Louise Haigh – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Louise Haigh on 2015-10-22.

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, what estimate he has made of efficiency savings arising from his Department’s digital strategies in (a) 2013-14 and (b) 2014-15.

Joseph Johnson

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) aims to build digital services that are simpler, clearer and faster to use. In 2013-14 and 2014-15 BIS took the lead in developing five exemplar “digital by default”projects. These focused on transforming key areas in which BIS engages with the public: student finance, Land Registry data, renewing patents, redundancy payments and apprenticeships. By the end of 2014-15 all five BIS digital exemplars were either live or in trial(“beta”) use.

Each of these is starting to bring significant benefits. For example, each year there are around 400,000 transactions for renewals of patents. The new digital patent renewal service allows patent owners and agents to complete the renewal process online in just a few minutes whereas the older, paper based service took up to 6 days to process.