More than twenty local authorities in England and Wales are planning to try e-voting and e-counting technology in next year’s local government elections. In all sixty-three councils have applied to participate in the May 2003 electoral pilot programme. 

Almost half of the 441 local councils in England, Scotland and Wales believe they will meet the government’s 2005 target date for 100 per cent electronic service delivery. 

By George Boyne, Catherine Farrell, Jennifer Law, Martin Powell and Richard WalkerGovernments across the world are pursuing reform in an effort to improve public services. But have these reforms actually led to improvements in services? The book develops a framework for a theory-based evaluation of reforms, and then uses the framework to assess the impact of new arrangement for public service delivery in the UK. 

Gloucestershire Hospitals has become the first National Health Service Trust in the country to install a virtual telephone operator system using advanced speech recognition technology to answer, transfer and make calls 24 hours a day.The Trust, which provides acute hospital services to half a million people in the Gloucestershire area will use the system to answer incoming calls and ease pressure on its switchboard operators, who currently handle up to six thousand calls every day. 

More people than ever used the national e-health library during November. More than 50,000 visits were recorded for the month, which saw the National electronic Library for Health (NeLH) celebrating its second birthday. The final number was boosted by an awareness week, at the end of November, which encouraged existing users to tell friends and colleagues about the information available from the e-library. 

By Duncan Eaton. Reproduced by permission of eGov Monitor Weekly. Providing thousands of suppliers using myriad different systems with the opportunity to trade electronically with the health service is the challenge facing the Purchasing and Supply Agency of the NHS. Duncan Eaton, who heads the Agency, describes how work is going on with pilot supply confederations to give greater leverage to the NHS over quality and service and bring benefits to suppliers.

Microsoft Ltd and MSN have launched a Public Services Channel offering access to online government and healthcare services. Departments collaborating in the channel include Department of Health, the Office of the e-Envoy, Inland Revenue, the Department for Education and Skills, Department for Work & Pensions and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.The site includes direct links to the three main health sites. 

Lord Haskins and his review team from the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) have been given the task of bringing cohesion to the patchwork quilt of agencies delivering services to rural areas. 

This report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development shows that only 16% of respondents in the public and private sectors believe their organizations are very effective at developing business plans that specify the management capabilities required. Thirty per cent of organizations do not even have business plans. The investigation by the Institute found that current management development practice is disconnected from the business challenges in many organizations. 

In a move to ensure that priorities and the use of resources are driven by what the customer wants, the Metropolitan Police Authority have set up a new ‘listen to the people’ structure.