John Hudson

Naturally there’s been much debate on the blogosphere about the new Digital Britain report. It’s the final substantive chapter (’The Journey to Digital Government’) that’s caught my eye and, arguably, has the greatest social policy implications.

It concedes that the first phase of e-government reform up until 2004-5 had a limited impact, albeit putting a positive spin on this, summing the period up as  ‘driving Britain [...] from being a laggard’. It notes that the proportion of public services online only reached ‘75% plus by 2005′* and admits that:

‘in many cases they were an online replica of the offline service, based around the silos of providing departments rather than the actual public services needs of the citizen’.

It argues a second phase - ‘Government on the Web’ - kicked in from 2004-5, as key outcomes from the Transformational Government report helped drive more co-ordinated use of ICTs across government and deliver:

‘effective savings, based on process re-engineering of online delivery of public services’.

The report then argues a third phase of e-government should flow from the broader changes outlined in Digital Britain:

‘not merely Government on the web, but [...] Government of the Web‘.

This phrase is awkward - it implies questions of how the web itself is governed in my mind - but is meant to capture the idea that:

in order to maximise the opportunity afforded by universal broadband for the delivery of services, digital Government will need to become genuinely “of the web”, not simply “on the web”. That means designing new services and transaction around the web platform, rather than simply adapting paper based, analogue, processes. It also means integrating web, telephone and face-to-face channels.

Again this could be read as an admission that the e-government agenda to date has failed to deliver the high quality transactional online services it has long promised. However, there is also something more subtle here that builds on the agenda that began to emerge in Transformational Government.

The early e-government policy documents made clear that electronic services were an addition to face-to-face offerings. When the Gershon Review  questioned the financial viability of this approach, the idea of forced migration to electronic channels for some customers gained prominence. Transformational Government took this thinking forward. I have argued elsewhere that:

‘while the first phase of e-government had focused on giving public services an online presence, the second phase was committed to making the presence of public services more of an online one‘**.

The third phase of e-government that Digital Britain promises to unleash seems to represent a further hardening of this position. Indeed, the report argues that:

Discussion with stakeholders inside and outside Government has demonstrated a consistent view that Government should develop a roadmap to a new programme of Digital Switchover of Public Services. ***

This programme, they suggest, should result in ‘online being the primary means of access’ but the report notes that there needs to be a ’safety net in delivery for those unable to access the service online’. 2012 is earmarked as the start date for Digital Switchover of Public Services, with every department being asked to identify at least two services to form part of this programme before this date.

Given the fiscal situation, it seems likely - whoever wins the next election - that the idea of replacing face-to-face services with electronic services will gather pace. There are two obvious concerns from a social policy viewpoint.

The first is how the Digital Switchover of Public Services will impact on services for those without internet access. If the non-digital safety net is an inferior service - which seems likely - then a two-tier service emerges. And, as the IPPR noted almost a decade ago****, the most disadvantaged are likely to be those receiving a disadvantaged service. This is a tricky position for a public service adopt.

The second issue flows from the first: how (and how far) can the government address the digital divide? At times, Digital Britain seems to imply the rolling out the broadband network to all homes will address the access issue. Clearly this is not the case and, to be fair, the report acknowledges this in many places; indeed, it reinforces the government’s commitment to tackling the digital divide, with Martha Lane Fox to be appointed as a high-profile Champion for Digital Inclusion.

But, we know that there is a substantial core of people who are unlikely to be easily coaxed into using the internet, including many who simply cannot afford access or lack the necessary skills. A key lesson from phase 1 of the e-government agenda - which was accompanied by a drive to deliver universal internet access by 2005 - was that there is no simple technical fix to the digital divide: campaigns to address digital exclusion need to be part of broader strategies to address social exclusion.  And, as phase 1 showed, a comprehensive policy here is neither cheap nor likely to meet its targets with ease.

The social policy risk of Digital Britain is clear.  A  government with an eye on the potential cost savings will power ahead with the Digital Switchover of Public Services. Meanwhile, a rather modestly funded digital inclusion agenda will be left to pick up the pieces, undertaking worthy but small scale work at the local level.

Hopefully this will not be the case, but Digital Britain does little to reassure on this count. The digital inclusion agenda slipped to the margins in the second phase of e-government, becoming primarily a local concern rather than a national one. As we enter the era of fiscal austerity, it is not difficult to imagine that the once generous funding for local government and voluntary sector digital inclusions programmes will start to dry up.*****

———

* As an aside, this is well short of the 100% by 2005 target Blair had set and the first time I’ve seen the 75% figure in black-and-white. Most documents at the time hinted that the target was much closer to being met with 96% being commonly mentioned.

** Hudson, J. (2009) ‘Information Technology and Social Security’ in Millar, J. (ed) Understanding Social Security (Second Edition). Bristol: The Policy Press.

*** Which stakeholders they mean is unclear - only IBM are mentioned at this juncture!

**** Tambini, D. (2001). Universal Internet Access: A Realistic View. London: IPPR.

***** All this is likely to be particularly so if the Conservatives win the next election and regional bodies are slashed in a bonfire of the QUANGOs.

According to BBC Newsnight: the main new policy announcement in Gordon Brown’s Labour Party Conference Speech tomorrow will be a plan to tackle the digital divide amongst young people. This will be done through a voucher scheme that will subsidize the cost of a computer or an internet subsciption for low income households with children…. if that is the case then it is an interesting development.

Obviously this is a hugely important speech for Brown. If he is pinning his political hopes on the headline grabbing potential of a plan to address the digital divide then this marks something of a return to the fore of the ‘e-galitarian’ rhetoric I wrote about in 2003. It will be a clear attempt to respond to Cameron’s claim that Brown is an ‘analogue politician in a digital age’ by plugging, once again, into the modernising imagery of new technology, but doing so in a way that suggests modernisation must be tied with a concern for equity that is the traditional hallmark of Labour (and, by implication, alien to the Conservatives, no matter how modern they might now appear.)

That the scheme will only be for young people is a nod to the human development potential of the internet for those in education: investment to boost equality of opportunity for learners rather than a social right for all. Internet access is not, it seems, regarded by Brown as an end in itself, but merely a means to an end, a way of improving human capital by boosting learning and, in turn, of improving social outcomes through a more level educational playing field.

In short, the plan has all the hallmarks of the limited, fragmented vision of e-galitarianism rather than the universal, comprehensive egalitarianism of Old Labour.

South Korea’s former President Roh Moo-hyun is making waves in the press at the moment after launching a new e-democracy website called Democracy 2.0 that is designed to foster greater public debate. It’s an interesting move for lots of reasons and seems beyond the run-of-the-mill political websites that regularly spring up around the world.

Firstly, Korea is one of the most wired nations on earth, and the participation rates in social networking sites such as Cyworld outstrip anything seen in countries like the UK. Already, some of the previous attempts at e-democracy (many instigated as part of Rho’s presidency) have had some interesting, albeit limited, impacts.

Secondly, there have been some recent signs that citizens are beginning to use the internet as a serious tool for political participation. Indeed, recent demonstrations against imports of US beef were largely organised online and the International Herald Tribune talked of a ‘new generation of Web 2.0 protestors‘ when reporting on the protests. In a relatively young democracy (in only its 20th year now), where political parties and political coalitions are still in a state of flux, web based movements perhaps have an added potency.

Thirdly, and not unrelated, the conservative government against whom the above mentioned protests were aimed are reportedly looking at restricting some online political activism in order to reduce the flow of misinformation it feels contributed to the anti-US beef import demonstrations. Rho’s site must be seen as some sort of direct response to this. And, his e-democracy credentials become bolder still when it comes clear that he is also in a battle with the current government over his attempts to keep hold of confidential government papers relating to his own Presidency that he downloaded from a government intranet he established during his Presidency.

The big question now, it seems, is whether all this points to Rho becoming politically active once again - and, I guess, whether he will look to harness Web 2.0 technologies to help him in doing so.

Hopefully posts to this site will start to be a bit more regular once again: with Densen’s help (well, they did pretty much all the work while I drank coffee), I’ve moved from Movable Type (MT) to WordPress. The MT platform was struggling with spam overload, which took the fun out of blogging, and constant (complicated) upgrades to try to address this were a pain in the ass. Plus it lacked the cool iPhone app that WordPress has!

Repointing the domain took a bit longer than planned, but by happy coincidence this means the new version of the blog has gone live on OneWebDay.

I’ve spent the past couple of days at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) Summer School at King’s College, Cambridge. It’s a tremendous event - and one that has been going since just after the Second World War - which is attended for one week by around 100 members of DWP staff as ’students’. They are joined by senior staff - who deliver lectures and host seminars and workshops - and the school can usually count on featuring an appearance from at least one minister, the DWP’s permanent secretary, several agency heads and programme directors and sometimes even the Cabinet Secretary.

From 2002-6 I was a tutor at the Summer School, which was then organised and delivered largely by academics, but from 2007 onwards the DWP decided to organise the school internally and adopt a more internal focus. This year, however, I was invited back to deliver a lecture on the ‘Changing Context of Welfare’. This provided me with the odd experience off delivering a talk dealing with the demise of the Keynesian welfare state not only in Keynes’ old college but in a lecture hall named after Keynes and featuring a bust of him on the stage! Slides below via Slideshare…

I have spent the past few days at the Joint University Council Public Administration Committee Annual Conference (aka PAC conference), which was at the University of York this year (so pretty easy for me to attend!).

Headline speakers included Jocelyne Bourgon (President Emeritus, Canada School of Public Service), who delivered the inaugural National School of Government Lecture, and Rod Rhodes (ANU and University of Tasmania) who delivered the Annual Frank Stacey Memorial Lecture. Both speakers offered some interesting challenges to the audience. Bourgon, whose career has mainly been in public service at the top echelons of the Canadian civil service, gave a talk that was clearly very strong influenced by some of the latest thinking in complexity theory, eschewing standard linear approaches to policy making and governance, and advocating a more networked form of policy management. Rhodes, meanwhile, continued to push his interpretive approach to policy analysis, drawing on his detailed (essentially anthropological) research on senrior staff in Whitehall to offer an intricate narrative of how the modern day civil service operates. Both, however, raised more questions than they offered answers.

Other interesting sessions included two linked panels examining the competition state thesis, in which the key exponents of the thesis (Phil Cerny of Rutgers and Mark Evans of York) both made theoretically focused presentations and others offered more empirically rooted papers testing/extending of the thesis (Sarah Radcliffe, Neil Lunt and Dan Horsfall - all from York).  Dan’s paper - From Competition State to Competition States? - won the Sage sponsored prize for best paper presented by a postgraduate. Oliver James (Exter University) gave what I thought was an interesting and carefully crafted presentation on whether top management team turn-over affects public service performance - reporting findings from an ESRC funded project that has involved the collection of a tremendous amount of data - but he got a bit of a rough ride from an audience that appeared largely hostile to quantitative research, which was a shame.

Myself and Jim Goddard (University of Bradford and current JUC Chair) hosted a round table discussion on the links between social policy and public administration - based around a presentation we delivered titled ‘Social Policy and Public Administration: Marriage or Divorce’ (slides below - though the charts won’t work on Slideshare for some reason) - and, hopefully, will lead to the JUC hosting some joint social policy-public administration events in the near future. I’ve always found the split between the subjects a little frustrating, not least because my interests span the two.

I haven’t had time to properly digest the Cities Unlimited report from Policy Exchange yet - too busy writing a conference paper - but the fact that David Cameron has felt the need to dismiss the work of his closest think tank as ‘insane‘ says it all.

For those not familiar with the report, here’s a snippet from The Times:

David Cameron has been embarrassed by his favourite think-tank after it suggested that Liverpool, Sunderland and Bolton should be abandoned because the North would never improve. The Tory leader, who begins a two-day tour of the North today, firmly rejected a report by Policy Exchange, which suggested that the Government should help northerners to relocate to Oxford and Cambridge. It suggested that Britain’s two university towns are likely to be able to “form the basis of strong, successful, substantial cities”. Singling out Sunderland as an example of a town in decline, the report says: “It is time to stop pretending that there is a bright future for Sunderland and ask ourselves instead what we need to do to offer people in Sunderland better prospects.”

Wow! I’ll probably have more to say later, but given Sunderland is my hometown I feel duty bound to challenge some of the report’s claims! The short boxed case study on Sunderland in the report itself is woefully inadequate.

Firstly, the authors have no understanding of Roy Keane (very important in my book), quoting him in support of their thesis as follows:

Sunderland suffers from very poor economic geography. It is a long way from most places. It is not somewhere that outsiders consider a desirable place to live. Roy Keane, Sunderland Football Club’s manager, commented on the difficulty of attracting good players to the Premiership club despite offering equivalent wages to clubs in the South: “I find it surprising that geography seems to play such a big part … Retire at 35 or 36, you can live wherever you bloody well like – London, Monaco, wherever – and any half-decent footballer will be a multimillionaire anyway. Why is there such a big attraction with London? It would be different if it was Chelsea, Arsenal or maybe Tottenham, but when they go to a smaller club just because it’s in London, then it’s clearly because of the shops.”

This was a joke guys - a sly dig at some players who wouldn’t sign for us because we were (then) officially the worst time in Premiership history x 2. (And, BTW, it’s Sunderland ASSOCIATION Football Club: if you’re gonna have a dig, get it right.)

Secondly, they are under the impression that the only economic change since the 1970s has been the arrival of Nissan. While over-hyped for sure, it’s odd that they made no mention of Sunderland winning the digital challenge competition, being named as one of most connected cities in the UK and a leader in the take up of digital television and broadband internet. Certainly there is a long way to go here before these technologies can be said to have had a major impact on the city’s economy, but things have happened that needed to explored, understood and acknowledged in the report, and all of them have happened in the last ten years, aided by regeneration money.

Thirdly, their discussion of the transport infrastructure - mocking the pathetic number of trains a day to London and their tardy speed and, similarly, pointing to the better Metro links in Newcastle and so on - totally misses the point. It is precisely because of the lack of investment in the transport infrastructure that the city has suffered so badly in the post-industrial era!

Fourthly, and relatedly, so much of this is about politics and political institutions but this goes uncommented. Sunderland’s transport infrastructure has been poor compared to Newcastle’s because Thatcher scrapped the Tyne & Wear Metropolitan Council when it was half way through a twenty year transport investment programme centred around the Metro; at this stage the Tyne section was well developed but the Wear section still to follow… consequently, Sunderland paid for Newcastle-Gateshead to get the Metro from the late 1970s/early 1980s but didn’t get it itself until a few years ago, after Labour came back into power in and began to plough in the regeneration funds that Policy Exchange dismisses as ineffective. The authors, of course, seem unaware of this and even mock the direct Sunderland-London train for being slower than the London-Newcastle and Metro to Sunderland route…. well, without the regional regeneration money it would have been a bus to Sunderland for us all…

Worse still, the report, badly abuses the notion of path dependency, using it an overly-deterministic way that fails to account for the influences on the branching effects of economic and social policy development. Chief amongst these is the UK’s overly centralised political system; the authors of the report completely write politics out of the picture though - the word itself hardly gets a mention in fact. It’s hardly surprising that a region with no political institutions of any significance should become one in which businesses do not tend to locate their headquarters and key decision makers. The authors of the report seem to think that successful cities are large ones, drawing this conclusion on the basis of their earlier work in which they examined a series of successful cities from around the world; but most of the successful cities they highlight are close to key political decision makers, being capital cities, regional capitals with significant powers or strongly represented at the national level as part of a federal system of politics.

Still, at least the report brought an editorial from the Guardian in praise of Sunderland…. which rightly suggests the report’s authors might want to relocate to Vorkuta.

Final word to Jams….

The rhetoric surrounding the Brown government’s latest plans for welfare reform - published in a green paper today - has been fascinating. As Polly Toynbee notes in the Guardian, James Purnell has been spinning like crazy ahead of its publication, with wildly different messages for different audiences, though as she points out, the overall message was simply ‘tough, tough, tough’.

Like practically every secretary of state responsible for social security in the post-war era, Purnell claims his reforms hark back to the principles of Beveridge. (The most notable example here was John Moore who, when defending Thatcher’s reforms of the late 1980s, suggested that the slashing of benefits for 16 & 17 year olds was a return to Beveridge on the grounds that Beveridge’s original plans had not covered people under the age of 18.) Purnell’s arguments rest on the claim that Beveridge’s deeply held principle of individual responsibility has been ‘left… out of the equation‘ of social policy, being overlooked from the 1960s onwards. (To stress his Beveridgean credentials on this, Purnell begins his foreword with a direct quotation from the Beveridge report.)

It is striking, as Toynbee again notes, that this line of rhetoric foregrounds so many of the core criticisms of welfare that the right have made since the 1970s and downplays many of the more nuanced parts of the proposals the government make in the green paper; as such, ‘Purnell missed the chance to take ideas about welfare away from endless punishment into Labour terrain, showing what really works in easing impoverishment, illiteracy, and all that leads to unemployment’.

Brown’s introduction to the paper sings from the same hymn sheet, arguing that ‘In 1997, this Government inherited a welfare state weighted heavily towards rewarding and supporting people who were not actively seeking to improve their situation’. He then talks tough while dodging the normative debates, blaming it all on the out-of-control macro forces - ‘in a globalised world, we simply cannot afford the high price of large numbers of people on benefits’ - before rounding off with some classic competition state style rhetoric: ‘we need people in work, making the best use of their talents and helping us compete’.

So far, so clear, but this little passage in Brown’s introduction struck me as being rather bizzare:

‘These reforms will ensure we have a world-class welfare system that maximises the numbers in employment and minimises the numbers on benefit. They reflect our drive towards world-class public services across the board – delivering personalised services tailored to individual needs, giving more freedom to frontline professionals and increasing people’s control over the services and support they choose to access’.

Ah… the rhetoric of ‘world class’. What does it mean in this context? And how might it be measured or benchmarked? And how does more conditionality in social security tie in with giving people more control over world-class public services? And is it really possible to combine giving more freedom to frontline professionals while also increasing people’s control over the services these professionals deliver?

I foresee a thousand new social policy essay questions…

Seems today marks 10 years since the term ‘blog’ was coined by Jorn Barger.

In 2007 I’ve noticed a whole bunch of ICT anniversaries being reported, including:

• 10 years since the first blog was established - well, possibly, depending on how the term is defined, but when Dave Winer launched Scripting News on 1st April 1997 he launched what some see as the first modern blog.
• 25 years since the emoticon was invented - when Professor Scott Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon University typed : - ) on a bulletin board on September 19th 1982.
• 15 years since the first text message was sent when Neil Papworth, an engineer working for Airwide, texted ‘Merry Christmas’ over the Vodafone Network on 5th December 1992.
• 5 years since the Creative Commons was launched on 14th December 2002.

Some sites have also noted that 2007 marked 25 years since the Commodore 64 was launched in January 1982. Personally I couldn’t care less about that one; much more important to me was the 25th Birthday of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, launched a few months later in April 1982, as my first computer was a Spectrum (a 1982 Christmas present IIRC!).

It is also fifteen years since the first mass produced GSM phone - Nokia’s 1011 - was released, on 10th November of 1992, and it was this device that made texting a possibility. While I was reading for my PhD I shared an office with a visiting scholar from Finland (Jan-Erik johanson) who had one of Nokia’s early GSM phones. As most UK handsets were still analogue he couldn’t send SMS to anyone he met in the UK and was completely bemused that we had not heard of texting over here…

The UK’s Social Security system is no stranger to IT disasters. Recent ‘highlights’ include: the long term closure (almost two years to date!) of the online tax credits payment system after widespread fraudulent claims were detected; the scrapping of the Benefits Processing Repayment Programme before launch but after £141 million of expenditure; the admission that the Child Support Agency could not function properly because of inadequate IT systems; which itself… followed earlier admissions that many Child Support applications were simply not being processed because of inadequacies in new systems. We should not forget earlier legendary disasters including the Operational Strategy of the 1980s/early 1990s that was billed as the biggest IT project in the whole of Europe but failed to meet the majority of its objectives despite coming in around three times over budget.

But, today’s news that the personal details of all families in the UK claiming Child Benefit (theoretically all with a child under 16) have gone missing after being placed on two CDs and then biked by a courier, in an unregistered delivery, has to be up there with the best of them. The discs, destined for the National Audit Office, apparently carried the full records of all claimants, meaning whoever finds these discs potentially has access to the name, address, date of birth, National Insurance number and bank details of up to 25 million people. The data is, we are told, password protected, but astonishingly is not encrypted so getting into the records shouldn’t be too difficult. Such basic inadequacies in protecting data really do beggar belief and, while the Chair of HM Revenues & Custom has resigned over the matter, deeper questions surely need to be asked here.

I watched some of the debate that took place in the House of Commons after the Chancellor announced the full details of the incident. The Lib Dem’s Vince Cable rightly asked why on earth data was being transported in this manner and pointed the finger at the prehistoric computer systems that underpin the whole social security sector. The Conservatives are using the event to attack the ID card proposals and they may well be right in suggesting this will shatter public confidence in the government’s ability to run such a national ID system in a way that does not threaten privacy, especially if the HMRC data does fall into criminal hands and this breaks into the media. But, what I found most amazing of all was the intervention of Edward Leigh, the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, who said he had spoken to the Comptroller General and been told that the NAO had specifically requested that they only be sent the National Insurance numbers of Child Benefit recipients; all other personal details should have been stripped out of the data they were sent. Leigh had also established that after the NAO had informed HRMC that the data had not arrived they sent two more copies of the discs (presumably by the same method!?!?).

In other words, it seems HMRC have been biking insecurely protected personal data of millions of people around the country for no good reason other than they could not be arsed to reformat it, delete the unneeded items or to fill in the extra paper work needed for a registered delivery. As Leigh says, the HMRC appear to have been ‘criminally irresponsible’ here.

There is some good news though. Given the track record of computing projects in the sector, chances are the discs weren’t burned properly and when they are found they will probably have no data on them at all.