UK News: Past Government's Webs of Deceit

The new coalition government has announced a review of its 820 websites. following a report by the Central Office of Information, which revealed the government spent £94m on website development / costs & £32m on web staff in the year 2009/2010.

In the age of the web, the government has been accused of running websites purely for vanity, rather than benefit to the taxpayer. Previous reviews by the former Labour government threatened 551 sites with closure, but the majority of closures never took place.

The previous administration is also accused of allowing government departments to bid against each other for search terms on search engines like Google.

The new government aims to put an end to the waste of running inefficient and unwanted websites and in wasting value resource and money in paying for keywords on search engines, when simple search engine optimization would have ranked the sites for the public to find.

This review appears to be long in coming and perhaps at the end of it we can overturn more New Labour waste. Until then new figures show that:

The Department of Health ran up a bill of £4.4m in 'paid search fees'

The Department for Communities and Local Government spent over £750,000

The Department of Energy and Climate Change spent more than £309,000

The Department of the environment, food and rural affairs (Defra) spent nearly £500,000

Nearly £6,000,000 on 'Keyword Bidding' on Search Engines rather than Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques - Makes You Proud Doesn't It!

Last Updated: 28th July 2010