resources to help departments evaluate quality, usability and value for money of websites. The move comes in response to a National Audit Office report in 2006 which found a quarter of government organisations did not know what their own websites cost.