Whitehall departments could face a mandatory levy to pay
for key "common good" projects within the government's new IT
strategy if the recommendations of the Cabinet Office's Strategy
Project Team are adopted.
The report was produced for the CIO Council and the Service
Transformation Board, which will be set up as part of the
government IT strategy announced in early November.
The Cabinet Office has emphasised that the strategy team's
report is "a working, internal discussion document" and is "not
itself a statement of government policy or of approved
recommendations". Even so, the report was published by the Cabinet
Office alongside its government IT strategy documents.
It urges the Treasury to, "consider mechanisms, including a
system of mandatory levies on existing departmental budgets, to
fund common good or infrastructure investments proposed by the CIO
Council or the Service Transformation Board".
The formal IT strategy document says that about £1.4bn - 10% of
the £14bn spent each year by government on technology - could be
"unlocked" from the cost of running legacy systems. This money
could, according to the IT strategy, be "released to new
technology-enabled reforms in public services".
The research paper calls for a common infrastructure, "where
government services converge around the citizen and organisations
adopt commercial off-the-shelf technology solutions".
It says that "common technology will enable joined-up solutions,
leverage investments and shorten the implementation timeframe of
new reforms".
To facilitate the reforms the paper wants government to form a
"user-led Common Infrastructure Board" which should be supported
from the Cabinet Office and "financed through user investment".
It should set out a roadmap and timetable for the delivery of
common infrastructure.