To be perfectly honest, I find the content a bit hit-and-miss. All too often, it doesn't deliver the cut-and-dried answer I'm hoping for. Mind you, that's probably due to the over-complexity of the tax/legal system, rather than the content's deficiencies.

A small company with hardly any cashflow can access a lot of helpful tips and advice without being robbed by some overpriced consultant. I don't know how many businesses make use of the site but useing your i-phone apps analogy of saving one person from cancer, I feel sure there are a number of businesses that have saved money, adjusted their strategy, or expanded their business after making use of the information on this site.

These are REAL factors that make Government projects longer and harder. Plus each project is "self-contained" and doesn't share data - that only comes along at vast extra cost.

This is how the sub-contracting chain worked: Business Link > Serco > Sweet & Maxwell > A small ltd co content provider > Me.

Everybody in the chain needed their cut. This is one reason it cost so much.

But I've also worked as an employee of a direct sub-contractor on a different gov.uk site. The team was enormous - at least 120. There were writers and editors, chief editors, a search team, a build team, a development team. Furthermore, everyone was paid roughly twice what they would have earned in the private sector. We're talking 40 to 50k for just uploading content.

Despite a veritable army operating the site, major changes were behind schedule, there was extensive turf war between contractors and employees, and nobody ever mentioned, let alone thought about, the users attempting to glean information from the site.

It wasn't just a gravy train. It was legalised plunder of the public purse. It was piratical in scope, and shameless in execution.

The bottom line? Salaries are where the money for Business Link went.

And there'll be a huge bureaucracy required to serve the governance process imposed by the owning Department. Ironically the governance is there to ensure that money is wisely spent, but ends up being one of the biggest overheads.

So I went along to the meeting. There were about 25 consultants around the table, some representing potential suppliers, some representing the client. And it was quickly clear that there were no requirements. So the first phase would be a requirements-gathering exercise. Ah, some of the consultants knew some good requirements-gathering methodologies. Which one should the project use? Clearly, they had to be evaluated before one could be chosen. So there had to be a phase of evaluating requirements gathering methodologies. And of course, that phase had to be planned. So the only outcome of a meeting costing about £20K was an action for someone to write a plan for evaluating methodologies for gathering requirements for the government web-site. I think the site was the one that became BusinessLink, and after that meeting I was in no doubt that the government would have no difficulty at all in spending its £20m budget. By comparison, we had just built an online banking system for a major retail bank for under £5m.

Earlier this year I was working on a 3-year build/host/maintain contract for a complex system for an international organisation. The funding amounted to $1m over 3 years.