by Rob McVey

Business Link - Money well spent?

With public sector spending being combed more finely than ever before, it’s no surprise that the reported £105 million spent on Business Link’s website has raised eyebrows – an estimated £2.15 per visit. And no surprise that the service as a whole, made up of a combination of online advice and local advisors, is to be one of the casualties of the government’s spending reduction drive.

It’s difficult to see what the service actually does to justify public spending on it – a glance at the website reveals a set of pages that are hard to navigate, over complicated and are lacking in overall usuability. You need to click through so many links to find any information at all, that the organisation’s own description of their role as “giving you instant access to clear, simple, and trustworthy information” starts to seem a rather inaccurate.

Perhaps Business Link has managed greater achievements away from the digital world. Still, that’s hardly an excuse for such a poor online presence, not does it make up for it. We live in a digital age, where the internet is part of our daily existence, and we have a country rich with digital talent. The talented developers, web designers and copywriters at digital agencies around the country would love the opportunity to take on a project such as the Business Link website, and would have been able to create something far more usable and relevant to the people funding it –the taxpayers.

Unfortunately, public sector digital contracts are notoriously difficult to get, with a complicated tendering process that seems to result in inflated fees being paid to a select few companies, who in many cases, simply aren’t up to the job. The irony of an advice service aimed at small businesses and start-ups having such a poor online presence, when there are so many small and new web companies which would be able to create something so much better for a modest fee, is not lost.

Mark Prisk, Minister for Business, Innovation and Skills, has said that he wants the government to fund an improved online service for businesses, but with the private sector providing local advice through enterprise partnerships. In an interview with the website Real Business, he talks about providing “an improved and simpler-to-use online service, accessible both on desktops and on mobiles”. So far, so vague, although of course the proof of the pudding has yet to come.

However, there is a real opportunity here for the government to provide relevant advice to businesses, while grasping the online technologies we all know are the future with both hands. It would be fantastic if they could also, amidst all the rhetoric about supporting British businesses, make sure they actively support the digital sector by giving us a real chance to get a piece of the public sector pie, without draining the public sector purse.

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