Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am delighted to see so many of our overseas colleagues in attendance, I wish to extend an extra special welcome to them. There are also people here from local and central Government, health and industries from the Global environment. I hope you find new contacts and a sense of inspiration that you have in the UK Government someone who is aware of what we need to do and with a sense of direction and want to work in partnership with all concerned.

Every day we hear and read so much about the revolution overtaking our lives through the impact of the information age and, above all, the Internet. Most of this coverage is about the challenges for the business community as it confronts a totally new consumer environment.

I would like to spend the next few minutes outlining our vision and direction for this initiative.

• Better Policy making

• Public service focussed on users

• Extending access to government services

• Promoting best practice and excellence
• Using IT to improve and transform Government.

• What we don't want is to affect the business of government in the delivery of services round the IT model, but what we want to do is to design our businesses in terms of what the needs of our citizens are. We should then use IT to make sure we deliver and transform those services. IT is a vehicle that enables us to Modernise Government.

As a government we are working together to push forward this agenda. We currently have a Ministerial team comprising of myself on e-government, Patricia Hewitt on e-commerce, and a network of 16 ministers from across Government who have been given responsibility to take political and management responsibility in their departments to drive this agenda forward

This is supported by 40 senior Board level Officials from across Whitehall and the Public Sector Agencies, Local Authorities, and Devolved Administrations forming the Information Age Champions Group. This group is in turn chaired by the e-Envoy.

As you are aware, sadly Alex Allan is having to leave his job on personal grounds, having achieved so much in a such a short time. However, the government is committed to finding a replacement for this highly strategic post as soon as possible. We have already commenced an open competition to find his successor.

The Information Age Agenda is shared by all in government. And even this morning in this venue, the Chancellor has taken part in the UK Internet Summit - looking at implications for the UK economy. The new scheme has three aims:

• To bridge the gap between those with computers and those without, ensuring no-one is left out of the internet revolution;

• To boost opportunities to work and train in the poorest and most deprived communities; and

• To put the UK at the forefront of the IT revolution, as part of meeting the Prime Minister’s pledge to ensure everyone has access to the Internet by 2005.

The Chancellor today revealed new and disturbing figures showing that whereas one in two of the richest families are now on the Internet, only one in twenty of the poorest families are linked up.

He outlined a plan to wire up some of Britain’s poorest communities, and offer on-line services and free on-line learning in IT skills.

The first community to benefit will be Kensington in Liverpool which has 14,000 residents, high levels of poverty and unemployment three times the national average, together with a range of other social and environmental problems. It will be wired up in a unique partnership between a range of organisations including ICL and Gardner Systems firms, which will offer free computers to every resident in the pilot area.

9 more communities to benefit from the initiative will be announced at a later date.

But that is not enough if we are going to close the gap between the information rich and information poor

Other measures to cross the digital divide include:

- on-line basic skills training free of charge for the unemployed;

- tax free computer loans on offer by employers;

The £15 million Computers Within Reach initiative which Education Secretary David Blunkett is leading will provide up to 100,000 recycled computers to low income families. Today, Education Minister Michael Wills is announcing the first wave of 35,000 computers.

This Government’s ambition is clear for us as a nation to be at the forefront of the new global knowledge economy.

This is vital to our future prosperity; we are putting in place procedures to ensure that we create an Information Rich and not an Information Poor society.

Internet access, like education, is the new equaliser of opportunity. In the future, being part of the net community will be a defining condition for taking part in society itself. This is why we must do all we can to bring down the barriers to connection and getting on-line.

Multiple access channels to our services is a primary goal for government. Everything from the Internet, Kiosks, Mobile phones, and Digital TV to name but a few.

Digital TV is of increasing importance to our agenda. It is a future means of universal access for not only giving the citizen an enhanced experience but also ensuring social inclusivity for our services.

Digital TV is very attractive as a delivery medium – in that most homes have TV’s and people are much more comfortable with a TV and a Remote Control than PC and keyboard. This is why we intend to make Digital Television a major channel for our UK Online Citizen Portal.

But we are doing much more on access.

A key strand of UK online is ensuring universal access to the internet by 2005. We are creating a new network of UK online centres, where citizens will be able to surf the net, and get advice and training if they need it. The Prime Minister has already announced the first 600 centres.

We're connecting all our public libraries to the Internet with Lottery funding - the single largest investment in the uk’s library network since its creation 150 years ago. And we're piloting Internet access in Post Offices. By the end of 2002, we're aiming to ensure 6,000 UK online centres across the country.

But Access is only one part of our strategy. You are all aware that government has not only set the vision but has translated this into hard targets. The Prime Minister has announced that by 2005 all government services will be on line. This isn't pie in the ski, it’s a deliberate attempt to try and ensure a culture of change in the public sector. To meet these targets they need to be realistic, but at the same time we need to recognise that there's a job on to achieve them.

Currently, we have identified over 450 services that central government delivers to the citizen or to business, and around one third of them are available now available electronically. But to ensure we finish the job we are pursuing the strategy on three fronts,

• Policy
• Legislation, and
• programmes

Let me come back to policy in a moment. First, you will be aware of our very substantial UK Online Programme within which we are delivering the Citizen’s Portal.

The Portal is seeking to engage and serve our citizens in ways that reflects the citizen’s needs – wherever they may be in the UK, be it Wales, London, Northern Ireland or Scotland.

For the first time, the public services will be – or will appear to be - organised around the needs of the customer. This itself is a huge task, and it will not all be delivered on day one. But the vision is to create a virtual "one stop shop" which will bring all public services together, whether provided by central or local government.

The Portal will provide both information and on-line transactions through a single personalised entry point.

A key feature will be "Life Episodes" – an innovative approach to service delivery which will help the customer to navigate the complexities of public services at important times of change – such as "Having a Baby", "Going Away"or "Change of Adress". But the Portal must be built on a firm basis. The standards and policies in the e-GIF provide this.

There is some legislation in place. But we must ensure that electronic transactions and information transfer have legal validity to support our e-government Agenda.

The Electronic Communications Act removes regulatory obstacles for the use of e-communication and electronic signatures.

There is more to do. The Performance and Innovation Unit has now been tasked with looking at the issue of Privacy and Data sharing. They will seek to find a way forward on the tricky balance between our rights on privacy and the need to share information. We hope to publish the results of this study and consultation by Spring of next year.

There are many works of the e-Government policies that I could mention here, including our excellent report on Successful IT and the very recent report from the PIU on Electronic Government Services for the 21^st Century.

The Successful IT report recommends that we stop thinking in terms of IT projects . Instead we should be developing systems and projects that deliver business benefits. Technology will be an inherent and integral feature of such initiatives, not a separate add on.

The Successful IT report recommends a comprehensive programme of improvement with key messages for delivering government projects involving IT. For example:

• Good leaders and clear responsibility for change are not enough. Projects need people at all levels who can deliver.

• The risk inherent in managing ambitious, complex programmes can be reduced through modular and incremental approaches.

• Projects need access to practical expertise and regular assurance that they are on track.

• We will NO longer tolerate failure.

Let me now turn to the PIU Report.

The recent PIU report, a centrepiece in our e-government drive, puts in place new incentives, levers and structures to make sure that transformation happens within Whitehall. It means there will be sharpened funding and financial incentives to promote electronic service delivery as well as a new government Incubator to develop service ideas.

The report recommended opening up the electronic delivery of government services to the private and voluntary sectors. This will encourage improvement in service quality, to stimulate innovation and provide value for money.

This strategy will also ensure that electronic service delivery is joined-up, with services focused on the needs of users rather than government departments, and delivered through a range of means, such as the Internet, telephone, digital TV, Mobile phones or face to face.

Significantly the report also recommends the establishment of an ESD Incubator – Gov.Lab – which will be small unit within the e-Envoy’s office with access to sufficient funds to build ideas rapidly. This is a radical proposal to accelerate the implementation of e-government.

The key strategy work for e-government was published in April this year. It sets out our policies and plans for the transformation of public services. It contains crucial policy frameworks and guidance on key areas of the agenda, for example, Digital Television, Security and Authentication Frameworks, Web sites and there are many more. A fundamental policy in this group is the e-GIF.

Joined up systems working across the public sector are the keys to delivering better services which meet the needs of the citizen and business. e-Gif provides us with the opportunity to reach these goals.

What the framework has done is laid down in plane English.

The clarity about what people's objectives are and what their role is is vitally important. Without such Plain English things can go very badly wrong. I used to be Local Authority Councillor and I remember way back in 1982 at my first council meeting. There was a debate about how we were going to clear up and tidy one of our local parks and somebody suggested to the committee meeting that somebody should buy a few gondolas for the ornamental ponds. And the chairman looked aghast and said why do we need to buy a few; why not just buy two and let them breed! Even with the most simple of ideas, if it is not explained appropriately people can get the wrong end of the stick.

I would like to stress that these standards and policies will apply to all our new information systems and portals. They will give clear guidance to private sector systems and set out what will be expected for connecting to and working with Government.

And we are working with Departments to ensure implementation is embedded into their normal business processes. The Departments are submitting their e-business strategies to the Office of the e-envoy in October and we will be looking for convergence with e-government policies and standards.

In addition, what I want to emphasise is that the e-GIF is more than a set of clear statements of policies and standards. It lays out how we will work together in capturing your innovations and capabilities so that we can develop our policies and implementation approaches that are defined by today’s Internet led environment. We also want to ensure that we work very closely with our European partners and other governments who have shown so much interest and support in this. I hope that together we can take forward this initiative and make it a truly international collaboration that supports the basis for e-government. I know the work we are doing on agreeing Internet standards and particularly XML schemas has this potential.

Of course it is not just about interoperability. The policies laid down in the e-GIF are fundamental to our desire to reduce the cost and risk of procuring new government information systems, as well as aligning our systems and organisations to the global e-revolution.

Again there is much we can do together with industry and other governments on this issue. I am pleased to see the strong support we have from industry sharing a platform today ourselves and the European Union.

Let me conclude by summarising what I think the e-GIF is all about. It’s about putting the basics in place to have the Government get its services online by 2005, thereby bringing about a fundamental change in the way that government interacts with the citizen. However, we also appreciate that some people will never want to use new technology, and we must ensure that there are always face to face services provided to those who still want them.

It’s also about making the jobs of public servants easier. The seamlessness that is brought about by implementing eGIF will help to reduce bureaucracy, improve our management systems, and free up staff from mundane process duties to provide better services.

Our agenda is a major challenge for the public sector, and we look to our partners in industry and other governments to work with us. The creation of 24 hour government at people’s fingertips is going to require effort from all. I hope that the partnership and commitment that you have shown in working with us on the eGIF can be maintained and deepened for all the exciting challenges ahead, such as the incubators and our digital TV programme.

We are looking for your partnership in implementing this programme in three ways;

• For public sector organisations to embrace and implement the e-government strategy by ensuring that fundamental policy frameworks like the e-GIF are worked into their business plans and procurement strategy;
• For industry to ensure that systems delivered to government are compliant to e-GIF policies and standards. And also to ensure that you help us to bring in new developments and innovations;
• And finally, our international partners to work with us in taking this policy forward on a pan-government basis.

Before I came to the Cabinet Office I was Minister of State for Trade and Industry and one of my roles was to go across the world and persuade people to invest in the UK. About 18 months ago I went to Japan and was taken to a company who were very proud of their robots and what those robots could do. The president of the company stood me in front of his 300 staff and he had his robots play traditional Japanese drums. I just knew at the end of it they were so proud about the announcement, about the technology advancements and about the intricate nature of these robotics that I knew he was going to ask me to respond. He duly did, and I looked at him and said, in Engish, "When they can play the bagpipes, come back and see me."

And the moral of that story surely must be as the Internet revolution takes place we do need co-operation across the globe. Competition has got its place and we need competition. But alongside competition there is a growing ground for partnership. It is in our interest to develop across the global economy and every community across the world, opportunities to develop our economies to develop our public services, to develop our education and employment opportunities. It’s a huge task and no doubt our generation will not complete it, but certainly it is our generation’s responsibility to ensure what we do and how we do it together so that we can build using the internet a new society in the 21^st Century.

Thank you.