The Office of the e-Envoy was set up by the British government of Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1999 and was replaced by the E-Government Unit in September 2004.
The first e-Envoy was Alex Allan. He was succeeded by Andrew Pinder in October 2000 until the office closed in September 2004.
Its staffing level was between 50 and 140 people. [1]
This flagship project of putting all government departments online by 2002 and enabling people to conduct a wide variety of routine transactions, from paying taxes to obtaining driving licences, via the internet by 2005 was announced by Microsoft on 27 March 2001 who, in just 15 weeks, had "brought Tony Blair's ambitious e-government vision to reality". [2] The tight timescale was due to Compaq withdrawing from the project after four months [3] for which they received £5.6 million. [4]
The project was billed at £15.6 million [5] and involved licensing some of the UK government's intellectual property to Microsoft to be sold on as part of their product to other governments around the world and return significant income streams. [6]
The result was widely criticised because the digital certificate system, central to the project, locked out all other browsers except Microsoft's own Internet Explorer. [7]
The e-Envoy responded by explaining that the priority was to make it available to as many people as possible as quickly as possible, and that the only part of the system that was limited was the ability for citizens and businesses to enrol for services. But, "Once enrolled, they can submit transactions from any operating system, since XML - the language used - is totally platform independent." [8]
The Millennium Dome was the original name of the large dome-shaped building on the Greenwich Peninsula in South East London, England, which housed a major exhibition celebrating the beginning of the third millennium. As of 2022, it is the ninth largest building in the world by usable volume. The exhibition was open to the public from 1 January to 31 December 2000. The project and exhibition were highly contentious and attracted barely half of the 12 million customers its sponsors forecasted, and so were deemed a failure by the press. All the original exhibition elements were sold or dismantled.
The Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS), created in July 2001 and disbanded in July 2022, was the executive department of the British Cabinet Office responsible for emergency planning in the UK. The role of the secretariat was to ensure the United Kingdom's resilience against disruptive challenge, and to do this by working with others to anticipate, assess, prevent, prepare, respond and recover. Until its creation in 2001, emergency planning in Britain was the responsibility of the Home Office. The CCS also supports the Civil Contingencies Committee, also known as COBR.
Hilary Jane Armstrong, Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top, DL is a British Labour Party politician who was the Member of Parliament (MP) for North West Durham from 1987 to 2010.
Desmond Henry Browne, Baron Browne of Ladyton, is a Scottish politician who served in the Cabinet of the United Kingdom under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as Secretary of State for Defence 2006 to 2008 and Secretary of State for Scotland from 2007 to 2008. A member of the Labour Party, he was Member of Parliament (MP) for Kilmarnock and Loudoun from 1997 to 2010.
Paul William Barry Marsden is a British writer, businessman and former politician. He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Shrewsbury and Atcham from 1997 until 2005. He was most prominently known for his anti-war views and crossing the floor twice, from Labour to the Liberal Democrats in 2001 and returning to Labour in 2005. He instructed a solicitor in 2010 to begin action for phone hacking that allegedly took place back in 2003 by a newspaper. In 2012, Marsden was appointed to draft the parliamentary inquiry report into VIP security at the Olympic and Paralympic Games in London. Marsden is currently Head of Quality for the Transpennine Route Upgrade West rail alliance, improving the railway between Manchester and Leeds.
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Surrey County Council is elected every four years and was made in 1889 under the Local Government Act 1888. Since 1965 this council has had one of two statuses as to its body of councillors: no overall political control, or overall Conservative party control.
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Andrew Pinder, CBE, led the Office of the e-Envoy from 2000 to 2004, reporting directly to the prime minister, Tony Blair.
The National Employment Savings Trust (NEST) is a defined contribution workplace pension scheme in the United Kingdom. It was set up to facilitate automatic enrolment as part of the government's workplace pension reforms under the Pensions Act 2008. Due to its public service obligation, any UK employer can use Nest to meet its new workplace duties as set out in the Pensions Act 2008.
In Australia, during winter and spring 2001, low rainfall across combined with a hot, dry December created ideal conditions for bushfires. On the day of Christmas Eve, firefighters from the Grose Vale Rural Fire Service (RFS) brigade attended a blaze in rugged terrain at the end of Cabbage Tree Rd, Grose Vale, believed to have been caused by power lines in the Grose Valley.
Adam Long is an American writer, voice director, and voice actor based in London, England, as well as a founding member of The Reduced Shakespeare Company. From 1987 to 2003, he co-wrote and performed The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), The Complete History of America (Abridged), The Reduced Shakespeare Radio Show for the BBC World Service, and The Ring Reduced, a 30 minute condensation of Wagner's Ring Cycle for Channel 4 television.
Lord Gyllene was a New Zealand-bred racehorse whose greatest victory came in the 1997 Grand National at Aintree. He was trained by Steve Brookshaw for owner Sir Stanley Clarke CBE and ridden by Tony Dobbin. Lord Gyllene was retired by his owner in 2001 due to injury. He had a race record in the UK of 13 runs: won 4, second 5 and third once, as well as two wins from 23 starts in New Zealand. His final appearance in his homeland was a winning one, in a steeplechase at Te Rapa racecourse in Hamilton on 16 September 1995. That followed his second at Ellerslie to one of the great jumpers in New Zealand racing history, Sydney Jones, in the Pakuranga Hunt Cup, one of New Zealand's most prestigious jumping races.
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Nathan Kiley is an English stage actor who has most notably starred in the West End production of Chicago as Mary Sunshine at the Cambridge Theatre as well as Tony Blair in Tony Blair the Musical, performed at the 2007 Edinburgh Festival.
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