Sorry, but that is absolutely disgusting, whilst we are all being told to cut back on our spending, and being braced for ever rising taxes to pay back the countries debt, the government are spending £1m on advertising a single public service.

As usual, this Labour government making already grossly overpaid, rich celebrities even richer, whilst the rest of us have to pay to pick up the pieces after their decade of excess.

Out of order imho.

BBC News Report

Its unfortunate that the majority of people in this country only believe or think information is correct if it comes from a celebrity or some reality show winner, they are the people who catch the eye as far as advertising goes, sorry state of affairs, but know one would give a suited civil servant a second look delivering the same message. However, if the money spent on this advertisement can save a government 400 million as claimed by Directgov then that can only be beneficial. The people of this country have gone far to long not knowing their entitlements and any informative website or department can only be a good thing.

I feel sorry for those who belive that authority is the truth, where as the truth is authority.

I use the internet for my annual tax self assessment (which is one of the most amazingly successful IT projects I have ever come across), my car tax renewal and tv licence renewal (when I bothered).

By comparison, when I phone up government departments or private companies, everything goes ape and I spend the next three months sorting out the cr@p.

I fully support directgov just on the grounds it simplifies things and saves me money on repeated phone calls and hence reduces hair-loss.

Unfortunately, using directgov for information seems to be about successful as Microsoft help files, it is either incomplete or just tells you information that you have just entered in the search.

Hold on people... Direct Gov has been around for years! It's not new, and if you type in a term like Self Assessment or Car Tax Online, in Google, you will end up there. Ive been using it myself for many years.

There is no need to advertise the service, and certainly no need to keep advertising it, or paying already-overpaid celebrities with public money to advertise such a service.

It wont save the government £400m over the next few years, it will only do that if people use it, and if people are not already using it, there is a good reason that - they dont want to - be it because of security concerns, problems with postal services, needing assistance/advice to complete the work etc...

It would be a LOT cheaper to do a mail-drop using the Royal Mail of leaflets/booklet to every household in the UK, and the marketing would be much more direct... but then that would'nt look so flashy or make the rich, richer and the poor, poorer.

It's also has it's own freeview channel, even if people don't know about it they will discover it when re-tuning their sets during the ongoing switch over.

It's all part of Brown's job creation scheme. He reckons there is no need for manufacturing now as "Information" is the money earner now. What a load of crap.