Matt Billingsley from Content Design London – What 6 FOI requests reveal about government campaign websites:

Departments treated these websites as communications products rather than services, which meant they did not need to meet GOV.UK’s Service Standard.

The MoJ said that modernising.justice.gov.uk “is a public communications product which sets out government policy, rather than a transactional public service.”

This is one reason why, when putting the LGDS together, I avoided the word “service”. Not because I don’t think it’s useful – it clearly is – but that I feel it can be used to claim that a standard doesn’t apply, when it obviously could.

This research seems to back up that view.