As we reported last month, the Mayor has a new website. Due to be up and running before the end of 2009, it finally made an appearance on 14 February, despite not being quite ready for publication.
On 23 March, the GLA Budget Monitoring Sub-Committee [PDF] are due to question the Mayor’s Director of Marketing, Dan Ritterband, about the new website; it remains to be seen whether the Director of Marketing will manage to answer the committee’s questions or if he’ll have another hissy fit and be thrown out.
I’d imagine the committee will be very keen to obtain more information about the redesign of the GLA website, as it has emerged that expenditure for the project was authorised in August 2006, nearly two years before Boris Johnson was elected, and almost £1.2m had been spent before the new Mayor decided to cancel the project and make all five staff in the GLA’s eServices Team redundant. The original redesign had been due to go live in July 2008, two months after Johnson’s election.
The intention of the redesign was that london.gov.uk would merge with the Your London portal which was led by the London Connects partnership, developed to provide pan-London data-sharing. In March 2009, London Connect’s responsibilities were transferred to Capital Ambition.
In October 2009, the Mayor authorised further expenditure of £150,000 [PDF] on a new procurement exercise for the website redesign. Note that the authorisation document makes no mention of the £1.2m already spent on the abandoned redesign project and diverts £80,000 from the 2009/10 State Of London Debate budget, with the excuse:
Previously inefficiencies in the GLA website had hindered the effectiveness of the State of London Debate event. It is hoped that a more effective website tool will improve the delivery of the State of London Debate hence budget has been assigned from this allocation for website improvement.
In previous years, the State Of London Debate had its own microsite; I’d be fascinated to know exactly how website “inefficiencies” had hindered the effectiveness of the event.
The biggest change that I can see from the old GLA website is that all trace of the previous administration, and what was delivered under Ken Livingstone, has been totally erased and we can now treat ourselves to many self-congratulatory video clips of Boris Johnson.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
This again demonstrates what Boris Johnson means when he says that he is delivering more for less !.
I’ve never seen that Dan Ritterband clip before – how embarassing.
Lets get him back in front of the assembly – clearly he loves pressure!
What a twat he is – who hired the fool? Can’t you take a bit of questioning? What are you going to do when you’re in court one day – walk out and call the judge a joker?
I thought Boris hired good people to cover his useless arse – now it seems they have all gone – deputies fell and now all that’s left is the yes men.
When it all goes tits up the electorate of London will only have itself to blame.