Barry Gardiner – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Barry Gardiner on 2014-04-03.

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what the reason is for the time his Department has taken to revise and publish environmental guidance on gov.uk.

Dan Rogerson

A target has been set to simplify all of Defra and its agencies’ guidance, including general reader and specialist guidance, by March 2015 with an expected reduction in volume of over 80%.

Guidance reform plans have now been prepared for all environmental topics and the Environment Agency started to put revised guidance on GOV.UK on 31 March. Seventy per cent of simplified content for the general reader will be on GOV.UK during April and the rest by June.

Defra and the Government Digital Service (GDS) are working closely together to make the most effective use of resources as GDS migrates Defra’s arm’s length bodies’ web content to GOV.UK. The original target date for completing this migration process was March this year. This timing has been revised to July.