WRITTEN ON March 13th, 2008 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Save Time and Money, What do we want?

Anna Kelly from the Swedish Administrative Development Agency drops a bit of a bombshell. The generally enlightened Swedes closed their central government portal last week. Now there’s nothing there (and no, it’s not for sale).

Nick and I tried to ask Anna about the reasoning behind what could well be an eminently sensible decision. But she’s baffled and a bit hurt by it, and can’t see any rationale beyond misguided cost-cutting.

The UK of course is going in the opposite direction, axing all the other web sites centralising all content on DirectGov, which still lacks a decent search engine.