Cabinet Office

Ensure departments meet the Prime Minister's targets for electronic service delivery by Government: 100 per cent capability by 2005, with key services achieving high levels of use.
(Objective 3 )

There are four key elements to the Office of e Envoy's (OeE) PSA target:

‘To ensure departments (1) meet the Prime Minister's targets for electronic service delivery by Government: 100% capability (2) by 2005, with key services (3) achieving high levels (4) of use.’

1. OeE's task is to ‘ensure departments’ deliver the Prime Minister's targets. Departments remain responsible and accountable for their own delivery. OeE's role is to act as a facilitator and enabler to departmental delivery, in particular working with departments to identify and solve on a collective basis cross-cutting risks and issues for the overall e-services programme.
2. ‘100%’ is defined as 100% of UK Central Government and health services - services delivered by the Devolved Administrations and Local Government are not included, as they are covered by their own arrangements. ‘Capability’ in this context is the capability to deliver e-enabled services (this is not limited to online delivery, but may include e-enabled call centres, digital TV and kiosks). Progress will be measured on a quarterly basis by returns from departments.
3. Currently some 581 services are tracked under the 100% capability target. As part of Spending Review 2002, the Government decided that there should be a specific focus within that on driving use of ‘key services’ - those which are likely to have most impact in terms of user benefit, Government efficiency, and alignment with the Government's overall policy priorities. The areas within which key services will be identified are:
   • Services to business
   • Benefit and personal taxation services
   • Transport and travel services
   • Educational services
   • Health services
   • Citizen interactions with the justice system
   • Land and property services
   • Agricultural services
   • E-democracy
4. Specific transactional services that will be prioritised under each of these key service areas are currently being identified. The assessment of whether a particular transaction should be considered a key service will be subject to amendment, as further work is undertaken on business cases and as the understanding of customer needs and wants deepens.
5. A ‘high level of use’ of e-services, whether informational or transactional, is the crux of the redefined target and drives the case for e-services that are attractive and beneficial to users. Rather than set a single across-the-board target for take-up, separate targets will be developed for each key service, taking account of its particular context and client base. o demonstrate that these targets are ‘high’, strategies will be developed by departments to achieve take-up trajectories which:
   • Are higher than comparable non-prioritised e-services
   • Compare favourably to the take-up trajectory for comparable benchmark services in the private sector and internationally.
6. Appropriate arrangements for measuring progress on a regular basis will be built-in to each take-up strategy.

Ensure that the Civil Service becomes more open and diverse, by achieving by 2004-05 the agreed targets of: 35% Senior Civil Service (SCS) to be women; 25% of top 600 posts to be filled by women; 3.2% of the SCS to be from ethnic minority backgrounds and 3% of the SCS to be people with disabilities
(Objective 4)

1st April 1998 data was used as the baseline against which to measure the Civil service reform targets. This target directly carries over the SR2000 target.

1998 baselines were:

• women in the SCS 17.8%
• women in the top management posts 12.7%
• minority ethnic staff at SCS level 1.6%
• disabled staff at SCS level 1.5%

At this time the Senior Civil Service strength was nearly 3000, with a further 600 people at SCS equivalent level.

The baseline data used for the women's target was for posts in the Senior Civil Service. The target for women in the top management posts includes all SCS posts at JESP 13 and above (JESP stands for Job Evaluation for Senior Posts). The baseline data used for the target for minority ethnic staff and disabled staff was for SCS level (including SCS and SCS equivalent posts), because data for SCS posts alone was not held.

The Civil Service has recently conducted a re-survey of staff ethnicity using categories comparable with the 2001 Census. In this exercise staff were asked to self-classify. Corporate guidance to departments and agencies on this is available via www.civil-service.gov.uk/statistics [External website]

For the purposes of the targets, ethnic minorities are considered to be those whose chosen ethnic group is numerically a minority in the UK - essentially those who selected categories other than ‘White’ - compared to the majority group because this is the basis on which the original target was set.

The new ethnicity categories in the recent re-survey of staff offer opportunities for richer analyses of ethnicity that will be pursued.

Civil Service statistics on disability are based on the number of individuals reporting a disability (variously defined by departments) as a proportion of all staff. The definition of disability in the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 is "a physical or mental impairment that has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities."Further information about the Act may be found via www.drc-gb.org/drc/InformationAndLegislation/
InformationAndLegislationMenu.asp [External website]. Cabinet Office is considering what support can be offered to departments and agencies to improve the quality of Civil Service disability statistics.

Civil Service Staffing statistics are National Statistics and are collected by the Personnel Statistics team in the Cabinet Office. Statistics on representation among senior staff in the Civil Service are collected and published every six months. They are available via www.diversity-whatworks.gov.uk [External website]