Councils fail to utilise websites

Councils are wasting ratepayers' money by not making full use of their websites, an industry body has said.

Local authorities currently spend more than ten times as much money per query on answering phone calls than on providing services over the internet.

According to the Society of IT Managers (Socitm), a local authority trade association, for calls that cost £1.50 to answer, on average, the same information could be provided online for just 12p.

The society conducted a 'mystery shopper' exercise of contacting 50 councils with enquiries on planning and building control. Only one of those, Clackmannanshire in Scotland, gave a satisfactory response.

According to the society's report, the mystery shoppers were often passed around various sections of the councils, or even sent to other organisations, when the information was already available on the website of the council in question.

Martin Greenwood of Socitm told Government Computing Weekly magazine: "When we ask someone for advice, we increasingly expect to be able to download background documents from a website. We expect [council] call centres to be knowledgeable about how their websites can help citizens."