What's the link between a smartcard that rewards south London children for behaving well, a database of civil servants' water consumption, an emergency control room in Cleveland and a website for teaching citizenship?
Answer: although all aim to improve public services with IT, none is part of the official e-government programme. They are this year's prize-winning projects in the Invest to Save Budget (ISB), a Treasury scheme that allows public bodies to escape the creativity-crushing imperative of balancing their books every year.
The scheme, jointly run by the Treasury and Cabinet Office, funds good ideas thought up by partnerships of two or more public bodies. So far, it has advanced £260m to what Cabinet Office minister Lord Macdonald calls "social entrepreneurs".
Invest to Save money helped set up the £100m scheme to join up unemployment benefits procedures and the rather more modest Wolverhampton bereavement centre (Online, May 8).
This year's award-winning schemes were:
· Karrot, a project in the London borough of Southwark to encourage 11- to 15-year-olds to behave responsibly by giving "reward points" stored on smartcards.
· Watermark, a monitoring system set up by the office of government commerce to encourage public agencies to cut water waste. Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wight cut its water bill by £60,000 a year; the Treasury saved £18,000.
· Joint emergency call handling, which enters the fraught no-go area of combining resources between police, fire and ambulance services.
· Time for Citizenship, a website to support citizenship education.
ISB has been going since 1998, which means that lessons from early schemes are starting to emerge. Most will be familiar to anyone involved in projects for modernising government: "top-level buy-in is crucial"; "ensure each partner's role is carefully defined".
There is also the perennial question of how to scale up pilot projects. In a mainly rave review to the project published last year, the national audit office warned that: "Careful consideration is needed as to who should be responsible for the implementaton of new ways of delivering a service that an ISB project has demonstrated to be practicable."
There's still money available in the ISB pot. Under round 6 of the scheme, £40m will be allocated to projects submitted this spring.
Sadly, despite the clear role of IT in successful schemes, none of the new funding will go to e-government bids from local authorities. The Treasury ruled earlier this year that councils already have access to adequate funds under the office of the deputy prime minister's local e-government programme.
Of course, local authorities, who are getting around 10% of the total e-government budget to revolutionise 80% of government services, may differ on that one.
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