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19 November 2002
Question time
Rt Hon Patricia
Hewitt MP, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, and Stephen Timms MP, Minister of State, Department of Trade and Industry, responsible for e-Commerce, to take questions from the floor
Patricia Hewitt
Jeremy
– thank you very much indeed. A great pleasure to be here this afternoon. I am going to say a few words by way of introduction
to this session and then with Stephen and Andrew Pinder we’ll
have a chance to take some questions and some comment. But first of all, may I say how delighted I
am that we’ve got such an extensive and expert international
audience here for this e-Summit. There is no doubt at all that in this world of electronic
government, electronic businesses, electronic services generally,
we need to be sharing policy and experience, sharing from
the best practice but also from the mistakes, from right across
the world.
I
particularly want to thank all the people here today who have
been involved in preparing the Booz Allen Hamilton benchmarking
report which we are publishing today. Now this report makes
a very important contribution to a very important debate. We set the target, as you know, four years ago of making
ourselves the best place in the world for electronic commerce.
And as the Prime Minister said this morning, it is essential
that we here in Britain really
take advantage of the huge potential of information and communication
of technology. Now
the report that we are publishing today shows how far we have
come. There are three
positive areas that I particularly want to highlight, but
then are also three challenges for the United
Kingdom that I want
to mention.
First of all the progress that we’ve
made. We set the target, as I say, of being the best
in the world and we have achieved second best, second only
to the United
States in the e-environment.
And when I look back to the scepticism and some of the scoffing
we had when we set that target, I think we should all we proud
of just how far we’ve come. In particular, the growing ICT
sector, a sophisticated venture capital market, amongst the
lowest price in the world for internet access and, of course,
the highest penetration of digital television in the world. I was delighted to hear Digby Jones this morning,
who is not always an uncritical fan of the government, say
this really is an outstanding achievement.
Second,
we are ranked in third place for participation by citizen
but also have a high number of internet shoppers and thirdly,
we are ranked in second place for business uptake of e-government
services and we’ve got one of the best states of e-government
readiness in terms of service availability.So that’s all good news and we are pleased to
hear it.
But
of course, we are not in any way there yet and the report
sets out very clearly three big challenges. First of all on e-government services, yes, we’ve got more and more services ready, but we’ve
only got one in ten of our people using them. So what we are
now doing is focusing much more sharply on the most regular
transactions, things like personal income tax and benefits.
We have enhanced the 2005 electronic service delivery target
so that there is a clear target for take up, not just for
availability. And that is one of the reasons that we are now
investing an additional £6billion in ICT over the three next
years so that we do transform government services in ways
that will achieve take up.
Secondly,
on broadband, and although many of you will know that broadband
in the UK is now one of the cheapest in the world, indeed
it is cheaper than in the United States, there still isn’t
access for everybody. About
two-thirds of households live within an area where broadband
is available through one means or another but not everybody. So we’ve still got more to do to stimulate broadband
across the whole country, particularly in rural areas. And
I was delighted to hear from a colleague this morning of an
experiment that is going on in the East Midlands, in Sherwood
Forest, where the Regional Development Agency has helped to
fund and pioneer a satellite based broadband access project
that has connected up an entire small town. We need more of
that and we will be spending more than £1million on connecting
up Government services by broadband and by boosting demand
in that way, we think we can help promote industry investment
and availability.
The
third challenge relates to business use of information and
communication technology. The report ranks us third overall
for e-business performance. We have got high investment in
ICT, we’ve got a high proportion of businesses with web sites,
we’ve got a high proportion of SMEs online. There is a still
a huge amount more in terms of potential productivity gains
which we need to exploit, so businesses and particularly our
SMEs need to move well beyond just thinking about email and website presence to using ICT to transform their business
planning and business processing. And we’ve all seen the impact
that that can have in particular businesses.
I
remember visiting a textiles company in the East Midlands
which is at the forefront of the very exciting developments
in technologies which allow you to dye synthetic and man-made
fabrics. But on top of that, they had invested in creative
leading edge information and communication software that enables
them instead of dyeing 50 samples and then sending them to
the customer overseas to see which one is exactly right, they
can now create the exact replica of that particular dye on
that particular fabric to such an extent you feel you could
reach out and touch the screen and feel the texture of the
fabric. And so electronically they can give the customer instant
access to exactly the right dye, the right colour and texture
effect, massively speeding up the ordering process and of
course the accuracy of the colour delivery.
So,
some big achievements there. We should be proud of those. We can celebrate them and thank everyone who has contributed
to them but some huge challenges are ahead and today Andrew
and I are also publishing the UK online Annual Report which
sets out a little bit more about how we are going to meet
those challenges. Both these reports - the benchmarking study
and the annual report - you will be receiving during the next
break. But for the time being I look forward to hearing your
questions and continuing to work in what I hope will be an
increasingly strong partnership, the Information Age Partnership
- and the much broader partnership that will enable us to
go on being one of the very best places in the world for e-commerce.
Thank
you.
Jeremy
Vine
We
are going to be joined by Stephen Timms as well and the e-envoy
Andrew Pinder is with me and we have these questions for you. I’ll start, I think, with you Stephen Timms with a
question, the theme of which came up again this morning, which
is: “What are you going
to do about the half of the population who say they don’t
care about the internet and they don’t want to use it, let
alone buy things online?”
Stephen
Timms
I
think it is very important that we get the message through
to those people. The
Prime Minister, in his speech before lunch, announced that
we’d succeeded in delivering the 6,000th UK online centre.
The aim of those is to make sure there is easy access available
within close range to where people live and at those centres
we are delivering training for people so they can develop,
in a very simple way, the skills they need to take advantage
of the technology. I think the problem is that there is a
fear issue here that is constraining people. People know the
internet is important, they know that is a valuable opportunity
for them. We need to make sure that they can get the skills,
get access to the technology in a successful way and I think
the new network and the rolling out of the courses at those
centres will help.
Jeremy
Vine
But
isn’t the point, Patricia Hewitt, that they have had access
to that already and they’ve passed up on it. They don’t want
it or they don’t need it?
Patricia
Hewitt
Stephen
has said all the right things – absolutely.
Jeremy
Vine
He
has to.
Patricia
Hewitt
He
always does! What I should have said is that I agree with
everything Stephen has just said, which I do, but I do think
part of this is about having really exciting stuff that people
want to do, that you know just helps solve problems in their
everyday lives. A lot of my constituents, in particular in
Asian-British families, use email absolutely daily because
that is the way they keep in touch with family back in the
Indian sub-continent or in East Africa or in North America.
They’re not writing letters, they are not sending photographs,
the whole thing is being done on the internet. Again, a lot
of elderly constituents I find are getting more and more absorbed,
not just in keeping tracking of their current family but researching
their family tree. And there is nothing better than the internet
for actually doing that.
Jeremy
Vine
They
need a computer at home, your elderly constituents, they are
not going to walk two miles to the Post Office to stand in
a queue and use a computer and they have to pay £1,000 to
get that computer, or £500 to get it.
Patricia
Hewitt
Well,
increasingly the UK online access centres are particularly
in the disadvantaged communities and that is where I meet
a lot of elderly people. And not just elderly, but a lot of
people who are using the internet and absolutely loving it
and, of course, increasingly the access is not just going
to come through computers, it will come through digital televisions
and it will come through mobile phones as well.
Jeremy
Vine
We
had this issue raised this morning, Andrew Pinder, of universal
access and what that means and we had someone defining it
as within walking distance of your home or as available to
some people who might want it. There’s no real definition is there and I think
that’s the problem.
Andrew
Pinder
I
think there’s no legal definition absolutely, but I think
there is a moral definition that says we are making it easy
for people. As Patricia says, there are a variety of ways
by which you can access the internet, it doesn’t have to be
by the internet, there are digital televisions. There are
about seven million digital televisions and there are more
digital televisions in people’s homes than there are PCs and
there’s a big overlap between the two, so that I think that
is last year’s argument in a way, if you will forgive me for
saying so Jeremy. Last year’s argument was the one about it’s
hard for people to actually get physical access.
This
stuff is prevalent now everywhere. You see kiosks in railway stations, you see this stuff
everywhere and actually it’s quite hard to avoid. And that’s why I think the argument about have we delivered
universal access is over. We have reached out. We have opened up over
6,000 centres across the country. 90% of the population have got these things within
walking distance. They are in every library, kids have got them
at school, most of us work in offices with internet access,
there’s stuff in people’s homes, lots of PCs in homes. There
are digital TV sets, you go to a railway station and you’ve
got kiosks there - Pierre will talk about that for sure -
there are BT internet phones everywhere.
Jeremy
Vine
But
you are saying that we have now universal access. We are there.
Andrew
Pinder
I
think we have now delivered universal access.
Jeremy
Vine
Does
anyone agree with that? Who thinks that we now have universal
access? That’s the
crucial thing.
Andrew
Pinder
No,
I think the crucial thing is this: I think the universal physical
access is there but I think what’s interesting and what was
behind your question is what are we going to do about the
people who have the physical access but they haven’t got either
the motivation or the skill or the confidence to use the stuff.
And that’s where I really think we’ve got to make some moves.
Jeremy
Vine
Another
question, Patricia Hewitt, following on from the first that
was put into our box at lunchtime. People think the internet
is full of paedophiles and fraudsters. How are you going to
get people online if it’s a place they fear?
Patricia
Hewitt
There
are real fears. From parents, I think, in particular. And those are perfectly understandable and reasonable
fears. It’s not the
internet of course creating these new crimes, but it is the
criminal taking advantage of the user and that’s where the
screening software is terribly important, especially for parents. We’ve been doing a lot of work supporting, for instance,
the UK Internet Watch Foundation, to help make the internet
a much safer place. And ensure that parents understand the
risks but also the way they can minimise those risks and feel
safe, and to support their children in their internet use.
And we also, through the schools, are making sure that children
are aware of the dangers and not doing things like giving
their home address when emailing a chat room.
Jeremy
Vine
Has
it ever crossed your mind that the downside can be greater
than the upside?
Patricia
Hewitt
I
don’t think that is the case at all. I think if we look at
the huge benefit in our personal lives as well as in our business
lives; and I speak as someone with two children as well as
someone who is professionally committed to all this. I don’t think the downsides are bigger than the upsides
but I think most scientific and technological breakthroughs
create downsides as well as huge upsides and we have to learn
to behave appropriately and manage those new risks.
Jeremy
Vine
Again
and again this morning, Stephen Timms, we heard, particularly
from the Chief Executive of Liverpool Council that unless
you actually have decent services, there’s no point in giving
people easier access to those services through the net. So it all comes back to delivery in other areas
doesn’t it?
Stephen
Timms
We
certainly need to be ready to change the way we deliver our
services to make the most of the technological possibilities
that are available to us. That’s the message from businesses. Through the UK
online business programme in the DTI, we are working with
small and medium-sized businesses looking at how they can achieve transformation
in their businesses through the technological possibilities
that are now available. We
need to make those changes in local and national Government
as well.
Jeremy
Vine
But
the point is that once you open the Government’s doors and
you say you can get through them quicker, you need to be delivering
things faster and at the moment, there’s no evidence that
you are, is there?
Stephen
Timms
Oh,
I think we are. We’ve got three-quarters of Government services
available online now. The
commitment is to have all of them available online by 2005. I think we will achieve that. We are doing an enormous amount that the Prime
Minister was speaking about - the £6billion we will be investing
over the next three years - this morning. I think we are going
to be in a place to allow everybody to reap the benefits of
the technology with Government services.
Jeremy
Vine
Question
in the box for you, Andrew Pinder. Would the establishment
of a single electronic identity for each citizen help with
Government efficiency and security? What are the plans?
Andrew
Pinder
There
aren’t any plans at the moment. As you know, this is a deeply sensitive and controversial
subject and that’s why David Blunkett announced that we are
going to have consultation on this. And there is consultation
underway at the moment with the Home Office and I think the
consultation intends to run until mid-January and we’ll see
what the public has to say about it. It’s something that raises
big data protection issues and I think we have to balance
those and individuals have to have a real say in how we take
that forward.
Jeremy
Vine
But
leaving aside the privacy argument for a second, Patricia
Hewitt, it would make things work faster, wouldn’t it, if
everyone could key in a seven-digit number and a letter and
that’s them.
Patricia
Hewitt
I
think we should always beware of the idea that there is some
silver bullet out there that could solve all problems and
make everything frightfully easy and you can’t simply say
‘put aside the privacy argument’ because you know, we all
of us carry various forms of identity. I see, in terms again
of some of my own constituents, the huge problems that arise
for people who actually don’t have good ways of establishing
ways of their identity. They don’t travel abroad because they
don’t have a passport, they can’t afford a car, they don’t
have a driving licence, they can find it very difficult. So that’s one problem – which is the problem of social
exclusion but I also see the problem of identity fraud and
that is a very real problem. It relates to illegal immigration but also to
financial and commercial fraud where people steal another
person’s identity or create a completely false identity for
themselves. So you know, technology does not solve all of
these problems.
We
have to look at what are the appropriate levels of identification,
proving your identity to get access to different services.
And we have to deal with those privacy questions in order
to get advantages from having a more robust system of establishing
identity, whether that is a sort of electronic card or something
else.
Jeremy
Vine
Just
out of interest Stephen Timms, would you personally mind having
an electronic identity?
Stephen
Timms
I
personally wouldn’t object to having an electronic identity,
but I think there are some very big issues affecting very
large numbers of people in an area where the Government needs
to proceed with a great deal of care and caution.
Jeremy
Vine
Patricia
Hewitt, a question again. Private sector companies which have
successfully embraced ‘e’ – we were going to ban the letter
‘e’, but now we can’t do without it – have generally fundamentally
re-engineered whole processes in their business, beyond just
applying the technology. The questioner wants to know: is
the Government really ready and willing to face the disruptive
challenge of what they call ‘process re-engineering’?
Patricia
Hewitt
We
are, but there is no doubt that sometimes we do it better
than other places. When
I look at what Ordnance Survey has done for instance, I mean,
they have transformed the entire way they do their business.
I think the Prime Minister may have referred to that this
morning. Great stuff there, if you have a look at the
Ask Giraffe web site. If you look at what we are now planning
to do on prescriptions, that’s a complete re-engineering of
the process. It’s not a question of bringing in the form
manually and then keying it in. It’s an issue of having the
whole thing, from the original writing of the prescription
done online, through to the chemist, copied to the reporting
people in the middle who analyse all the data, that’s fed
back in real time to the GPs and the management so that they
can see the prescription patterns and so on. Now that would
be a transformation because the process at the moment is cumbersome,
it’s expensive, it’s about six million pieces of paper a year,
I think, something ghastly. So we are thinking very big about that.
Similarly
conveyancing, where the Land Registry, the Lord Chancellor’s
department and so on are involved in what will be end to end
electronic delivery of land and property conveyancing. A huge piece of re-engineering which we enabled with
the Electronic Commerce Act a couple of years ago. But we don’t always think as radically as that in Government
and there‘s a real change of mindset that we need from ministers
as well as officials that says: “don’t just take the existing
processes and add a bit of IT, but change the whole way you
think about what the service is and how you deliver it.”
Jeremy
Vine
And
that is again something we’ve talked about this morning, Andrew
Pinder, isn’t it? That
when you have an existing process, trying to bulk change on
top of that is really difficult. Can you give us some examples
of where the e-process has just not jelled with what’s already
there.
Andrew
Pinder
I
don’t think I do because I think that would be invidious.
I think there are lots of examples where most members of your
audience can pick up there, so I am not going to do that but
what I would like to do is build on what Patricia is saying
because I think there are a number of points there. First
of all, we have got a big opportunity with this technology.
In the past, we have sort of delivered services because that
was the only way we could deliver a particular service and
that’s why they are the way they are. Sometimes they’re clunky
and sometimes they are difficult but actually, given what
we had to work with, that is what we had to do. I think what we have now is a real opportunity
to start building services in a much more customer focussed
kind of way and again, that was a point made earlier. I think
that’s absolutely right. To get away from the old distribution-channel
focussed way of doing things to saying: “let’s start building
things from a customer-centric point of view.” And we are
working on that.
We’ve
got some work going on at the moment in the business area,
being led by an official from Patricia’s department. We are
using the working title “business.gov” - it will end up like
that probably - but trying to build a range of services that
are aimed at a business. What does a business need to be online?
How do we deliver the whole range of Government services in
a very focussed way, to them, around them, rather than around
the individual Government departments that are supplying those
services? And that’s what we really mean by re-engineering
and transformation. It’s not just taking the Inland Revenue
and trying to make their internal processes more efficient,
it’s saying ‘what do I as a citizen want from the Inland Revenue?’
Well, I want a range of services from them and from a whole
pile of other Government departments that look seamless and
integrated so that we genuinely do have joined-up Government.
Jeremy
Vine
Question
four here on the paper is: until now, e-Government seems to
have been about getting the easy information services online.
When are you going to start the hard work of letting us do
business with you online?
Andrew
Pinder
Some
of it feels like pretty hard work now actually, so I think
that obviously we are going to take the easy stuff anyway. Why leave good fruit hanging there? And an awful lot of it has been taken. But we are also
doing some pretty gritty stuff. Patricia has talked about
Ordnance Survey for example, but there are lots of other departments
who are doing some really heavy duty work to get their services
online. It’s not been easy for them. Sometimes the effort
has been pretty visible to people too. It’s been hard to do,
so I think we have already started the hard work. Stephen
has already mentioned that we have about three-quarters of
our services which will be online by the end of this year,
and we are working on the rest. In particular we are prioritising
some of the services that appear to be important services
to people, to make sure that they are done in an attractive
way that make people feel that they want to use them.
Jeremy
Vine
Can
you think of an example, Stephen Timms, where the whole e-process
hasn’t really jelled with what’s there and it’s been difficult
to re-engineer it? Off
the record.
Stephen
Timms
I
mean I can think of lots of examples. Some good, some bad. Actually, in local Government there have been
some superb examples of where people have run with the e-agenda
in a very effective way. My local authority, Newham, has done
so and I think local councils in a number of places have blazed
a trail. We are seeing some very good results in central
Government along the way. There have been difficulties but
I think people have learned their lessons from those and are
building those lessons into the coming generation of e-services.
Jeremy
Vine
We
had a BBC presentation this morning - I don’t know if you
were here for it - but it was talking about getting people
involved in politics. Directly.
Now, are you worried if somebody can click on a website and
register their views on something that that cuts out the politicians. Patricia Hewitt?
Patricia
Hewitt
No,
I’m not and in any case, it’s happening and it’s going to
go on happening and there’s no point in complaining about
it. What I am very
interested in is how we can use the advantages of the internet
as a tool for a much richer form of democratic engagement.
I mean, simply clicking on an opinion poll or phoning in and
registering your vote is pretty limited. And actually the
exciting forms of political engagement are much more about
deliberative democracy - you know in the physical world –
citizens’ juries and people’s panels where you can get people
together interrogating the so-called experts and policy makers
and then building their own consensus around what the real
issues are and what ought to be done.
We
have just done some quite interesting online consultation,
as well as offline, on the energy policy that we are developing
for the White Paper. And I think that’s an area where we,
and others, could be much more imaginative. And that would
enrich the whole policy making and parliamentary process and
would help re-engage people with more formal politics which
we have to do. People
are feeling very disengaged and unless we change the way we
work and communicate with people, I think that disengagement
will only get worse.
Jeremy
Vine
But
how do you keep track of the babble that’s out there on the
net and interactively and so on, but as soon as you try and
stream it surely, as soon as you try and make that a formal
response to something, you lose the genuine picture.
Patricia
Hewitt
There
will always be, you know, all the chat rooms, all the stuff
that goes on and certainly one of the tricks Government has
had to start learning is just to get engaged with that itself.
I remember during the lead up to the Millennium Bug that never
was, we made sure that we had officials who were just constantly
in the websites and the chat rooms because there was a staggering
amount of misinformation around. And it was just important
that we knew what was being said, and we were also countering
that with what we believed to be better information.
Jeremy
Vine
So
the next time any of us is in a chat room, we might bump into
a Government official
Patricia
Hewitt
You
never know.
Jeremy
Vine
That’s
an amazing thought.
Patricia
Hewitt
You
might even bump into a ministe, but not necessarily under
their own identity.
Jeremy
Vine
Okay,
I won’t comment on that. No, no, I won’t. Stephen Timms. We’ve got about four or five
minutes left so I’ll just do the other questions that came
out of our box. Our very electronic box. Stephen Timms, we
all know that IT projects keep failing. How are you going
to make sure that investment in e-Government isn’t frittered
away?
Stephen
Timms
We
are learning the lessons. The Office of Government Commerce
has looked very carefully at the lessons from the last IT
projects there have been and are building those into planning
for the coming projects. So I think we are going to be able
to be pretty confident, particularly about ways of taking
out the risk, of designing the project in a way that there
isn’t a serious risk following implementation. For example, making sure that as projects come
on stream, there is a managed migration up to the full capacity
of the system. Those
kinds of lessons that we’ve taken to heart from some of the
problems we’ve had in the past.
Jeremy
Vine
Speaking
as a layman, everything seems to be obsolete in six months.
Isn’t that true of some of your ideas?
Stephen
Timms
Well
there might be the odd one or two that is, I suppose, but
no, I think the systems we are building now are going to be
serving us for a long time as past Government services have
been actually. There are lots of systems around that have
been in use for a long time and I think the systems we are
putting in place now will be too.
Jeremy
Vine
Thank
you. Andrew Pinder, from the box again. How can the UK marketplace for broadband be fully opened
up, as in the case of South Korea, so that competitive pressures
can ensure cheap, high quality roll out for all?
Andrew
Pinder
Well,
I think our market has been opened up actually. We’ve got
a very competitive market in the UK, especially for narrowband
and increasingly, there is an open market for a number of
suppliers for broadband. That market is really very immature
at the moment, it is just developing, we are seeing it building
up. As more and more demand does build up, I think we will
see more and more providers being in that market. Physically, it’s a very difficult thing to deliver
broadband in the next year or two to everyone, simply because
of the enormous investment that will be required to get it
to the extremities of the country in its current form. But
there are a variety of ways in which you might deliver services,
for example, through satellite.
Jeremy
Vine
Interesting
that this morning, when we asked how many people had broadband,
I think certainly more than 50% in this room did, but when
asked was broadband essential for e-delivery, most people
thought not.
Andrew
Pinder
I
think that’s probably right, because we are deliberately designing
our services so that people who don’t have broadband aren’t
taken out. We’ve got to deliver our services in a way which
make them accessible by everyone, whether by narrowband or
broadband. Having said that, most of us here would agree that
for the future, having access to broadband is going to be
essential for the UK and that’s what we’ve been working really
hard over the last 12-18 months or so to deliver.
Jeremy
Vine
Patricia
Hewitt, last question to you: You’ve missed your target to
get one million small and medium sized enterprises trading
online. In fact, the questioner says, there are very few SMEs
trading online. How are you going to change that?
Patricia
Hewitt
It’s
an interesting issue this one. There aren’t as many businesses
as we’d hoped for trading online although the volumes of e-commerce
generally have been going up. I think what we did in focussing on the trading online
bit was to miss the fact that actually what matters, particularly
to SMEs, is to use the internet as effectively as they can
and frankly right through the value chain and the supply chain,
to make the business more successful and to cut their costs.
And I think we are finding in the UK online for business service
that it’s that much richer use of internet technologies that
SMEs can really profit from.
Jeremy
Vine
But
maybe they’ve looked at it and it doesn’t work for them?
Patricia
Hewitt
That
may be right, in which case there may be issues that may partly
be to do with the customer base. There may be issues there
about whether they can effectively deliver on those orders.
In other words, just taking the online trading theme is not
necessarily the most important thing and I think it comes
back to the point you were making about Government. You’ve
got to re-engineer the whole process in order to get real
advantage out of this.
Jeremy
Vine
I’d
like to thank you all very much, Stephen Timms, Patricia Hewitt
and Andrew Pinder for joining me here on our panel. Thank
you very much and I’m on an ordinary telephone dial up connection
at home by the way.
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