Talk of government promises to get everybody on line at home with super high speed broadband, to be followed by the closure of expensive old fashioned offices staffed by expensive human beings as everybody switches to transacting all their business with government from the comfort of their own front room.
Sounds more like a recipe for chaos, the fulfilment of the Anarchists dream, a complete breakdown of government.
Of course it should be much easier to get on line at home, but for this to be anything like universal will need more than just the right kind of wiring under the street & all the way to your sockets.
It will need some stability in hardware & software, so that when you pay out what are still quite considerable sums of money you know that it will not all be obsolete in less than 5 years time. It will be something approaching plug & play, ready to go, without needing to wade through a mass of mystifying instructions before you can even start. And you will not need at least one member of your household to be a qualified IT manager to cope with all the glitches, software updates, security, contracts with ISPs ….
Having said that, there is clearly much to be said for a simpler, less bewildering route for the citizen to follow in accessing government services.
We had such a system when I was a child – at least one friendly office in even the smallest village. It was called the Post Office.
You went there not just for stamps & to have your parcels weighed. Dog licences, radio &, later, television licences, pension, family allowance, passport, Post Office Savings Bank, National Savings – even a 7 year old could be a customer in her own right.
There is probably scope for a new virtual Post Office. A nice clean Home Page with easy to follow signs using familiar language (bus pass, not National Bus Concession). This implies a stability in government organisation, real cooperation between departments, not an ever changing cast of ministers competing for attention.
And why not think about following the model of hole in the wall cash machines? Almost everybody now has easy access to one of these, & the designs have converged so that the scope for confusion, for pressing the wrong button, has been reduced by familiarity & practice. People learn of the advantages (& disadvantages) from each other, by word of mouth, by copying family members, friends & neighbours instead of tearing their hair & screaming at the blinking machine behind the closed front door.
A rolling programme of introducing such machines – which venues work best, what kind of design, how many will be needed – that can be modified & adapted as it goes along, rather than held up for years because of the problems of trying to design from scratch one Grand Universal System.
Who knows, perhaps people will suddenly be happy to have a universal government plastic card, much as they now are pleased & happy to have cash cads from a provider of their choice. [Leave that typo - Ed]
