Government shutters half its websites

Government shutters half its websites

Nine-hundred-and-seven of the government's 1,700 websites have closed following the recommendations of the Varney report in 2006.

A further 479 are "committed to be closed", according to a written answer from Cabinet Office minister Angela Smith on 27 January.

She was responding to a request for information from shadow Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude, who also asked for details of the numbers of websites operated by different organisations in Whitehall.

Smith said that as of 31 December, 2009, 793 central government websites remain open and of these 182 are run by departments and 611 by executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies.

Two years after his Service transformation report, published in December 2006, Sir David Varney called on the government to speed the transformation processes he had recommended. He said progress had been made on combining government websites with Directgov and Businesslink, but added that four unnamed departments were responsible for 80 percent of sites that had not been planned for closure.