Revealed: The simple symbol delaying the launch of Birmingham City Council website

Jul 4 2009 by Paul Dale, Birmingham Mail

THE launch of Birmingham City Council’s new website, which was supposed to make it easier for people to pay bills and keep track of council tax payments, has been delayed by months after red-faced officials discovered the new system refused to recognise pound signs.

Quotation marks, apostrophes and euro signs were also missing when the updated version of www.birmingham.gov.uk was switched on.

Council bosses are arguing with installer Service Birmingham, led by private outsourcing firm Capita, about who picks up the bill to fix the errors.

And the council has admitted it does not know exactly how much has already been spent on attempting to install the new IT.

A spokesman said: “There are figures, but they come from different budgets and we can’t get them worked out today.”

The glitch is deeply embarrassing for the city, which says its business transformation scheme can save up to £1 billion, largely through better IT systems.

The new website is critical in delivering the Customer First project, which will allow anyone in Birmingham with access to a broadband computer to have a personal account with the council – enabling bills to be paid and requests for services to be logged on-line.

Deputy city council leader Paul Tilsley said the delays were caused by “teething problems”.

The website was supposed to go live in April, but will not now be up and running until the beginning of next month.

Coun Tilsley (Lib Dem Sheldon) said: “This is a huge project and we don’t want to go live if it’s not right.

“Obviously I don’t like delays but it is better to get it in a fit state than to put it online and then suffer problems.”

Coun Tilsley said he was confident the new system would be one of the best in the country and that the council might be able to sell the technology to other public sector organisations wishing to upgrade their websites.

Glyn Evans, corporate director of business change, said transferring 10,000 pages of information from the old website to the new one was problematic.

He added: “A number of functional defects and performance problems have been identified and are currently being addressed and indeed, most are now being resolved.”

It’s the second time recently that the council has suffered embarrassing IT problems.

Installation by Service Birmingham of the Voyager system for electronically paying bills led to a backlog of 30,000 unpaid invoices, resulting in some small traders threatening the council with bailiffs.