Britain has just missed one of its first e-government's targets. Chief secretary to the Treasury Andrew Smith waited to announce this discreetly in a parliamentary question on the last day of the Commons session.
Around Whitehall there are a few mutterings about "disappointment", but this is no resigning matter. The e-government objectives, like many other New Labour targets, are a shambles. A relic of a period when Downing Street's priority was to clamber on to the e-bandwagon at any price, the targets would simply be a bit of an embarrassment except that the Treasury is enforcing them hard on the public sector.
What counts as an e-government interaction has been vague. Does a phone call to the local council complaining about the bin men help take Britain into the Knowledge Age? No one knew - until now when the new government e-envoy, Andrew Pinder, is facing up to some unpalatable contradictions.
From the moment New Labour first got a whiff of the internet it was hooked. To greed-driven venture capitalists the lure was instant wealth. But the masters of spin at Millbank were intoxicated by something different, the prospect of an endless slew of new initiatives and easy headline wins: Citizens' Portal Opens Up Brave New Digital World and so on. The net also promised millions in government procurement savings. And it was hoped it could defeat the Sir Humphreys to join up the myriad bits of government; for the first time the citizenry would have seamless dealings with the state.
At the start, the web was a lifestyle statement to Tony Blair and New Labour -youthful, entrepreneurial, inclusive and full of potential. Indeed Blair's online love affair can be traced back to the Bournemouth party conference in 1994. There, as leader of the opposition, he famously unveiled a "deal" with BT to put every school online. As propaganda it was brilliant, and had Norman Tebbit, then a BT director, choking on his digestives.
After the 1997 Labour victory, Whitehall began churning out reports stressing the vital importance of Britain joining the Information Age. Getting your family online became a moral imperative. These were days of irrational exuberance when hard-nosed bankers valued dot.coms such as Boo, Boxman and QXL at billions.
The Blair administration succumbed to the hype and gave it a firm twist. The government was to be an "exemplar" for industry and the rest of the nation. The stuffy men at the Treasury thought they could launch an online mall where a mandarin would, at the click of a mouse, procure a carton of paper clips, a set of red boxes for his minister, or a battle tank. The Cabinet Office produced reports warning of the dire consequences of missing out on e-government. "Electronic service delivery offers unparalleled opportunities to improve public service for the benefit of the citizen," gushed one such paper. Another claimed the web could "transform relations between the citizen and the state".
And there had to be, of course, an e-tzar, called, for alliterative purposes, an "e-envoy". So taken is the PM with this that he recently upped Pinder's starting salary to around £150,000. There is an e-minister and government webmaster, too.
Blair's stated objective is to make the UK "the best environment in the world for e-commerce by 2002". That entails outclassing both the United States and Sweden, the true epicentre of the internet economy in Europe.
And, this being New Labour, e-government was to be pushed forward by pledges. The prime minister's electronic service delivery target calls for 25% of public services to be available electronically by 2002 and 100% by 2005. He has promised that everyone who wants it will have access to the internet by 2005.
And, there was the target that Smith admitted has just been missed. Ministers had decreed that departments should be buying 90% of routine goods and services on-line by now. In fact, the figure for these low-value deals is little more than half that.
The targets appear to have been dreamed up - and announced - before even a stab was made at setting the criteria. Understandably a tone of quiet desperation has crept into public sector IT professionals. Take the formal response of the Society of IT Management, (SOCITM), which complained that the government's e-government definition "was broader than expected and includes things that most people would not think of as electronic."
It declared ruefully: "We need some proper definition of what can be counted as contributing to the target and what cannot. For example, if a telephone call is just to gain information eg, 'What are your opening times?' that surely should not be counted, but if it is to undertake an interaction, for example to make a booking, then presumably it would."
As for the question of internet access - well, the government has recently committed another £30m to extend broadband technology outside metropolitan areas. Sweden is committing £1.19bn.
This summer, town halls have had to bear the brunt with an exercise to explain how e-government will be one of the three "core drivers" in improving local public services. By the end of last month each local authority was required to submit an Implementing Electronic Government statement to the new Department for Transport Local Government and the Regions (DTLR). The aim is to "embed e-government" into the culture of local authorities. Above all, these must explain how they will attain Blair's 2005 target. Councils will in due course be awarded a traffic-light status of red, amber or green to show how they are faring - just as they were with the millennium bug.
Many local government bosses have been stumped by this - they see e-government as a distraction from the hard grind council services. And there is a further twist. It is widely believed that the DTLR sees the e-government statements as pointless too. But they have gone along with them to placate Gordon Brown's target-toting Treasury which reluctantly agreed an extra £350m for local government.
However, consultants, who found Y2K compliance offered rich pickings, have hit pay dirt again.
The man grappling with Britain's heroic bid to be at the fore of e-government presides over the Office of the E-envoy. In an interview with the Guardian, Pinder reveals himself as above all a realist, someone determined to get the spirit, not the letter, of the targets observed. He's inherited the rhetorical baggage of the government, but plainly has no taste for it himself.
"If you say the internet has not lived up to the hype, well, very few things do - it was hard to live up to the hype of the press and the markets in a few fevered moments," says Pinder. He sees the internet growing steadily and playing an ever more fundamental role in peoples' lives. Of about 90 targets, the government is behind in only about one in 10.
Pinder says: "We have nearly half of government services online already. There is a lot of stuff there that wasn't there a year or two years ago. So a lot of progress has been made." Almost 45% of information-only services are now up on the web. The Government Gateway, with its well-publicised life-episodes portal, is a hit with a million visitors a week and is a "worldbeater" technology wise.
But what about online services involving transactions? Well, the answer is that you can get a passport, fishing licence, company reports, report a minor crime and do some returns for VAT, income tax and to the agriculture ministry. But you can't pay a parking fine, council tax, receive housing benefit, sell your house, register a birth, death or marriage, report an mugging, complain direct to the ombudsman, book a driving test or the 101 other things that citizens might expect.
Pinder's line is, don't worry - that's why we've given ourselves until 2005. But the reality is daunting. Primary legislation has been required for the validation of electronic signatures and complex legal changes are underway permitting house sales online. It is going to be awfully hard slog, case by case.
Pinder's take on the targets is canny. He will not disown them, but has been downplaying their significance since he was appointed earlier this year. "They're a good galvaniser for action, but the real need is to push the amount of take-up, to increase the use of the principal services."
But what about the vagueness of the main target? What about the fear (articulated by SOCITM) that telephone, fax even, may count and thereby render the whole process a farce? At this point, Pinder has evidently decided that the usefulness of government obfuscation has bounds.
He concedes that "we have not defined what electronic means" and that SOCITM "have rightly criticised us".
At a stroke he then goes on to avow simply that "what I mean by online is 'available to people online via the internet'". No telephone and no fax, then. Simple. Except that once the escape route of counting phone calls is gone there is a big knock-off on Blair's target of getting all relevant services online by 2005.
For one thing, some services may always be more appropriately delivered in person or over the telephone. Does the e-envoy squander taxpayers money on online services that are unlikely to be used simply to meet the Blair pledge? Or does he admit that call centres, for example, may be a better way? If he chooses the latter - given that he has ruled out phone calls - bang goes the pledge.
Pinder bravely plumps for the latter. "There will be circumstances where it does not make sense to put services online, but it make sense to spend the money in a different way, for example on other modern communications such as a call centre.
"In that situation, I would expect to explain why I hadn't hit the 100% target and why some services were available methods using modern communications."
But he says that the 2005 target is "big, broad-brush and aspirational". Aspirational? Someone better tell the PM and the Treasury.
