Examination of witnesses (Questions 343
- 359)
WEDNESDAY 14 JUNE 2000
SIR RICHARD
MOTTRAM, MR
JOHN BALLARD,
MR TOM
ADAMS and MR
ALAN EVANS
Chairman
343. Sir Richard, can I welcome you and your
colleagues to the Select Committee's inquiry into the Department's
Annual Report and Expenditure Plans for the year 2000/2001 and
2001/2002. Would you like to start by introducing your team?
(Sir Richard Mottram) Yes, thank you, Chairman. On
my right is John Ballard, who is the Principal Finance Officer
of the Department and who has appeared before this Committee many
times before; Alan Evans, who is the Director of Communications,
and on my left we have Tom Adams who works in the Directorate
of Communications under Alan Evans and is colloquially known as
our web master.
344. Do you want to say anything by way of introduction
or are you happy for us to go straight to questions?
(Sir Richard Mottram) I am happy to go straight to
questions.
345. The web site, if we can start with that,
gives a pretty large amount of information but I think one of
the concerns of the Committee and certainly those of us who have
tried to use it is how effective the search engine is. I wonder
whether you could help us by demonstrating it. Supposing we wanted
to know something about the Urban Task Force's Report towards
an Urban Renaissance, where might we find it?
(Mr Adams) Does the Chairman wish me to use the search
engine?
346. Yes please. (There followed a pause)
(Sir Richard Mottram) Do you want us to show you where
it is, Chairman?
Chairman: No. What we want to know is how—
Mrs Dunwoody
347. How would I know if I was sitting there
trying to find out a bit about the Urban Task Force and I had
not set it up? Forgive me: the web master giving us this information
is tremendously useful but not all of have got a pet web master.
(Sir Richard Mottram) No. If you wanted to find it
you would go under "Regeneration". Essentially the way
that the site is set up, and we can talk about how we might do
it better in the future, is that it has these various domains
and the idea is that you go into the domains and there are piles
of information inside the domains and most of it is reasonably
accessible.
Chairman
348. Would you like to find us gap funding then?
(Sir Richard Mottram) Do you want us to show you where
the Urban Task Force is first?
Chairman: Yes. (There followed a pause)
Dr Ladyman
349. But you have only been able to find that
because you know it is there.
(Sir Richard Mottram) Yes, sure. What we are showing
you is the way to get into it is to go in through "Regeneration".
350. But a member of the public would never
have found it.
(Sir Richard Mottram) Lots of members of the public
are accessing our site all the time.
Chairman
351. There are lots of people who access my
web site and a good proportion of them are American students who
get there by mistake. You can get some pretty good figures for
people accessing your web site if they end up trawling around
going all over it and cannot find what they want. They may give
up in frustration but they may just go on. In a sense the amount
of time people spend going to it is not necessarily the best measure,
is it? It is how user friendly it is.
(Sir Richard Mottram) Yes, absolutely.
352. Could you give us another example? The
Committee has been interested in gap funding. Your colleagues
will have told you about that. Can we find gap funding with the
search engine? (There followed a pause) The Committee has
not got a huge amount of time so can you get us to gap funding
by your method rather than the search engine?
(Mr Adams) I cannot, Chairman, because I am not aware
of any gap funding there.
Mr Gray: This is all gap funding.
Mrs Dunwoody
353. These are all references. They will not
tell you about gap funding per se, nor will they tell you about
what the Department is doing about gap funding. it will tell you
the number of times that phrase has been used, which is absolutely
accurate and fine, but it is rather an important subject. It is
nice to know that it is mentioned 3,061 times.
(Mr Evans) Can I add something, Chairman, on the two
points raised? The first point, which is quite obvious from the
way we have used the search engine there, is that the search facility
is not as advanced and effective as we would like, and this goes
for any search engine on any web site because a lot of the material
that went on to the site pre-dates the installation of the search
engine. One of the things we are doing in reviewing the site at
the moment is some work on improvements to the search engine so
that you can search better by domain, and hopefully we will be
able to search more effectively for the Urban Task Force in the
future. On the other point about gap funding, one of the other
things we need to look at in this review is putting in more of
a statement of departmental policy the first time you click on
a particular domain area, which you can get to if you know where,
for example, the annual report is, but perhaps members of the
public do not have that. That is one of the disadvantages of having
what we call a library site where we seek to put every document
on it rather than—
354. But it is not as clear as a library site,
is it? I could probably find it much quicker in here, in the report.
(Mr Evans) If you go to the introduction of the DETR
site you can get straight into the annual report on the web site.
What you are showing up quite accurately is that you need a better
site posting at the start of the site for the average person coming
into the site.
Chairman
355. How soon do you think those changes will
be in place?
(Mr Evans) We are at the moment completing the review
of the web site and, subject to extra resources, which is one
of the things we will need because it takes a lot of people doing
it, we will have these changes in place within a number of months.
I would not like to speculate how many.
356. Perhaps I can go on to another question.
Planning guidance notes: how easy are they to find on the web
page? Can we find a complete set of planning guidance notes?
(Sir Richard Mottram) If we go to what we have got
on planning guidance, what you find is that there is guidance
on all the guidance, so to speak. Only some of the PPGs, I think
the three latest, are available on the site in a full text. What
we are proposing to do there is that over time we will put more
on it. This again reflects the way in which the site has been
built up. As new documents are being created it is relatively
easy and not too resource intensive to put them on the site. For
historical documents it is quite a big task if you wanted to put
more on the site. There is an issue about how far you do that.
Our intention will be to put all the planning policy guidance
on the site progressively. At the moment there is guidance about
planning policy, including the PPGs, and those three are the ones
of which you will find a full text.
Mrs Dunwoody
357. "Progressively"—does that
mean "Progressively any PPG that we now produce will go on
the site but we have no plan to go backwards"?
(Sir Richard Mottram) No. I think we should go backwards.
Chairman
358. How soon are you going to go backwards?
(Sir Richard Mottram) I think we will be doing this
by the autumn.
359. Of course there are your sites and then
there are your agency sites. I am sure that the shadow Strategic
Rail Authority site is a good one but the DVLA one is not so good.
Are you having any influence on the agencies to try and persuade
them perhaps to reach a certain standard or to get some compatibility
with your own site?
(Sir Richard Mottram) Yes. I do not know why you think
the DVLA site is not a good one.
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