Excellence in e-Government

There I am, thinking, "I'm going to be away and miss the first meeting of the Sustainable Development Committee, that I've just been put on as Labour 'lead member' (the Greens and LibDems have the chair and vice-chair). So I'll send a friendly apology to the other members of it, so they don't think I'm not interested."

I have a piece of paper with the list of members (5 Labour, 3 LibDems, 1 Green, 1 Blue), fresh from last night's Council AGM. So I go to the trusty council website to get their email addresses, and...

A phone call to the Members Office reveals that it's been taken down deliberately (they don't know why), and Fujitsu (the IT contractor) is entirely responsible. Another phone call to Richard (the most senior person I can find via the Fujitsu Helpdesk) reveals that they are "just obeying orders" from the e-government unit, and he doesn't know why they couldn't do this out-of-hours, and that they were told to take the whole council website offline at about 12:05 today, and that it would be off for "about an hour for something to be updated". (I just checked again at 13:30, and it was still off).

Oh dear, Standards Board here I come...