The adoption of new technologies to help to rebuild public services around the needs of people is an ambitious goal. To meet it, public bodies must first understand what improvements are needed and how new technologies can be used to help deliver them, and then they must implement the necessary changes. Unsurprisingly, progress is not uniform across all councils, and it is still too early to say if e-government has made local government services more effective, economic and efficient. Meeting this overarching goal will take time. This area is new and complex; is likely to incur significant expenditure; and is one with which many councils are struggling. It is timely now to review progress so far and to identify what additional measures are needed to assist local government in successfully meeting this goal.
It is recognised that the e-government agenda extends across all public services and that partnerships, both within the public sector and with private sector organisations, are key to its delivery. However, within this context, local government has a central role to play and this study focuses on how councils in England are responding to the key challenges of the agenda. The report considers what lies beneath the successes that some councils are having, drawing on their learning and experience for those who are further behind. All councils are struggling with some aspects of implementation and the report examines the reasons for this. The report challenges whether the current direction that local activity is following will deliver the vision of improved quality of services for local people and sets out proposals for both central and local government on what should be done to help move the agenda on.