« Who says national governments can't regulate the Internet? Not Borat | Home | The NSA's unpalatable cookies »

Signs e-government might actually be working?

Posted on Thu, Dec 22, 2005 at 12:26 PM by Andrew Chadwick


I just renewed my car tax license disc - online. Though it has still to arrive in the mail, the renewal process took me about a minute and thirty seconds. This compares with the usual forty five minutes to an hour it takes me to fill in the forms, gather the validation documents, write out the check, go to my nearest post office, stand in line, and, finally, obtain the disc.

Putting the UK Driver and Vehicle License Agency online has not been easy; it has taken more than five years - but they got there in the end. There are many problems with e-government in the UK, but arguably one of the biggest is that they never really caught the public's imagination by rolling out the obvious services early on. Much effort was spent on producing 'life events' portals and so on, but there was less emphasis on sitting down, working out what, say, the top ten most wanted online services were, and implementing these quickly and smoothly.

But there are signs that this is now starting to happen.

Update: the disc arrived two days later!

Edited on: Fri, Jan 13, 2006 11:02 AM

« Who says national governments can't regulate the Internet? Not Borat | Top | The NSA's unpalatable cookies »