UK storms up the e-gov rankings

The EU has published its fifth annual report into the state of e-government within Europe - and has found one of the biggest improvers since last year was the UK.

The survey, performed by Capgemini for the EU, studied 14,000 websites across 28 countries - the 25 member states, including those that joined last year, plus Norway, Iceland and Switzerland.

The benchmarking report discovered that the UK, Italy, Iceland and Germany made the best progress across the Union countries, increasing the online sophistication of their government services.

Ireland and Denmark declined in comparison with their performance in the last report. Sweden, in contrast, is the most advanced country across the Union, with 74 per cent of its government services now available online. The UK was fourth, behind Austria and Finland, with 59 per cent of services now available through the internet.

While most European countries still have some progress to make before they're fully online, the EU expects that the sophistication of internet-based government services will start to level off.

The report also finds that there is a gap between how well business and citizens are catered for with e-government - and the services that earn money - the ones that governments tend to put online first.

"Income-generating public services reach a level of 88 per cent while services that deal with the administrative obligation of citizens and business (registrations and permits), and those where citizens and businesses receive value in return for their taxes, are scoring below the overall averages," it says.

And while some countries have been surging ahead and equipping citizens with a welter of online tools, the new entrants to the EU, including states such as the Czech Republic, Estonia and Lithuania, aren't as far behind the more longstanding members as might be expected.

"An important conclusion of the [report] with respect to the new member states is the fact that the scores of the accessing countries can be described as very satisfactory: they correspond, on average, wit the level where the 18 originally included countries were two years ago," the report says.