Politicians are continually going on about “e-government” and “public sector IT”. In reality much of this ends up being despotic rights-violating tracking systems, or paying someone £100,000 a year to be the government’s advisor on Twitter. In reality what we should be trying to do is – to the greatest extent possible – eliminate paper communication by government agencies. Any form that needs to be completed, should be done online. Any response should be by secure email. This would save a great deal of money (30 million taxpayers x lots of government agencies = lots of printing and delivery costs!), make public agencies more efficient (since staff can be doing the actual job rather than filling or opening envelopes), as well as helping the environment by cutting down the deforestation required to print paper documents and the carbon emissions required to deliver them.

Of course, there are still lots of people who can’t or won’t use the internet.To ensure that they are not excluded, there could be an expansion of free internet access at public libraries or possibly even kiosks at the sort of locations which currently issue paper forms. As a last resort paper forms could be available on request, but the intention should be to completely eliminate dead-tree forms as soon as it is possible and fair to do so.