At last, your ingrowing toenail is getting attention. Equipped with an electronic booking service and online NHS waiting list figures, your GP finds you a slot for an operation next week.
There's a snag: it's in Harrogate and you're in London. How are you going to get there with a sore foot? Another government web service, Transport Direct, provides transport options from your home to the hospital. Public transport doesn't appeal? The same site works out a driving route, taking into account the time of day, school holidays and roadworks along the way.
Your brother, who has a car and owes you a favour, still isn't keen. "I haven't sent off for my new tax disc yet." No problem: point your browser to www.vehiclelicence.gov.uk and do it now.
OK, so the scenario is contrived, but all these e-government services are now running, though mostly still as pilots under wraps. Their public launch over the next few weeks will underpin the prime minister's claim to be revolutionising public services around personal choice.
Although e-government itself is not new - some local councils already have all their services "e-enabled" - the three new services take it to a different level. They operate country-wide (though Scots may have to wait longer for NHS booking) and integrate the back offices of government with local services and, in one case, private industry. Together, they lift Britain into the premier league of e-governments.
Politically, NHS booking, online transport information and vehicle licensing have high priority. They were named by the prime minister in his "e-summit" speech back in November 2002, in which he sketched out a vision of broadband Britain: "For the public services, the real opportunity is to use information technology to help create fundamental improvement in the efficiency, convenience and quality of our services."
Partly because of the prime ministerial link and partly from harsh experience of bad publicity generated by previous failures, all three projects are shrouded in some secrecy. Everyone's nightmare precedent is the historical census website, which was overwhelmed by demand when data from the 1901 census was put on line at the beginning of 2002.
That said, the Guardian has managed to uncover information about three projects, Transport Direct, online car tax renewal and NHS e-booking.
Transport Direct, the government's long-awaited site for joined-up travel information, is on the web awaiting ministers' permission to be made publicly available. The site, now at www.transportdirect.info, is a world first. "This is not a timetable service, it's a 'travel between two points service'," Nick Illsley, chief executive of Transport Direct, told the Building Transport Confidence conference in London last week.
"It takes you to a place, not just to a station." Users enter their location, which can be as precise as a postcode, and their destination, which can be another postcode, a landmark, or an event such as "Glastonbury". The site will describe how to make the journey from door to door by public transport and will include numbers for taxi firms when necessary.
For drivers, the site will show a route and calculate "realistic journey times" based on data about congestion at specific times along the way, timed in 15-minute blocks. The calculation also takes into account factors such as school holidays. Users can print out the map and, before travelling, check the "live events" section for sudden cancellations and delays.
Transport Direct has been a long time in the making: it was announced in Labour's 2001 election manifesto, but shelved during the chaos in rail timetabling that followed the Hatfield crash. Although the IT was developed on time and on budget by contractor Atos Origin, the launch will be about a year late because of the mammoth task of entering local details. "There are 330,000 bus stops in Great Britain, all have been located to an accuracy of one metre and given a unique name and number," says Illsley.
The launch is a nervous time. The team has little idea of what demand will be. They also know that such a complex, constantly changing, service can never be 100% accurate. "Because we have billions of pieces of data in there, some of it is going to be wrong," says Illsley. "We're asking users to tell us, and we'll put it right."
Illsley says that providing citizens with this level of information will have profound consequences, including persuading them to use buses and trains. "Most transport choices are made habitually. The way to tackle that is to give people a better choice."
Electronic vehicle licensing is available already, but by invitation only. Vehicle owners whose tax discs are expiring have begun receiving reminder letters offering them the option to renew them online. This "soft launch" strategy is designed not to put too much strain on the system.
Car tax is a complicated transaction for government to put on the web because the process isn't just about raising money. It is the only regular annual check of insurance and MOT certificates. The system could not be e-enabled until these were both already online.
Electronic vehicle licensing is being led by the DVLA as part of a modernisation project carried out with IBM. This is a massive IT project in its own right: the agency handles 200m transactions a year, 43m of which are to do with road tax.
Car owners who have been invited to use the e-licensing service identify themselves with a reference number issued in the letter and complete a form online. Their details are then checked against the DVLA's records and the Motor Insurance Database. As a database of MOT records is not due to go live nationally until December, the service is not yet suitable for cars more than three years old. The site accepts payment by debit card but not credit card, as this would require a change in the law. As a large percentage of motorists are also internet users, the DVLA expects the service to be popular. "We're looking for 30% take-up by 2005-06," says Mike Turley, of IBM.
Apart from saving drivers the bother of queueing at Post Office branches, e-licensing will help the agency work faster. "At its worst, the manual channel took about six weeks from showing your documents at a post office to updating the records," says Turley. This will now happen instantaneously.
In the long run, electronic vehicle licensing opens the way to doing away with tax discs altogether. Police forces are installing systems to read number plates automatically, which will check that a car is taxed. (People in untaxed cars are statistically likely to be committing other offences.) However, this will need another change in the law, to remove the offence of failing to display a tax disc.
The NHS e-booking project, now branded as Choose and Book, is the centrepiece of Tony Blair's NHS reforms. It is about to be launched at primary care trusts in London and Yorkshire and then extended nationally. Patients facing a waiting time of more than six months to see a consultant will be offered a choice by doctors equipped with the two systems.
One, the NHS directory website www.nhs.uk, is already live and has been upgraded without publicity to include waiting times by speciality for every hospital in England. To access the information, click on "performance" and then "waiting times". The site says the figures "will give you an idea of how long you might have to wait for a routine appointment or admission". However, it warns that waits may vary "as this can depend on a number of factors".
The second system is the national e-booking service being installed by the £6bn NHS National Programme for IT. It relies on scheduling software from the US firm Cerner, run by Atos Origin and piped through the new NHS broadband network to thousands of GPs and hospitals.
Up to now, Britain has been in the second tier of e-government nations. The three new services, when combined with existing functions such as online tax filing and local council services on the web, add up to an e-government programme that is winning worldwide acclaim for scale and ambition. "The UK is a thought leader in e-government," says Edwin Lau, head of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's e-government effort.
Whether the electorate is as impressed remains to be seen. The e-government programme is far from complete. On average, public bodies are still about 30% short of the national target of "e-enabling" 100% of services by January 2006. Much work still needs to be done to join local authorities, which run most public services, with central government.
But the most important thing is to persuade people to use the services. That won't happen until civil servants steel themselves, take the passwords off, and start advertising the fact that Her Majesty's government is now (more or less) online.
