1 April 2003

Cost of Whitehall's web unravelled

By Ian Cuddy

New information released by Ministers to Parliament has revealed wide variations in the annual cost of websites across Whitehall, with some government departments admitting they cannot put a figure on their spending.

The most expensive website was found to belong to the Department for Education and Skills, which reported that the "core programme cost" of www.dfes.gov.uk was £1,747,000 during the last 12 months. The data was provided in response to parliamentary questions tabled by Conservative backbench MP John Bercow on the total annual cost of departments' websites.

The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and Lord Chancellor's Department could not provide full details to Mr Bercow. In a written answer, Patricia Hewitt, the Trade Secretary and designated e-Minister, responded: "The cost of the Department's websites are included in the overall service charge paid monthly under the IT service contract in place since 1 April 1999. There is no separation of website costs in this charge." The Minister added that the DTI website at www.dti.gov.uk had been redesigned in April 2002 at a cost of £60,000.

The Lord Chancellor's Department was unable to provide any information on expenditure. "Website work is not differentiated from other work in the production and publication of departmental material", said Yvette Cooper, the Freedom of Information Minister. "The total annual cost of my Department's website could therefore not be obtained without incurring disproportionate costs", she said.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport's response claimed that as its primary website is managed in-house, the only cost was £20,000 for the server used to host a number of its websites. Expenditure on internal management was not mentioned or disclosed. By contrast, the Ministry for Defence told Mr Bercow that the direct costs of its departmental website at www.mod.uk were £124,000 for the current financial year, including expenditure on hardware, contractual support and support costs for the central MOD website team.

Elsewhere in Whitehall, staffing costs for the central team responsible for updating and maintaining the content of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) website were quoted as £326,000 for the last 12 months. In a written answer, Alun Michael, the Environment Minister, said that DEFRA hosted its website internally with the annual operating costs running at £297,000. The Department for Transport, which was brought into existence in June last year, estimated that the cost of the new www.dft.gov.uk website totalled £752,000 to date. The Transport Minister David Jamieson said this included staff costs, development and "HTML conversion costs", as well as the capital of a new website, currently under construction, which aims to provide what he described as an "improved more customer-focused website in terms of design, navigation and information retrieval". The new website accounts for 70 per cent of total costs, the Minister said, representing expenditure of over half a million pounds.

The Department of Health (DoH) reported that its website cost £722, 560 during 2002-03, with estimated staffing costs of over half a million pounds amounting to the bulk of expenditure. Website development over the year resulted in costs of £46,000, a major reduction in comparision to the £245,900 spent in the previous year. However during this period, hosting and maintenance charges more than doubled to reach £165,000, which the Department said was due to more databases being made available online, as well as the Office of the Government shutting down its hosting facility last year, which forced the DoH to switch to a private sector provider, incurring additional costs of £16,840.

The International Development Secretary Clare Short said that expenditure on the DFID website at www.dfid.gov.uk was £75,000 between March 2002 and February 2003, but that this excluded undisclosed "staffing and other centralised costs".

Details for other departments, such as the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and the Foreign Office, are due to be published this week. This will also include official figures for website expenditure by the Home Office, which - as eGov monitor Weekly reported recently - has spent over £1.5 million on its 18 different websites since January last year, excluding staffing costs, or the Department's Immigration & National Directorate and Passports websites.

In a separate development, Disability Rights Commission has announced it will be conducting its first formal investigation into the accessibility of 1,000 websites from across the public and private sectors. The study will involve assessing sites for compliance with recognised industry accessibility standards, with the findings expected to be published by the end of this year.