Who is Stephen Walter Pollak?

[No relation to Charon QC’s post on BBC’s Rough Justice]

A long time ago in a land far, far away I reported that under the 2006 Cabinet Office “Transformational Government Strategy” at least 550 government websites would be closed, with only 26 certain to be retained (basically, I speculated, one for each Department plus DirectGov and Business Link to which information from the closed websites would be transferred).

And so it is coming to pass.

There are many good reasons to whittle down the number of gov sites, not least of which in this administration’s eyes must be that there must be substantial savings there somewhere. But if the new Justice site is anything to go by that’s all the current lot are interested in; user experience be damned.

Justice (the site) incorporates information from a number of now redundant sites within the justice system. But some of the information on those sites is now on Direct.gov or BusinessLink. It’s difficult to determine the rhyme or reason.

For example, as to courts and tribunals we now have the (huge) integrated HM Courts and Tribunals Service, but it no longer has a website. Crazy or what? The old HMCS website helpfully tells us that “information for practitioners is available on the justice website … information for other court users is available on Directgov … information for business customers can be found on Businesslink.”

It’s difficult to navigate and find what you want on Justice and all-in-all it looks a bit rough and ready to me; cobbled together without too much thought. Though there were bound to be transitional difficulties you’d think they could have done a better job. But then if you want to save a shedload, maybe not.