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.

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.

According to BT (via Computer Shopper):

The number of broadband connections in the UK has exceeded dial-up usage for the first time. BT figures show that there are now more than 7.4 million broadband users, with two million using cable and 5.4 on DSL.

The UK is bottom of the EU league table for e-government take up accroding to a recent report by Eurostat (via e-gov monitor; full text via Eurostat):

Less than a third of businesses in the UK used basic eGovernment services compared to the European average of 45 per cent and 90 per cent in Sweden… Survey findings released by Eurostat show 31 per cent of UK companies used online government services to obtain information during the first quarter of 2004… 27 per cent downloaded forms from government websites against an average figure of 41 per cent for the EU25 and 84 per cent in Finland. The UK also came joint bottom with Cyprus in the EU Member States in terms of businesses using government services to send online forms, reported to be just 11 per cent, compared with the average of 29 per cent. Take-up in this area was highest in Poland at 68 per cent, followed by Finland at 61 per cent.

Similar figures for e-Government take-up by citizens were, in a sense, relatively better compared to the EU norm. A fifth of UK citizens were reported to have obtained government information online (EU average 22 per cent), seven per cent had downloaded forms from government websites (EU average 10 per cent) and just three per cent had used online forms (EU average seven per cent).

It’s a poor record, particularly given that the UK tops the IT spending league table in Europe (report only available at huge cost from Kable, but this snippet from electric news):

The UK is spending more on public sector ICT than any other European country, according to a new survey by market analyst firm Kable. ICT expenditure across Europe is set for slow but steady growth over the next two years, according to the report, titled “ICT Spend in the European Public Sector.” Total spending this year will amount to EUR87 billion, reaching EUR94 billion by 2007. The UK accounts for an estimated 23 percent of the total for this year, or EUR21 billion, a figure that is 40 percent higher than the amounts spent by Germany or France. The UK spending is largely being driven by major investments in e-government and back office infrastructure, says Kable, and includes major IT projects like the Connecting for Health initiative, the Criminal Justice IT programme and the Defence Information Infrastructure.

Obviously the figures are not fully comparable, being in absolute rather than per capita amounts, but it seems clear that the UK isn’t getting the return it ought to. Given this, it is no surprise that on-the-record explanations are starting to emerge. Last week, an ODPM official argued that the UK struggles with e-gov ignorance (story via FCW):

Setting up government Web sites for citizen transactions does little good unless the public uses them, a U.K. e-government official said today. Almost all of the UK’s 400 local governments will provide electronic services by the end of this year, said Julian Bowrey, divisional and programme manager of local e-government in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Bowrey was a panel member at FCW Events’ Web-Enabled Government Conference in Washington, D.C. Although a digital divide exists between those who have access to computers and those who do not, e-government usage is low even among those who have access. “The first thing we do when we get access to a computer is go shopping,” Bowrey said. “Very few of us do e-government.”

Given his responsibility for local, rather than national, e-government, his proposed solution was, perhaps, to be expected, but interesting nonetheless:

To increase usage, the central government’s Web portal should link to local government Web sites, Bowrey said. The U.K. equivalent of FirstGov.gov is Directgov, but its content is mainly limited to policy statements, he added. Users searching for information on special education in schools, for example, would be more interested in information about local schools and how to contact local officials, Bowrey said.

In short, devolve down to the local level and bring a government (i.e. a political) dimension back in:

A U.K. marketing campaign should target two segments of the populace most likely to start using e-services, Bowrey said. One is “grumpy young men who want to pay their parking fines online and want to complain, preferably at 3 in the morning,” he said. The other is women with an interest in local community services, he added.

The United Kingdom also must overcome the public perception that local authorities are unresponsive and accessible only during banker’s hours, he said. The “view among some people is ‘Well, local government just doesn’t do this stuff. It’s all 19th century,’” he said.

But, he also conceded that building e-government is, in itself, not enough:

Surveys show that interest in e-government is far higher than actual usage. More people don’t use available services “because they’re not aware of them,” Bowrey said.

However, it might also help if some of the basics were done properly — and this applies to local government as much (perhaps even more than) central government. Central amongst these is surely accessibility and here the record is often poor. Indeed, a recent report found that 85 per cent of London borough web sites were yet to achieve web accessibility.

It has also been suggested that services need to be made more user friendly too. Nigel Dunn, Vice President of Genesys Conferencing, has argued this can be done through giving e-government a clearer visual identity; some of this is, no doubt, a plug for his products, but worthy of some attention perhaps (via Publictechnology.net)

His argument is simple but compelling - putting a human face to an e-government service will in crease take-up. Though it may sounds like a sales pitch for video-conferencing, the message is an important one to heed for e-government service marketing. The public have greater trust and usage of a service if there’s a face attached to its marketing and communication - so videoconferencing or avatars could make a real difference if embedded in the front end of an e-gov service.

It might help too if the Prime Minister himself had a stronger understanding of what’s going on in the field; his shameful ignorance was exposed in a recent House of Commons session:

Q88 Mr Allan: You have something of a reputation of being a technophobe on a personal level, is that fair?

Mr Blair: I am afraid that is fair actually, yes.

Q89 Mr Allan: It is. Have you ever visited the multi-million pound central government website that you have set up to get us all to use these new electronic government facilities?

Mr Blair: I think that is a very unfair question. The answer is no.

Q90 Mr Allan: Do you know the address of this multi-million pound project?

Mr Blair: No.

Mr Allan: Your head of e.government, Ian Watmore, would be able to tell you all about it.

Mr Blair: That is exactly why delegation is such an important part of the job of a prime minister.

Oh dear…

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…)

An article on John Hutton - who will be the minister responsible for overseeing the culmination of the 2005 e-government target - in yesterday’s Guardian Online.

As it points out, there are over a dozen ‘mission critical’ projects underway at the moment. Moreover, it seems likely - despite Blair’s reduced majority - that the ID cards bill will feature in the Queen’s Speech.

Blunkett’s move to the DWP will, no doubt, add impeteus to this: while crime, migration and terrorism issues are those connected most commonly with the proposals, Blunkett tried at the Home Office to sell the idea of an ‘entitlement card’ and it seems likely that he’ll look to follow this agenda at the DWP too - if nothing else as a route into tackling benefit fraud.

An interesting looking conference on E-government and Accessibility (via e-government bulletin)… and at URBIS too! As so often with these events, it is out of the price range of a poor academic like myself though…

For a bit of fun I ran the conference web page through Bobby… and it failed to meet even the Priority 1 checkpoints… doh!

The final report from the LSE’s Children-Go-Online research project is now out.
Easily the most prominent of the ESRC’s e-society projects so far, the report has generated ample headlines: see the BBC News website and the Guardian.

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