The delivery of the Isle of Wight Council’s new website — which is already 18 months behind schedule and has so far cost £200,000 — is set to be scrutinised next week.
Concerns about the progress of the website were raised by the council’s audit committee after an internal review identified risks, including ‘significant weaknesses’ in the project management.
A new website was agreed as part of the council’s digital strategy in 2017.
The current site has since failed to meet new accessibility legislation, introduced in 2018, which required all existing public sector websites to be fully compliant by September last year.
In a report to the corporate scrutiny committee, the council say cuts to its budget, from 2010, have seen the ICT infrastructure scaled back which have led to it ‘quickly becoming not fit for purpose’.
When the Covid pandemic struck in March 2020, the website project team was only just three months into planning and the aim of launching a development (or Beta) site by September 2020, designed around the needs of those who use our services, was no longer feasible.
The team was redirected to help the pandemic response.
Progress was ‘further hampered’ as new waves of the virus continued to emerge and as staff left.
The internal audit also found key documents were not sufficiently available to the team, there was an absence of detailed planning and weak financial control.
At the time of the review, auditors said it was not possible to identify how much had been spent on the project so far.
The report revealed overall budget for the project, across all three phases, is £765,000 — with £219,800 already spent in phase one.
Action has since been taken to address the points raised by auditors but further concerns about the project overall were raised by councillors, chiefly the reason why the council decided to build the website and content management system and not have another party do it.
Using financial modelling over a five-year period, based on the time it took other authorities to build their sites, the council estimated it would cost between £300,000 and £900,000 more to get an outside supplier to complete the website.
It is hoped the test website will be launched in March 2022 and, once checks have been completed, it should go live in April.
The council says a significant amount of work has put the project back on track but the original plans for the site have been scaled back to meet the statutory obligations as soon as feasibly possible.
Members of the corporate scrutiny committee will look further into the problems at their meeting on Wednesday, December 15.
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