COI shows £128m Whitehall web costs

Titled Reporting on Progress: central government websites 2009-10 , Reporting on Progress: central government websites 2009-10 and published on 25 June 2010, it shows spending on the two sites accounted for approximately £62m of the total £128m. Business Link , the official government website for businesses, was the most expensive, with HM Revenue and Customs spending just under £36m on it in 2009-10. The site cost £35m in non-staff costs including marketing, platform capability and strategic projects, user support and content development and maintenance. Staff costs were reported to be £788,000. The Department for Work and Pensions' Directgov , the central website for citizen services, was the next most expensive at just over £26m. Most of this covered internal staff costs of some £15.5m. Web design and build costs were £2.4m; content provision £2.5m; strategy and planning £7.1m; hosting and infrastructure £2.6m; and testing and evaluation cost just under £1m. The costs for other major websites were £6.5m for the Department of Transport's Transport Direct site, £4.7m for UK Trade and Investment and the £1.9m for the Department for Education . The Attorney General's Office had the lowest website spend, with a figure of £7,320, says the report. The total cost of government websites was just under £128m, with £94.4m allocated to non-staff costs and £33.5m to staff, according to the COI's findings. The COI document was compiled in response to a critical report on government websites by the Public Accounts Committee published in 2008. The committee concluded that it was impossible to assess whether websites represented value for money as more than 25% of government organisations did not know the costs of their websites. In addition, the committee said it was unacceptable for the government not to know how many websites it had. The COI's progress report was published on the same day as Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude announced a review of existing websites and his intention to close many of them. Maude said that the previous government had made only limited progress in rationalising its websites as part of the Transformational Government agenda.