How Can the Government Help Online?

There are many ways in which the government help us, the public, using online services, for example:

• Pay parking fines and congestion charges
• Planning permission
• Medical help-NHS direct
• Find out about local jobs
• Apply for schools or education
• Order prescriptions
• Get driving licenses, register your vehicles and buy car tax.

There are many advantages to using the Internet services from the government to make our lives easier:

• People can pay more efficiently/easily
• Government (and us) pay less money for postage and administrative costs
• Faster than writing a letter due to time spent sending and receiving and sending back, etc.
• It helps the government do their job more effectively.

I have used the site Direct Gov, to evaluate the services that are offered by the government.

Below is a page the government have posted for citizens about dumping of rubbish in their LOCAL area. It gives them advice on what they should do about the litter and also contact details, in case they wish to report this issue back to the government. Also on this page you can get statistics about your neighbourhood, find about community safety in your area, find your nearest volunteer centre and much more.

The site is bright and aesthetically pleasing, and is clearly laid out and therefore easy to understand and navigate around.Below is a screenshot of a government page to let people know about school term times. On the page are links to find out about schools in your local area specifically and also the best and safest routes to get your children to school. By putting this relevant information onto a site, people can easily find out what they wish to know about term times, rather than calling the government and flooding their phone lines. There are also contact details in the unlikely event that the information you need to know is not written on the site. This would save the government a lot of time and also the public who want to know answers in detail and as quickly as possible.

Below is a screen shot on employment. On this page are a multitude of links to areas that relate to employment and different scenarios that may occur to do with employment, such as discrimination in the workplace, trying to get a new job and redundancy & leaving your job. There are also job related contacts on the page and also ways in which the site enables you to 'do it online'. Using these, you can find yourself a job and more, giving you more independence, quicker results and the government with more time.