The Department for Education have managed to escape substantial budget cuts, and their business plan reflects this with an emphasis more on new and improved services as opposed to driving efficiencies. This could partly reflect a point made in their vision statement on the need for the UK to keep up with international competition: “In the most recent Performance in International Student Assessment (PISA) survey, we fell from 4th to 14th in science, from 7th to 17th in literacy, and from 8th to 24th in mathematics.”

Savings were mainly to be achieved through the elimination of quangos and the discontinuation of the Building Schools for the Future programme, ie actions that have already been taken. (more…)

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Most of the direct references to ICT in central government can be found in the Cabinet Office business plan. The departmental plans contain some interesting bits, but most of the big bits have been announced previously in the Spending Review, such as HMRC’s plan to invest £900m in recovering additional tax revenue and DWP’s plans for universal credit. The following observations therefore focus on the Cabinet Office plan.

Increased delivery of services online now seems to be enshrined with the commitment to mandate channel shift (1.13.ii). The dual levers of central mandation and departmental budget cuts will likely help accelerate this move. In addition (while it has long been known that online service delivery is vastly cheaper than via other channels) the ‘input indicator’ to publish every department’s cost per citizen transaction on the internet, phone and in person should help give this even greater momentum. (more…)

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