Department of Health website costs rise by £200k

Publicservice.co.uk reports:

The taxpayer has been landed with a bill to maintain the Department of Health website costing hundreds of thousands of pounds more than previous years, official figures have revealed.

Health minister Simon Burns told Labour MP Dianne Abbott that the department had spent more than £928,000, excluding VAT, maintaining its website in the tax year 2011-2012.

This was a near £200,000 increase on the previous year, when the Department of Health spent less than £731,000.

The increase in spending comes at a time when ministers want to push public services online.

But the minister also revealed that his department's website had seen little movement in traffic figures.

From April 2011 to March 2012, the website received some 14,736,705 visits, a slight increase on the 14,655,544 seen in the previous year.