Money Advice Service spent over £250,000 rebranding website
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The Money Advice Service spent more than £250,000 rebranding the Money Made Clear and Consumer Financial Education Body websites before its launch in April.
Labour peer Baroness McDonagh submitted a question to Parliament about how much the Money Advice Service spent on its website, including staff costs.
In a written answer published this week, Treasury commercial secretary Lord Sassoon says the total cost was approximately £254,000, excluding VAT.
He says: “The Money Advice Service enhanced and rebranded its web offering prior to its launch in April 2011. This included consolidating its previous websites (the Consumer Financial Education Body website and the Money Made Clear website) on a single platform under the Money Advice Service brand.
“The Money Advice Service states that the new website includes enhanced features, resulting in improved user experience, accessibility, speed and search engine performance.The Money Advice Service confirms that the total costs, including staffing costs, associated with enhancing its website were approximately £254,000 (excluding VAT).”
An MAS spokeswoman says: “The Money Advice Service significantly enhanced and rebranded its web offering in time for launch in April 2011. This included consolidating our previous websites on a single, easy to maintain platform under our new Money Advice Service brand, an automated content publishing and scheduling service for money news, features, campaigns, press releases and vacancies, and easy to use navigation resulting in significantly improved user experience, accessibility, speed and search engine performance.”
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Readers' comments (12)
Donna Hopton, cherry | 25 Nov 2011 1:41 pm
A ludicrous waste. Those in charge should feel ashamed.
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Last post | 25 Nov 2011 1:42 pm
I would have got my mate to do it for half that
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Simon Webster | 25 Nov 2011 1:43 pm
and we put in a full content management system for £2,000 and I personally wrote c 150 pages of at least OK content over 3 months in my spare time and got it fully SEO'd. Total cost £2k. I woud have done the pension regulator site for £100k.
Don't you just love the way these govt. types spend our money? It is perhaps unkind but with so may of them being laid off it will be interesting to see how they fair in the real world!
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Anonymous | 25 Nov 2011 1:56 pm
shakes head in resignation rather than disbelief as this sort of profligacy with other peoples money is all too common.
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Richard Brydon | 25 Nov 2011 1:57 pm
Re the job losses: The redundancies will cost us more than the rebranding and the staff will probably find that the compensation packages should see them through for quite some time. Perhaps with ASU they could manage until the recession is over. I wish that I could make myself redundant on the same terms. Unfortunately, as I'm self employed, I can't get anything. Sympathy? No way!
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Stephen Bolton | 25 Nov 2011 2:05 pm
...And do they know how effective their spend is? Do they monitor the amount of traffic to the site, and do they track whether people spend more time on the site than they did before? Common sense says you need to know what you are getting back from marketing expenditure.
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Gerry Cooper | 25 Nov 2011 2:32 pm
Fools!
Wasteful, proflgate, remote, disconnected fools!
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Sean | 25 Nov 2011 2:59 pm
Typical civil service approach - it aint our money so it doesnt matter.
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Keith Jayne | 25 Nov 2011 4:52 pm
How ironic that the Money ADVICE Service's part-predecessor was MONEY MADE CLEAR.
They've managed to p*ss £250k up against the wall by telling people advice is FREE.
Sorry, but I was under the impression that ADVICE needed to be paid for?
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Bob | 25 Nov 2011 5:34 pm
Seems to me they could have done with some financial advice before going ahead!
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