Cash boost for e-government authentication
Kablenet.com
Published: 23 Aug 2005 17:20 BST
The minister for local e-government has announced that Government Connect, the project developing secure online transactions between the public and government, is to receive £7.5m over the next year. It will support development and initial roll out from 2005-06.
Government Connect was set up to solve one of the key problems for transactional online services — how to authenticate the users.
Announcing the funding on 23 August 2005, Jim Fitzpatrick said: "Government Connect can become the catalyst for removing two major barriers to e-enabled government: firstly for citizens a single sign on to government services; and secondly, the ability to share data securely between local and central government in support of service delivery.
"Since its launch in March 2005, good progress has been made, with 276 local authorities already registered and over 100 of these expressing an interest in becoming early adopters of the Government Connect products being rolled out from August."
Fitzpatrick said the programme aims to roll out services "to up to 250 local authorities" by December 2006 and to all councils by the same time in 2007.
Government Connect is made up of several components which include:
- GC Core, which allows secure messaging between councils. There is also a GC Mail service which is a secure email facility;
- GC Register, a toolkit for registration and enrolment of users;
- GC Exchange, the middleware allowing systems belonging to a range of different agencies to exchange data;
- GC Pay, which validates, authorises and collects payments online;
- GC Alert, a text messaging service. Among other services, councils will be able to send texts through the system about appointments or road works.
Bolton MBC is leading a group of 12 organisations, which include the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) and the e-Government Unit, to develop Government Connect.
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