The government is not thinking radically enough on how IT could
improve public services, politicians at the Conservative Party
Conference said yesterday.
West Midlands MEP Malcolm Harbour said the UK's performance in
technology areas, particularly software development, needs to
improve. He said, "I think we should be doing better than we are.
We do not seem to be playing the sort of role in software that we
should be."
But he added that UK retailers are some of the best companies at
successfully applying IT. "We are good in retail - Tesco, for
example, is arguably the world's biggest retailer, and that is
because it has been so successful in the way it has deployed its
systems."
He was speaking at a meeting of the
Conservative Technology Forum.
Charles Hendry, MP for Wealden and shadow minister for energy,
industry and postal affairs, said spending on procurement needs to
be re-thought. "Government spends around £4bn on research and
development, and £125bn on procurement. We should be using the
procurement budget more sensibly than we do at the moment."
Harbour added that one of David Cameron's aims in government
would be to delegate power to local authorities, and this would
create a need for IT systems on a smaller, local scale, instead of
big, centralised systems.
He said, "We need to be encouraging investment in innovative new
technology and rethink completely the process of delivering public
service. We are not thinking radically enough. We need to think
about how we are going to encourage the development of the next big
ideas in software platforms."
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