Business Link Website Cost £1.5 Million For 3 Years!

What would it cost to create and run a government website for three years?  How does £105m sound? Rory Cellan-Jones reports….

After we covered a couple of stories about government spending on websites and iPhone apps someone got in touch to suggest we take a look at one particular site, businesslink.gov.uk.

The correspondent said this site, run by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), had cost £35m a year to build and operate for three years and suggested that it had been poor value, delivered an unsatisfactory service to users and proved technically shaky.

I could not quite believe that figure – it sounds an awful lot of money for one site
but it turns out to be true. Businesslink.gov.uk was among the sites singled out last week by the Cabinet Office as very expensive in terms of cost per visit.

When I went to the lengthy document [941.60KB PDF] in which the Central Office of Information (COI) examined central government websites, I found that £35m staring out from a table.

Only the NHS Choices site, at £21m, comes anywhere close. But it has around six million unique users a month, whereas the Business Link site, which offers all kinds of advice to businesses, has just over a million.

The site is the work of a major outsourcing company called Serco, which has sub-contracted the technology to a little business called BT. So how do the costs break down?

The COI report has some detail – £6.2m on strategy and planning, £4.4m on design and build, £4.7m on hosting and infrastructure, £15.3m on content provision and £4.5m on testing and evaluation. What I can’t work out is why that cost is repeated for three years.

But I freely admit my knowledge of website development is sketchy so I consulted a couple of experts. One had helped build a customer support website for a major retailer, to cope with similar traffic to that experienced on the Business Link site. That had been built in-house but a supplier had quoted roughly £1.5m to build it, plus £150,000 in annual running costs.

Then I went to Sean O’Halloran at a firm called Hoop Associates which builds websites, mainly for public sector clients. So what was his reaction to that £35m?

“It’s a completely unfathomable number, I can’t imagine how that could be spent.” Mr O’Halloran had an interesting theory though, he claims that government departments are still locked into a big supplier, technology driven way of thinking when it comes to building websites.

“Most of the big sums go on the technology, which is wrong. They should first work out what they want to deliver, then source the technology.” He said that these days there were plenty of cheap or even free sources of technology that did not involve going to big companies, but that civil servants felt more comfortable dealing with the kind of suppliers who have always been involved in major IT projects.

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