RUSSIA, February 7 - Agenda: expanding the functions of the Government Services website for children, monitoring the quality of government services’ provision, the results of implementing the housing construction support programme in 2021.

Excerpts from Mikhail Mishustin’s opening remarks

Good afternoon, colleagues,

The Government is continually expanding the functions of the Government Services website; it is upgrading electronic services and creating new ones, including those for children. However, they can only use these services via their parents’ accounts, and this is not always convenient.

We have drafted a Government resolution that will allow teenagers who are at least 14 years old to register in the system independently. And the mothers and fathers of younger children will do this for them. Children will use various services via personal accounts. For example, they will be able to go into their electronic record book and see their assessments, find out about homework or see whether they have enrolled at an education institution. Young people wishing to work part-time during the holidays can submit their own applications.

This important legislative amendment will rid children and their parents of the need to visit official agencies and collect documents.

The Government Services website was created in order to help Russian citizens interact with government agencies more easily and to quickly and effectively address their everyday issues.

I would like to say a few more words about improving the process of obtaining government and municipal services.

From now on, we will constantly monitor the quality of service provision.

All organisations involved in this process shall submit data to a special information system.

We will therefore create a mechanism that can quickly obtain and process data on all government services being provided in Russia. This will make it possible to formulate proposals regarding the quality of the provision of such services. It will be possible to assess user-friendly formats and to see whether people prefer to request services via Government Services centres or online, 24 hours a day, without visiting such centres. We will see what aspect should be prioritised, and how these procedures can be improved.

All this will help simplify interaction between the state and the people to the greatest possible extent, as the President has noted.

We will discuss another subject.

The President has instructed the relevant officials to expand annual housing construction volumes to 120 million square metres by 2030. This will allow more Russian families to move into modern flats.

Work is underway all over the country, and it is highly important that the new residential areas feature all the amenities necessary for a comfortable life. They should have kindergartens, schools, outpatient clinics and, of course, all essential utility mains and roads.

The state is helping developers to build such facilities. For example, subsidies are being allocated for the construction of the relevant transport and engineering infrastructure, under the special Incentive programme. Last year, this made it possible to build 5.5 million square metres of housing.

We will continue this practice. This year, about 30 billion roubles will be provided for the implementation of the programme. There are plans to build almost 200 facilities that are necessary for the development of residential areas.