NCC Website Techies in "Bollocks to EU Directive" Shocker

Nottingham City Council has signaled a big 'up yours Delors*' to the EU Services Directive according to a survey of council websites by Socitm, the 'membership association for all ICT professionals working in Local Authorities and the Public and Third Sectors and suppliers to those sectors'.

The Directive, which has been in force in the UK via regulations since 28 December 2009, requires local authorities (and other public bodies) to make it easier for businesses to find out about their responsibilities to trade legally across Europe. The UK regulations require that anybody wanting to provide certain services should be able to find out about and apply for the various regulatory requirements online and Socitm looked at council websites to see how well they complied. It's fascinating stuff believe me.

Now, to put the rest of this post into context, I think it's fair to first point out that, according to Socitm's survey, very few councils did at all well.

But of course, this is 'Nottingham City Council LOLS' so we want to see how well NCC did, point and stare, then LOL at it.

Let's start with the overall assessment**. The survey asks how well NCC is responding to the aims of the Directive and possible answers are 0 - no info found, 1 - poor, 2 - satisfactory and 3 - very good.

The good news is that at least NCC didn't score 0 and believe me several councils did, astonishingly. NCC scored 1 - poor. Mind you, the assessor went on to flesh this rating out with the following comment-

"I saw no sign of the Directive being implemented."

Hmm, that's probably '1' that is pretty close to '0' then.

Specific areas they looked at included the process for applying to erect scaffolding close to a road, information that would be helpful to building contractors but which Socitm could find nothing about on NCC's website. They did better with information about registering a new food business with 5 positives out of 9 and scored 3 out of 7 for info provided on the admittedly somewhat esoteric process requirements for erecting cooling towers.

One area that caught my eye was the registering of Houses of Multiple Occupation, partly because at the last full council meeting there was a public question about areas being 'blighted' by HMOs and 'Councillor Clarke' (presumably actually Cllr Alan Clark who is portfolio holder for neighbourhood regeneration) appeared to claim some credit for NCC for lobbying for increased regulation of HMO 'change of use' planning applications.

Cllr Clark may therefore want to ponder the fact that NCC only scored 2 positives out of a possible 14 for information about how to register an HMO. In addition it was rated as '1 - poor' for ease of finding the information and '0 - not found' in a rating of the provision of service information. The assessor clarified this with -

"The information provided is more about what an HMO is, rather than how to register."

You're not going to persuade landlords to comply with regulatory requirements by making it hard to find out about them are you?

So another resounding success for the NCC communications team here. Let's remember, this isn't a simple matter of best practice, we are talking here about a legal requirement. Perhaps Stephen Barker and chums could spend more of their £1.8m marketing and comms budget on complying with the law rather than producing glossy magazines.

*For the benefit of younger readers, this was a famous Sun headline in 1990 which has since become a symbol of gung ho anti EU sentiment, often with comic or ironic intent.

**In order to see the full report and the tables etc you need to register with Socitm so unfortunately I can't link to them. I'll leave it up to you whether you want to take my word for all the detail.