IN November last year, the Government’s digital champion Martha Lane Fox issued a challenge to Whitehall: Do things better online, she said, and you could save huge sums of money.

Last week, an experimental new website was launched, the first direct result of Ms Lane Fox’s report.

Simply called alpha.gov.uk, it’s a radical re-think of how Government websites should work.

The idea is that it serves the needs of ordinary people, rather than those of Government departments.

It looks a bit like Google. There’s a big, friendly search box and a list of popular pages underneath.

Everyone has to deal with national or local Government services every so often. If all of us can do a few of those transactions online instead of in person or by post, the savings could add up to billions of pounds.

Because it’s an alpha, it shouldn’t be treated like the real thing.

Alphas are released so that people can poke at them and find out which bits work and which bits don’t.

You can find out more about the project by reading its official blog, at www.blog.alpha.gov.uk