Of all the bonkers ambitions held by British governments, surely none was as daft as the solemn undertaking to make all public services available electronically. Give or take a little fudge, the ambition was achieved two years ago. Since then, though, bits have been dropping off the government's e-programme like plasma TVs off the back of a dodgy lorry.
Prominent casualties include passport applications and reporting crimes electronically. Back in 2000, passport executives were talking enthusiastically about the web doing away with inefficient 20th century traditions like paying personal visits to the office. For obvious reasons, that little ambition went out of the window shortly afterwards. Today, personal interviews for first-time applicants are one of the passport service's main weapons against identity theft. Biometrics will make face-to-face appointments mandatory.
Meanwhile, electronic crime-reporting fizzled out for a whole set of reasons. For a start, it was an orphan service, offered by "police.gov.uk", an organisation that does not exist. It also lacked political leadership: the one certain outcome of making crimes easier to report is that the number of reported crimes will soar. Try selling that to any home secretary. A retreat from e-government is also becoming apparent in programmes under development. Last December, the Land Registry of England and Wales scaled back plans for electronic conveyancing. The Treasury's fear, apparently, was that a crooked solicitor with access to the system might pull the modern equivalent of selling Trafalgar Square to a tourist.
Over the next couple of years, I think we'll see more retreats as contracts for underused e-services come up for renewal and policy makers get more discerning about choosing at precisely which bits of the government machine computer power should be thrown. Occasionally, this involves thinking the unthinkable - instead of computerising a complex process, why not simplify it, or abolish it altogether?
The classic case is income tax declaration. One reason Britain lags behind Denmark and Sweden in the percentage of taxpayers who file returns online is that we chose to "e-enable" our complex self-assessment process. The Nordic countries' "one-touch" system, where all the citizen has to do is accept the state's calculation, lends itself far more to electronic approval, even by text message, so far more people use it.
Of course this implies close cooperation between policy makers and IT people, but we can always dream. Another policy area where some lateral thinking may be useful is in free school meals. At the moment, a considerable amount of effort is going into local initiatives to join up social security benefits systems with school meal registers so that parents who qualify for free meals for their children don't have to apply separately. The aim is worthy, so free school meals has become the standard bearer for joined-up government.
What seems to be missing is any connection between these heroic efforts and the wider debate over whether to extend free meals to all comers. Free meals are already being piloted in Scotland and North Tyneside; the argument is that the benefits for social inclusion outweigh extra costs.
Of course, there's a slippery slope to this argument: do we abolish all means tests and even identity checks just because they are costly to administer? I doubt it very much. But an honourable retreat from IT should definitely be on the agenda in any grown-up debate about the future of public services.
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