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.*****

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* 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.

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.

In his 1986 classic The Cult of Information, Roszak warned us that information has ‘been divorced from its conventional meaning, [and is] up for grabs… for the information theorist, it does not matter whether we are transmitting a fact, a judgement, a shallow cliché, a deep teaching, a sublime truth, or a nasty obscenity. All are ‘information’.

Though this was in the context of a critique of many of the rhetorically driven ‘information revolution’ theses, the phrase often comes to mind when I’m surfing the web… or, indeed, marking student work. The web (and ‘Googling it’ in particular) seems to be the first port of call for so many research efforts these days. Not a problem per se, but it means that being able to sort a sublime truth from the nasty obscenity becomes a much bigger issue when so much of the information is published without any process of peer review or quality assurance.

Two totally unrelated stories illustrated this well for me recently.

The first was a bit of fun really, but said something important about the nature of the press perhaps. Bored by lack of football news following the end of the season in England, some supporters of my team — Sunderland — decided to make up a transfer rumour. They posted bogus claims on various fan sites that Czech international Jan Koller was in negotiations with Sunderland — and equally bogus claims that the news was on his current (German) club’s web site — and then sat back to see if the media would bite.

Within hours the local paper ran the story on its back page (’Cats want Koller - AMBITIOUS Sunderland want to sign giant Czech striker Jan Koller [...] But enquiries are still at the very early stage for the Borussia Dortmund forward…’). The following day the best selling tabloids picked it up, including The Sun (’Cats eye giant Jan - Sunderland want giant striker Jan Koller to fire them to Premiership safety. The Black Cats are having talks with Borussia Dortmund in a bid to tie up a £1.5 million deal for the 32 year-old Czech.’) and The Mirror (’KOLLER & TIE-UP - SUNDERLAND want giant striker Jan Koller to boost their chances in the Premiership. The Black Cats are in talks with Borussia Dortmund in a bid to tie up a £1.5million deal for the Czech international.’).

All lies, of course, and sourced initially from fan sites with made up quotations being reproduced and false certainties and facts inserted by some very lazy journos, probably on the basis of the local paper story being fed to the PA and embellished to fill out the gaps.

Less than 48 hours after starting the rumour, the global television media were on the case with the player’s agent had to contact Sky Sports News to deny the claims appearing in the press: ‘These stories are a major surprise and I think someone is dreaming up stories’. If only he knew…

The second story concerns more serious subject matter - the nature and extent of climate change - and was uncovered by George Monbiot:

For the past three weeks, a set of figures has been working a hole in my mind. On April 16th, New Scientist published a letter from the famous botanist David Bellamy. Many of the world’s glaciers, he claimed, “are not shrinking but in fact are growing. … 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980.” His letter was instantly taken up by climate change deniers. And it began to worry me. What if Bellamy was right?

Of course, he wasn’t:

So last week I telephoned the World Glacier Monitoring Service and read out Bellamy’s letter. I don’t think the response would have been published in Nature, but it had the scientific virtue of clarity. “This is complete bullshit.” A few hours later, they sent me an email.

“Despite his scientific reputation, he makes all the mistakes that are possible”. He had cited data which was simply false, failed to provide references, completely misunderstood the scientific context and neglected current scientific literature. The latest studies show unequivocally that most of the world’s glaciers are retreating.

So Monbiot e-mailed Bellamy a few times to find out where the figures came from - turns out it was a site called Iceagenow.com. Here the figures were slightly different (55% of the 625 mountain glaciers under observation rather than 555) and were sourced as coming from ’21st Century Science and Technology’, which got them from www.sepp.org, which said they came from a 1989 issue of Science. Monbiot continued his search for the original source:

I went through every edition of Science published in 1989, both manually and electronically. Not only did it contain nothing resembling those figures; throughout that year there was no paper published in this journal about glacial advance or retreat.

So, it wasn’t looking too good for Bellamy, or Singer, or any of the deniers who have cited these figures. But there was still one mystery to clear up. While Bellamy’s source claimed that 55% of 625 glaciers are advancing, Bellamy claimed that 555 of them – or 89% – are advancing. This figure appears to exist nowhere else. But on the standard English keyboard, 5 and % occupy the same key. If you try to hit %, but fail to press shift, you get 555, instead of 55%. This is the only explanation I can produce for his figure. When I challenged him, he admitted that there had been “a glitch of the electronics”.

So, in Bellamy’s poor typing, we have the basis for a whole new front in the war against climate science. The 555 figure is now being cited as definitive evidence that global warming is a “fraud”, a “scam”, a “lie”.

As Mark Twain once said: ‘A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes’. (Or did he? This one could run and run…)

A bit quiet recently due to combined forces of comment spammers killing my blog and the extra hours I’ve been putting in to pull together the launch issue of the Social Policy Association’s revamped newsletter - Policy World - which I have taken over editing. The launch issue is now online.

The Head of e-government, Ian Watmore, is interviewed today by BBCi:

“The getting 100% of services online target is something I inherited and the job is pretty much achieved. The real question is ‘where do we go from here?’”
The answer, he says, is moving on from the glut of information currently available to fewer and better targeted services.
“Let’s make them as good as we can and, most importantly, let’s move to the point where most people are using them rather than some people are using them.”

This follows on from an interview in the Guardian a couple of weeks back - his first since taking up the post:

Watmore said he is more interested in getting people to use e-services than in dogmatically ensuring that every single service goes online. “What we want to do next is to get a high take-up and high impact of services that really matter and which touch people’s lives.” But he said the 2005 target is still “business as usual” - and in any case, it is not in his power to change a directive from the prime minister.

And another in Computing magazine where he outlines the differences between his post (the ‘CIO of government’) and that of e-Envoy.

All this is laying the ground for a major new e-government strategy document due at the end of the month.

Have just returned from the Social Policy Association annual conference at the University of Nottingham. Some papers are available online: those that stood out for me were two given by Michael Hill and Hugh Bochel on the policy process; a couple of interesting papers on e-local government by a team from Newcastle; and a series of comparative papers from a team headed by Peter Taylor-Gooby. The conference ended with a lively plenary on ‘Where Next for Social Policy?’ featuring Paul Spicker, Adrian Sinfield and Nick Ellison; this will be taken forward in the next issue of the SPA newsletter that I’ll blog about nearer the time.

There was also a formal launch of The Policy Press’ new Understanding Welfare book series, including the text penned by myself and Stuart Lowe: Understanding the Policy Process.

From the New York Times:

So began a test run for a game of Pac-Manhattan, a real-world version of the 1980’s video game played on the streets of New York and the latest example of a so-called “big game”: a contest that uses wireless devices like cellphones and global positioning beacons to track players as they move through the urban grid, turning cities into vast game boards.