If you enjoy listening to statistics, then there’s a good chance you’d enjoy attending public sector conferences and events.
If there is anything that the civil service is good at, it’s facts and figures and at the recent Building Perfect Council Websites ’11, they didn’t let us down.
Chris Chant, Interim CEO of Digital at the Cabinet Office, was impressive. He provided a swathe of data to underline the benefits of becoming “digital by default”. Chris is a self-confessed career civil servant and always makes a lot of sense, so thought I’d recycle some of the numbers he used to support the strategy.
How many people use the internet?
40-million of adults use the internet
30-million use it every day
How old are they?
99% of people between the ages of 16 and 25
96% of people between the ages of 25 and 34
Chris was keen to stress that where people were unable to get online, for whatever reason, access to the services would continue to be provided through other channels.
Mobile internet
By 2014 more than 50% of web use will be from mobile devices.
Number of Government transactions, by department
DWP – 20 million
HMRC – 29.3 million
DVLA – 109 million
Department of Health – 75.9 million outpatient appointments & 69.1 million appointments attended
Transaction costs
Face-to-Face – £10.53 per meeting
Telephone – £3.39 per call
Post – £12.10 per transaction
Online – £0.08 per transactions
(I believe these are based on central government departments and may vary from local government figures.)
Estimated savings
Moving 30% of government service delivery contracts online would save £1.2 billion
Moving 50% of contracts would save £2.2 billion
These were all scribbled down quickly, so come with a health warning. However, overall, I’d agree with Chris that, based on the above, the government is right to be focussing its attention on channel-shift projects.
Good news for web developers and contact management system vendors, who must feel they are entering a golden era. They are, particularly those already supporting mobile. It seems that channel shift and the migration to mobile are moving forward together at breakneck speed.