In the first of three articles by the major political
parties, the Conservatives explain their stance on IT issues and
how they would help our industry
Communications networks have a role in the 21st century as
important as railways in the 19th century and roads in the 20th
century.
The last Conservative government planned a period of regulated
duopoly to enable the cable companies to build alternative
infrastructures before BT was unchained in 2002 and Oftel wound up.
Then Labour was elected. Within months Oftel had been transformed
into a pension plan for civil servants, regulating access to the BT
network until their dotage.
But as Labour fiddled with stakeholder groups and burdensome
regulation, our overseas competitors forged ahead with their plans.
From Brussels to Beijing, from Stockholm to Seoul, home-workers
have bandwidth not available in the UK outside a few science parks,
and the elderly can see their grandchildren play when they go
online for a video gossip.
On 11 April, the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao met his Indian
counterpart Manmohan Singh in Bangalore and said their two
countries must make use of their complementary IT skills, China's
hardware expertise and India's software know-how, to make the 21st
century the "Asian century of the IT industry". We need to recover
Labour's eight wasted years and deliver internationally competitive
bandwidth to work and home so that you can network interactively
with your customers and suppliers on the same terms as your
competitors in Belgium or the Netherlands, let alone those in Japan
or Korea.
For the UK to be a location where information age businesses can
flourish, not just a declining centralised, socialist state, fit
only for planners, regulators and bureaucrats, we need to bring the
growing army of regulators under control, ensuring their ongoing
operations are effective, efficient, affordable and properly
assessed.
In e-government, the UK has gone from near pole position, in 1997,
to middle of the pack. The sixth annual Accenture rankings place
the UK above France but behind Germany in internet usage, and
behind both when it comes to online dealings with government.
Labour is locked in a time warp of centralised command and control
programmes that take little account of the people who are to run
them, let alone the needs of those they are supposedly to
serve.
The national programme for IT in the NHS is a classic example. The
centralised patient records system is part of a genuinely
transformational agenda: to complete the transfer of control over
health care from clinicians to politicians, begun in the 1940s but
put on hold by all subsequent governments. This is to be achieved
by centralising bookings as well as records so that performance
against target and contract can be monitored and rewarded.
It is not merely the largest IT programme in the world but the
largest change programme in the UK since the post war
nationalisations, and it is being implemented to tight timescales
with strong penalty clauses.
Already major suppliers are warning shareholders (under Stock
Exchange rules) of penalties incurred for non-performance. The
Conservative Tech- nology Forum has suggested ways to greatly
reduce the risks while improving security, resilience and the
likelihood of success.
A similar confusion of objectives, compounded by the track record
of failure in the implementation of Home Office information
systems, lies behind the mix of support and scepticism over ID
cards. Most citizens want to be able to deal with government via a
single point of contact (Citizens Advice Bureau, post office or
community centre). The main barrier is the failure to share
information between departments, even when citizens request
it.
Meanwhile, there is a tangled web of powers to demand information,
confusion over governance and a common lack of control over the
contractors and temporary staff who enter or retrieve publicly held
data.
The pressure from voters to see joined up government is paralleled
by massive scepticism in the competence of government and its
suppliers to deliver the savings and efficiency improvements being
promised.
And e-crime is not "just" phishing, spam, denial of service and
child pornography. Half of all theft and fraud now involves
computers. Law enforcement is well short of the skills and
resources necessary to keep abreast of the criminal use of
technology.
We therefore need co-operation across the boundaries between law
enforcement and industry (protecting both itself and its customers)
as well as between agencies and regulators.
One of the keys to that co-operation is to update the Computer
Misuse Act, particularly to make the offences extraditable and thus
within mainstream routines for international co-operation. All
parties are in agreement on this and I hope that Computer Weekly
will continue its campaign and ensure that whoever is home
secretary on 6 May puts this well above the many issues on which
the parties differ.
Michael Fabricant is the Conservative shadow minister for
industry and technology
www.conservativetechnologyforum.equology.com/html
