Taxpayers face £800,000 bill for parliament website revamp

Published on Thursday 5 November 2009 21:27

THE Scottish Parliament is to revamp its website at a cost to the taxpayer of up to £800,000, it has emerged.

The sum earmarked by the parliamentary authorities for the five-year overhaul of Holyrood's official website was last night described as "astonishing" by politicians.

The upgrading, which will begin next September, is designed to make the website more accessible for people with disabilities and those whose first language is not English.

Improvements include the addition of British Sign Language (BSL) videos in Flash format to assist deaf users and new formats that would help the partially sighted.

More podcasts and audio downloads in a range of languages will also be offered to help people without good English.

Holyrood officials said the upgrade would cost the parliament "a maximum of 800,000" over the next five years.

But politicians questioned the amount of money being spent on the project, which will use the latest software technology to make it easier to browse speeches and parliamentary questions.

The Liberal Democrat chief whip Mike Rumbles said: "This seems like an astonishing amount of money. The Scottish Parliament, like other public bodies, must remember that money is tight."

Mark Wallace of the Taxpayers' Alliance said: "This is a huge amount to spend on upgrading a website. The ordinary taxpayer will be staggered to find it is going to cost so much. Plenty of businesses upgrade their websites all the time without incurring such massive costs."

He added: "It is this kind of thing that gives the impression that politicians have forgotten where this money comes from."

A Scottish Labour spokesman said: "We will study these plans in detail."

The website project is being run by a permanent member of staff. For the next ten months her position will be filled by a temporary contractor.

No other additional staff have been employed for this project.

In total, the project team has four members – all of whom have other roles as well as working on this project.

A Scottish Parliament spokeswoman said: "As with any forward-thinking organisation, we view the internet as a key method to push information out and to pull people into engaging with the parliament's work and our activities. As with all our contracts, we always strive to ensure value for money."