WRITTEN QUESTION P-0268/02

by Giles Chichester (PPE-DE) to the Commission

(1 February 2002)

Subject: Preparation for the European Council meeting in Barcelona

The 2000 Lisbon European Council called on the Member States to ensure generalised electronic access to main basic public services by 2003. Does the Commission believe this target will be met, and what evidence can it point to to support its view?

Answer given by Mr Liikanen on behalf of the Commission

(4 March 2002)

Commission and Council integrated this call and the other requests made by the European Council in Article 11 of the Presidency conclusions of Lisbon (on 23-24 March 2000), into the eEurope 2002 action plan(1). The action plan was subsequently adopted at the Feira European Council (on 19-20 June 2000) and contained 64 targets with clear deadlines, such as the one quoted in the Honourable Member's question.

To determine whether this target can be met, first of all the term main basic public services had to be defined. The Commission therefore proposed a list of 20 basic public services, 12 for citizens and eight for businesses, which was approved by the Internal Market Council in November 2001. As a follow-up, an open call for tenders has been launched to measure the availability of these public services online. The terms of reference for this call stated explicitly that a four-stage-model, developed by the Dutch Economic Institute, had to be used to assess the degree of online sophistication. Level 1 is information only; stage 2 is when forms can be downloaded and submitted online; stage 3 full processing of forms including authentication and stage 4 secure online transactions. These are translated into percentages and averages across the 20 services.

First results of this survey have been presented by the consultants at the eGovernment conference of 29-30 November 2001 in Brussels, which was organised jointly by the Commission and the Belgian Presidency. The consultants have drawn a representative sample of more than 10 000 local, regional and federal administrations of which 7 400 had a web site and were surveyed. Results for each of the 20 services can be found in the full report(2). The survey showed that about a half of basic public services is already made available online, although this mostly only means that forms can be downloaded from websites. It also indicated that services provided by a single administrative unit have higher levels of online service delivery whereas services provided by decentralised local agencies are less well developed.

The Commission concluded from this that good progress has been made in Member States with regard to the target. However, more needs to be done to achieve a higher level of interactivity and eventually full electronic delivery of the service. This will require important back office reorganisation to deal with complex transactions at a single-entry point for citizens and businesses. Provided this happens, the Commission believes that the target set was an ambitious one, but that Member States overall are on track with the realisation of the target.

(1) COM(2000) 330 final.

(2) http://europa.eu.int/information_society/eeurope/news_library/documents/bench_online_services.doc.