John Hudson

Ethopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi believes information technology has the power to counteract poverty according to BBC News.

“We are fully committed to ensuring that as many of our poor as possible have this weapon that they need to fight poverty at the earliest possible time” he said.

Currently there are around 30,000 internet connections (total population is 71 million); within six months they aim to up this to 500,000. It will invest around US$40m to do this. 450 secondary schools will be connected to the web, regional and district government offices will be linked and Healthnet will connect all hospitals.

Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit & the DTI have published a new Digital Strategy - Connecting the UK - which Blair and Hewitt say, in its foreword, is:

a clear sign of our continuing commitment to ensure that everyone in our country has the opportunity to benefit from the transformative power of ICT.

It contains a seven point plan, under three broad headings:

Raising our game:Making the UK a world leader in digital excellence

• Action 1: Transform learning with ICT
• Action 2: Set up a “Digital Challenge” for Local Authorities
• Action 3: Make the UK the safest place to use the Internet
• Action 4: Promote the creation of innovative broadband content

Constructing a robust strategy to achieve our vision

• Action 5: Set out a strategy for transformation of delivery of public services
• Action 6: Ofcom’s strategy should consider improving competition and take-up in the broadband market

Tackling social exclusion & bridging the digital divide

• Action 7: Improve accessibility to technology for the digitally excluded and ease of use for the disabled
• Action 8: Review the digital divide in 2008

Read the rest of this entry »

Larry Elliot reports in the Guardian on an interesting paper presented to the Royal Economic Society by Rocco Huang of the World Bank. It:

looked at how tolerant different countries were of uncertainty and investigated whether that was linked to a willingness to devote resources to innovative sectors of the economy. Huang found that that was the case. There is evidence, he says, to show that attitudes to uncertainty differ greatly across countries. The Anglo- Saxon nations and the Scandinavians are far less conservative when it comes to new ideas than southern Europeans.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have a funny feeling of déjà vu…

A new NHS computer database may threaten the privacy of patients’ medical records, the BBC has learned.

A senior Department of Health civil servant said people would not be able to decide what details were stored.

Critics said this went against earlier government assurances that patients would be able to veto the information.

The DoH said people could still discuss with their doctor what details were recorded and control who could access them - except in an emergency.

[...] Phil Walker, the DoH’s head of digital information policy, made the privacy claims in an e-mail to a Warwickshire GP, Dr Paul Thornton.

[...] The British Medical Association said this appeared to contradict earlier ministerial assurances that patients will be able to withhold sensitive information from the database.

From: BBC News

The Work Foundation have published a new report on e-government: Why ICT? The role of ICT in public services (Also: BBC News Report).

The headline finding is around preferences for e-government services:

we asked the public how they would like to access services, and what they think are the advantages and disadvantages of three of the main service delivery channels.We found that there was an equal split, with a third each preferring: one-stop shop, face-toface services; telephone hotlines; and interactive websites.

In addition, they found that:

• 78% felt there is enough choice in terms of different service delivery channels;
• 48% wanted more government services online [a bit of contradiction with the above?];
• 63% thought the web had made it easier to find out about government services;
• More than three quarters wanted access to services outside of normal working hour.

Read the rest of this entry »

An interesting little spat about the importance and impact of think tanks is going on within (a section) of the policy wonk community.
Rob Blackhurst, formerly of the Foreign Policy Centre, has published a piece in the New Statesman titled ‘The sad decline of the policy wonks in which he argues ‘The British policy wonk has never been more in demand’, but that ‘enslaved by corporate sponsors, [the think tanks] no longer have a significant influence on the political parties’.

Read the rest of this entry »

The IPPR North seminar last week - ‘Opportunity Society - Improving Social Mobility in the North’ - which featured David Miliband as the key note speaker.

A brief report for the next issue of Policy World:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Forbes magazine list of the world’s super-rich has increased to a record 691 people with a combined fortune of $2.2 trillion (£1.14 trillion).

Microsoft’s boss Bill Gates is top of the billionaires’ list for the 11th year in a row [...] Mr Gates nevertheless saw his net worth decline slightly to $46.5bn from $46.6bn.

From: BBC News.

The government are flagging claims that they’ve saved £0.5 billion via a crackdown on benefit fraud.

A central plank of their new strategy has been increased data sharing within government, though it seems that the Inland Revenue were initially reluctant to participate:

The dramatic turnaround follows a decision pushed through four years ago by the former social security minister, Angela Eagle, to persuade the Inland Revenue to share its data with benefit offices to track down fraudsters. The policy was initially resisted by the Inland Revenue but after what Ms Eagle calls a “Whitehall kerfuffle” the tax officers backed down.

Now officials are able to trace immediately whether a claimant is both paying tax and claiming benefit at the same time. This has led to 80,914 people caught in the last year. The number of cases of people working and claiming at the same time has nearly halved in the last five years.

The ministry is also targeting what it calls “at risk” groups of people, thought to be likely to be claiming benefit while holding down self-employed jobs. Altogether 133,277 cases have been identified.

Mr Pond is adamant that the department is not picking on particular ethnic groups as part of the exercise.

Officials are also having more success in cooperating with local councils to curb housing benefit and council tax fraud. Checks on claimants revealed that some 44,000 people had made incorrect claims which did not match their income.

We await news of an equally vigorous and technologically sophisticated ‘crackdown’ on non-take up of benefit entitlements…

Came across an interesting piece on the global money markets today. I’d already seen the estimates of somewhere between US$1 and US$1.5 trillion being traded on the foreign exchange markets each day, but have to admit I had no idea that the UK’s share of this trade was (a) bigger than that of any other single nation and (b) accounted for a third of all trading globally.

(Source: http://www.ny.frb.org/education/fx/foreign.html)