It has not been a good week for targets. On Thursday the Joseph Rowntree Foundation revealed that the government was falling behind its 2004 poverty reduction goal. Yesterday the public accounts committee criticised the government for falling behind its target that all public services that can be transacted online should be available by 2005. There has been a lot of activity but scant results. Thanks to the Customs and Excise, for instance, traders can submit VAT returns electronically - but in practice only 2,500 out of 1.65 million eligible firms have done so. You can take a horse to the computer but you can't make it sync. It has now dawned on C and E that it is not enough just to make services available online, they must be made attractive to use as well. If companies can't see any benefit in paying their taxes through the internet, why should they do it?

Part of the problem is that the government is failing to lead by example. The committee found that the Downing Street website did not have a complete up-to-date list of ministers and the flagship site www.ukonline.gov.uk had as its latest "hot topic" an event (the Budget) that had happened almost two months previously. This explains the main problem with public web services: lack of take-up. The range of services provided - and the amount of information - compares well with other countries: the trouble is we don't use them so much. Only 11% of people in Britain had used an online government service compared with 18% in France and 40% in Canada. The answer is to market the services more effectively. Users should be able to access cross-departmental information from a single source. The government has not enabled this yet and nor does it have systematic data about how many people use individual services. There is no point in having more services than other countries if they are not used. The information revolution is about more than the provision of information.