Government Services (Websites)

Nick Hurd Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Mr Nick Hurd)]

Madam Deputy Speaker, it is wonderful to see you in the Chair, and I should like to add my name to the long list of people who have stepped up to say the same thing today.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier) on securing the debate and on the way in which he presented his argument. I thought he was rather self-effacing about the importance of the debate. This is one of the better attended Adjournment debates that I have taken part in, and the keen interest of Radio Hereford and Worcester has also been noted. This is an issue that strikes a chord; none of us wants to see our constituents being ripped off. He powerfully highlighted the difficulties, and in some cases the distress, that some users of online services have experienced as a result of the activities of some third-party websites providing access to Government services, often at a significant mark-up while providing little or no additional value.

This is an important issue, and it becomes even more important because of its context. As my hon. Friend will know, the Government are extremely ambitious to deliver more services online and to encourage more of our citizens and constituents to access services in that way, as set out in the Government’s digital strategy. Quite simply, we want the public to receive services that are simple, fast and clear and that can be accessed easily at times and in ways that suit them. We want to take full advantage of the digital opportunities. It will also please colleagues to hear that this will allow us to produce better services at a much lower cost. It is worth placing on record that the Government saved £500 million last year on digital and technology-related expenditure while making improvements to how people access information and services.

There is much to celebrate in the progress that we are making in building world-class digital services in this country, and we are ambitious to work with the private sector and civil society to help the 11 million people in the UK who are still digitally excluded to get online and close that gap. Given that context, and that ambition, it is really important that we should not allow fraud to undermine the trust in, and integrity of, the systems and services that we are presenting. Concerns about security and the potential for identity theft, confusion about which websites are trustworthy and fears about being ripped off all act as deterrents to the take-up of digital services, so this does matter to us and I thank my hon. Friend for drawing the issue to the House’s attention.

The abuse of access to Government services can take a range of forms, all of which can have a negative impact on confidence. They include: brand abuse, in which Government logos are used to imply affiliation with, or endorsement by, the Government or their agencies; phishing, when attempts are made to acquire information such as usernames, passwords, credit card details and other useful personal information by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication; and levying additional charges for access via third-party websites to Government services that are, in some cases, normally free. The justification for those charges are so-called additional services that in fact offer little or no additional value.

What are we doing about it? When we have discovered —or when the public have highlighted—the misuse of Government logos, we have ensured that they are removed from the offending sites. I am pleased to say that we have seen a significant drop in the number of reports of such misuse. However, reports relating to phishing and to third-party websites levying additional charges for access to Government websites have not fallen in the same way.

Obviously, some Government services are more impacted by this problem than others. Services that tend to involve one-off transactions, or those that citizens and businesses use only infrequently, tend to be the ones that third-party websites offer access to. Such services include passport and driving licence applications and the booking of driving tests. We are taking steps to deal with these issues, but there have been some challenges that I should like to share with the House.

The first complication is that the infrequency of use means that users of services provided by central Government Departments and their agencies are not necessarily familiar with the look and feel of those services online. The wide demographic base of the users of those services also limits the impact of a broad-based communication and education approach, in itself an expensive proposition. That does not make the problem insurmountable, nor does it mean that education about the best way to access Government services should not be part of our approach to tackling the problem. However, it does mean that we should seek creative ways of doing that, such as through the use of partners in the private and civil society sectors.

The second complication is the difficulty we have in categorising the activities of some of the websites we have been discussing as bad or misleading. In 2012, as my hon. Friend will know, the Office of Fair Trading conducted an investigation into the online commercial practices relating to Government services and concluded that it was not appropriate to take formal enforcement action. The investigation did not reveal widespread attempts by non-Government websites to misrepresent their affiliation with Government. Moreover, the OFT was of the view that the overall depiction of the sites investigated, including branding, colouring and images, did not create a misleading impression that they were official Government websites. In particular, many of the sites carried statements explaining the nature of the service provided and disclaiming any official status or affiliation with the Government.

Most of the sites subject to the complaints to which my hon. Friend referred tend to be those that, as he said, feature in search engine-sponsored ad spots. Search engines tend to highlight and prominently display such ads above the search results that are most relevant to the search terms that have been used and in general Government services that are accessible via gov.uk, the new single Government website for all information and services, top the list of relevant search results on the main search engine websites.

What are the Government doing about misleading third-party websites? The OFT’s findings and the means by which such sites promote their offerings bring us back to the subject of education and how we help users of our services to spot correctly when they are on a Government website or the site of a third party. How do we ensure that citizens and businesses enjoy the benefits and additional value that competition through third-party provision of access to Government services can bring without fear of being exploited? We want to encourage that.

[Damian Hinds]

Will the Minister give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hurd]

If my hon. Friend will forgive me, I want to give proper time to the debate of my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre Forest.

We feel that similarity in the look and feel of Government services will help our efforts to educate users and we are achieving that through the transition of departmental websites as well as those of most of their agencies on to gov.uk. A unique typeface font is used on that site and mimicry of that font by non-Government sites will be difficult.

We do not think at this stage that legislation is the way to resolve the issue. Any action we take should be evidence-driven and the complaints we receive at the moment represent a small fraction of the total number of service users. That does not mean that we should be complacent, but it means that any action we take should be proportionate. Frankly, we need more information about how and why people use the third-party sites. At present, we have no evidence that they have all been misled. That could be the result of under-reporting, but we must also leave room for the possibility that it is not.

We do not as a Government have a single clear view of the scale of the problem of third-party sites mis-selling Government services and until recently there has been little consistency in how the Government have recorded and monitored details of complaints about the issue. The situation cannot continue, so my officials in the Government Digital Service have proposed, and Departments have agreed to, a cross-Government approach to tackling and tracking the problem. That will result in a clearer view of the scale of the issue, which currently appears to affect a small proportion of service users. Further action will depend on the scale and seriousness of the problems reported. That will also guide our engagement with the search engines on their enforcement of the terms and conditions that are supposed to guide the use of their sponsored ad slots.

I am pleased to say that in other areas we are making more headway. On phishing, the clear illegality of the behaviour has meant a more clear-cut approach to tackling the problem. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, for example, has a robust system in place to find and shut down rogue sites engaged in phishing activity. In 2011-12, HMRC shut down 841 rogue sites and in 2012-13, it shut down 560. Additionally, the HMRC digital services security team has undertaken a cross-cutting exercise to assist Department for Work and Pensions colleagues in developing the Department’s anti-phishing capabilities by providing training and process maps for dealing with such work.

I welcome the fact that my hon. Friend has thrown a spotlight on the issue. There is clearly a lot of work still to be done, but I very much welcome the insights and challenges that debates such as this provide to help us to make sure that as many citizens as possible enjoy and trust the benefits of digital Government services.

Question put and agreed to.