Up and down England, councillors are anxiously awaiting the electorate's verdict on their fancy new websites and other electronic public services.

Dream on. Next week's local elections will, as usual, be referenda on the performance of central government, which, to a growing number of people, means the prime minister in person.

That's a shame, because it would be nice to know what voters think of one of the most exciting developments in local government since the public library.

Local e-government is starting to make a difference. On Tuesday, the Improvement and Development Agency (Idea), a self-help group funded through a levy on local authority budgets, publishes its third report on local e-government. Unlike previous inward-looking reports, concerned mainly with targets and technical strategies, this one is about "service outcomes" - how e-government helps councils tackle urgent priorities.

We're not talking about wheelie bins, but education, health, law and order and protecting the environment.

The Idea report will cite several exciting initiatives made possible through IT. Registers of children at risk, for example. Until recently, registers were routinely bungled because NHS and social service organisations could not share data. Children have died as a result.

Now, according to the report, Telford and Wrekin Council has developed ways of sharing information across agencies while recognising rights to privacy.

Another example of collaboration is a scheme in Northamptonshire to help people with dementia stay in their homes, equipped with telemonitoring devices.

The snag is that e-government has more pilots than the RAF. Often, these rely on special one-off funding or personal relationships to get them going. The report warns of "a discontinuity" between local innovations and central policies and projects. To overcome it, we need to find ways to apply local successes nationally. The buzzword is "mainstreaming".

A bigger question raised by the report is whether e-services can reconnect citizens and their councils. E-voting, as currently conceived, seems unlikely to do the trick. Even if next week's e-voting pilots, the biggest yet, increase turnouts, the voters will not have local services in mind.

Even among activists, e-government is rarely a party issue. Success stories come from across the spectrum, though terminologies differ as different parties claim the agenda for their own.

To the technocrats and bean-counters who are supposed to run councils, that's a good sign: e-government is "above politics". But local services will not be transformed unless citizens are engaged and that means giving them a voice.

Here's an idea. If you are interested in e-government, ask your ward candidate about their ideas on the topic. And, if you think e-government is important to the future of education, health and the environment, why not cast your vote according to the reply? It will have more effect than a ballot paper telling Blair, Duncan-Smith or Kennedy to get stuffed.