Over 400 delegates attended a fringe meeting addressed by the Secretaries of State for Trade and Industry (Patrick now Lord Jenkin) and Education and Science (Norman, now Lord Tebbit) on the critical importance of IT to the UK economy at the Conservative Party Conference in 1982. Over twenty IT companies had stands outside to reinforce that message

Then IT was seen as the "metatechnology" of the future. Today it really does underpin society. But the only IT-related fringe meetings at the conference this year appear to be those on the need to balance the war against terror and civil liberties within the ippr , programme, on the perils of electronic voting from the Openrights Group and on Avoiding Computer Aided Catastrophe (alias the need for a joined up approach to information assurance), organised by the Conservative Technology Forum . Few ICT suppliers are exhibiting at the conferences and most no longer have any public affairs or political relations staff to send.

LIttle wonder we do not have well informed political debate on matters IT

The Byron Review is an independent review of the risks to children from exposure to potentially harmful or inappropriate material on the internet and in video games. At this point the blogosphere will erupt with cries of "censorship" while parents will say "about time too", Lets hope that Dr Tanya Byron comes up with something that is at least as practical and sensible as in her TV programmes.

Last week I attended the Westminster E-Forum Keynote Seminar “A UK IT Skills Gap?”. Most of the discussion could have taken place in 1983, before the Butcher reports on IT Skills - but for the fact that our position, relative to the rest of the world, is so much worse and the minister who responded to the discussion did not appear to have been briefed on the scale and nature of the challenge.

The Transformational Government agenda is the most ambitious attempt to change the way government works since Sir John Hoskyns tried to apply systems thinking to Whitehall in the first days of Mrs Thatcher's government. Many commentators were therefore very sceptical as to its chances of success. The Service Transformation Agreement published as part of the support package for the Comprehensive Spending Review shows that the sceptics were both right and wrong. The task cannot be under-estimated but there now appears to be the necessary critical mass of support to enable success.

William Heath asks “what happened to the Crosby review” in his “Ideal Government” blog (a must for those of you who want to keep abreast of the thinking among the e-government movers and shakers). However, while I always find William’s insights most perceptive and his blog most informative I think he is on the wrong tack. I think that Crosby has put issues into the wider perspective and the result is even more challenging, across the whole of Whitehall, not just Home Office, than William speculates. Hence some of the drafting of the Public Service Agreement to which I referred in my entry on delivering the Transformation of Government.

Do you agree with the decision by the new Department for Innovation Universities and Skills to withdraw funding for ICT skills updating programmes, including the MSc conversion programmes that are our main source of high level security skills.

If so, do nothing.

If not read the HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) consultation on the Withdrawal of funding for equivalent or lower qualfications and reply before the 7th December.

The Conservative Government similarly withdrew funding for MSc Conversion Courses twenty years ago, helping exacerbate the then IT skills crisis and triggering the start of the trend towards offshoring..

The effect of this short-sighted action will be to hasten the demise of what is left - because the "exemptions" for critical skills in short supply do not currently include those needed to produce reliable, secure ICT systems, network or content. Such skills need continual updating - and MSc Conversion courses are one of the main sources.

Yesterday the Cabinet Office Mnister, Gillian Merron MP presided over the launch of the annual Get Safe On-line security awareness campaign. The GSOL website now includes material on business, as well as consumer protection and every customer-facing website should have a hot-link. And if you think the material needs improving, join up and help improve it.

Those at the launch event heard the usual barrage of statistics, this time from a survey of 2000 adults conducted by ICM in October. Three hit home.

- 88% of end users (and 99% of SMEs) now have some form of Internet Security software,
- 73% believe some-one else should have prime responsbility for their on-line security, usually those who want them to transact on-line (i.e. only 27% beleive they themselves should have prime responsbility)
- 36% will not bank on-line (and 21% will not even shop on-line).

Yesterday I received the following "Update" from Ofcom

"New Ofcom notification service - advanced notice of possible interuption to Global Positioning Systems: The Ministry of Defence conduct occasional tests on military systems which may result in some loss of service to civilian users of the Global Positioning System (GPS) including in-car navigation devices and networks which rely on GPS signals. Ofcom has today launched a new email update notification service to give advanced notification of these tests - To sign up for these email updates please register here: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/static/subscribe/select_list.htm

Yesterday the European Commission published its plans for a Single European Telecommunications Market . Meanwhile the Internet faced a "Bretton Woods Moment" .

The Bretton Woods Conference, which created the world systems for commercial and financial management was even less well reported in the world press in July 1944 than the
Internet Governance Forum on Rio de Janeiro that is happening this week. But the consequences of the IGF meeting are likely to be at least as profound.

Last week, in describing the challenge of moving towards citizen-centric service delivery, Sir David Varney reminded his audience that the current structure of Whitehall dates back to 1918, when Lloyd George's coalition government decided to organise the post World-War 1 public services in vertical silos, each with its own legislative powers. In order to protect against abuse the agencies were often forbidden to share information except under specific circumstances.

The minutes of the first of the EURIM "Transformational Government Dialogues are now available and help explain why the reform of public service delivery is so important, why it is so difficult and why technology enthusiasts are all too often part of the problem, not the solution,

Most public sector 'partnerships' are doomed before the procurement begins, let alone the implementaton. The exceptions are where service recipients and delivery partners are fully involved in the initial planning.

The petition calls on 'the Prime Minister to give the formation of a police central e-crime unit, as proposed by the Metropolitan Police and ACPO, urgent priority' including to help limit the damage from recent data leaks.

Nearly 130 MPs have now signed a motion opposing the ending of funding for the part time degree courses used by many of you to acquire or update the skills you need in order to remain employable.

I have just received the letter asking for inputs to the independent review requested by the Prime Minister. Inputs to this review will be discussed at most of my meetings tomorrow. What will you be doing to help?

The Innovation, Universities and Skills Committee is to conduct an enquiry into "Funding for Equivalent and Lower Qualifications (ELQs)". It is the cuts in these which threaten to wipe out ICT conversion and updating courses.

I got the name wrong. It is sousveillance not su-veillance, but we have now seen the concept at work over the past couple of weeks, as e-mails leak and the omni-incompetance of our over-centralised bureaucracies is exposed.

The announcements this week of further data losses result from a flurry of overdue reviews across Whitehall. But attention is still focussed on "data protection" rather than "information risk management". It therefore risks doing more harm than good.

The growing flood of data leak stories means that few, if any, large UK public sector ICT programmes will be progressed until political confidence is rebuilt. That is a major challenge for an industry that has lost touch with reality

Just before Christmas the Secretaries for Culture and Business, James Purnell and John Hutton, announced a ThinkTank to look at convergence. In parallel we are due to implement the AVMS Directive, which wrecks the economics.

From puberty to senility we are urged to put intimate details on-line via services like Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, Linked-In and Friends Re-United to be trawled by friends, predators, on-line marketeers, anti-piracy lawyers and information aggregators.

Today is the deadline for submissions to the public consultation on the first "operational" ID Cards Pilot - alias "The Trial of Smart Card Provisional Driving Licenses for Wales". How many of you huffers and puffers miss such exercises?

This evening the Number 10 Website had 8,245 petitions, on all sorts of subject from the serious to the frivolous. That on e-Crime has now climbed out of the noise. It may have only 348 signatures: but what quality!

The DIUS (Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills) consultation on its Innovation Strategy closes on 31st January. This goes to heart of UK survival as a technologically advanced nation. Make your views known - via all channels open to you.

The consultation on the Innovation Strategy of the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills closes tomorrow. The questions assume hierarchies of committees to tour the world, pick winners and measure success by "publication".

No wonder there was such a massive attempt to bury or re-write the Crosby report. The release of his report on the same day that David Davis launched a stinging attack on the lack of priority being given to action on e-Crime entails a major change of rationale as well as of implementation strategy. Don't settle for the press cover. Read the report.

The news that Yahoo is to move its European Headquarters from London to Geneva, following the location of Google's European Engineering headquarters in Zurich (as opposed to London or Cambridge), confirms the fears I have long expressed over the impact of what is now the Audio-Visual Media Services Directive.

It takes a child psychologist to navigate the politics of Whitehall and the Internet and produce, on time, a meaty report whose recommendations will be almost impossible to ignore - despite some painful stings - although I would prefer to call them "therapeutic accupuncture"

I have agreed to chair the session on "Ethical aspects related to the use of government on-line services" at the European Commission workshop on "Ethics and e-Inclusion" in early May. In parallel I am mapping "issues and players" for the new UK Internet Governance Forum. As with climate change it looks as though we are walking backwards into a most uncertain future.

Most government on-line systems are inaccessible to most of those of those they are most intended to serve - was my personla summary of the of the introductory discussions at the EU workshop on Ethics and e-Inclusion that I attended on Monday. The consequences are not only unethical, they are indefensible by almost any measure other than technophilia.

On May 15th I promised to blog again on the conclusions from the session I chaired at the European Commission workshop in Bled on social inclusion, ethics, the "forced" use of e-government services and "digital citizens rights". These have no official status, they but an extract from my report back to a plenary but ...

The Internet is the most concentrated and regulated communications system the world has ever known. Players like Google or Microsoft take a far larger revenue share of the markets within which they operate than Standard Oil, Ma Bell or IBM ever did. Meanwhile over 500 agencies and regulators in the UK alone claim powers to access traffic data or stored content: albeit almost none are capable of securing what they demands.

A strong response to the consultation on the "Additional Uses of Patient Data" (e.g. to help planning, research, audit etc) could change the nature of UK debate on data protection and information security . Respond as a patient. Ensure responses from all organisations with which you are involved. Get them to distribute to their employers and members to also reply as patients.

HMG has just launched a consultation to extend the remit of Ofcom to promote "efficient investment in infrastructure". The six week timescale is determined by the need to legislate before the next government reviews the very existance of Ofcom. But can we afford a two year wait for a proper review of the UK communications infrastructure, given the stress tests it will face in 2012 if not before? And can we afford to leave that review to Ofcom? 

Those involved in the pre-legislative scrutiny of the Communications Act 2003 which created Ofcom were well aware of the need to subsequently review implementation and perfomance. There were various ideas as to how to achieve this: including a joint committee of both Houses. None came to pass.

I blogged last week on plans for the EURIM Dragon's Dens at the Party Conferences. On Monday it is Bournemouth. After each Den I plan to post a note on the political priorities for action on ICT as seen by the Candidates of that party.