Large design companies can charge £1,000 a day for this work, if not more. Capita is a large company that secures many government contracts. It can afford to invest in winning tenders for this type of work, which means smaller companies don't get a look in. I'd be interested to know what the cost is per user of the site. Then maybe we could judge whether the cost is fully justified. I had a quick look around the site and it looks pretty much like any other site, so I doubt there's much in the way of extra design costs incurred there. Still can't quite get my head around it. Maybe it's something to do with the volume of data? In any case, the public should be able to see why it spent that sort of money. Transparency and all that. Viv.