Facing up to techno-fix?

Web-based services have got me thinking. Sparked off by a particularly interesting panel session at the recent Guardian Public Sector Summit, I started listing the possible environmental benefits of investing more public money in these technologies – from better home delivery services and reduced car use, to savings in town hall energy and water consumption, and cutting down on paper waste by emailing council tax bills rather than sending them out in the post.

It might also improve some of our point-of-contact services. Recently,as a relative recounted the ‘joys’ of their visit to the job centre, I was struck by the similarities to my own nightmare encounters as a student, made worse by desperate employees whose only concern was to get home before Neighbours (yes, the first series). Surely a small piece of interactive software could do a better job?

But then I thought about the possible social consequences of a rush to web-based services.

I doubt the closure of local job centres would provoke a furore on the scale currently sweeping my borough, where campaigns are being mounted to save four post offices. But it’s likely that losing other face-to-face public services would cause considerable distress to many, particularly those for whom they’re a reason to get out and about and make contact with other people.

There are also risks in reconciling the push to run our lives online with data protection issues. In the Guardian Summit workshop a great story was told about an automatic mail-out of free travel passes to the over-60s, which backfired because people hadn’t told their partners their real age!

The main problems, though, are the access and inclusion issues – for disabled people, and indeed for anyone who finds the technology a barrier in itself. Not everyone has a personal computer or the skills to use one. Even for middle-class, middle-income, laptop-owning and reasonably literate me, my experiences of web-based services have often left me wanting to throw my computer out of the window. A mix-up trying to cancel travel tickets online when my friend and her family were struck down with norovirus has cost me £60. And when applying for a job, I couldn’t do it online because the form came in PDF format (who owns Adobe’s software at home?). So with the end of the last day for application looming I had to fax it page by page. I wasn’t successful – luckily, or I wouldn’t now be working at Forum for the Future.

There are lessons here for the public sector. Yes, there are financial savings and environmental benefits to be gained from doing more stuff online. But if there’s a social price to pay then public sector managers should beware the easy, off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all techno-fix.

Deborah Fox is Forum for the Future’s new public sector programme director.

28 March 2008