Stephen Timms MP

London E-Government Conference

If you go into any London Jobcentre today, you will find not those awful old blue felt boards with scruffy little postcards telling you about local jobs, instead you will find smart kiosks providing information in frankly a much more respectful way about jobs not just in London but also right across the country. Those kiosks are part of the reason why unemployment has continued to fall in Britain, despite everything that is happening in the world economy. And having developed that system we can use it to make the information more widely available still – on kiosks in post offices for example, as in a couple of recent experiments, or on any PC with Internet access such as those available in the network of 6000 UK Online Centres right across the country, concentrated especially in areas with high levels of disadvantage of which we have many in London.

It is a great example I think of how we can use the new technology to benefit those who have been on the wrong end of the rich / poor divide in the past and ensure that we do not put a new digital divide in its place. There are here tremendous opportunities to improve the way we deliver public services, to modernise them, to ensure they are in a form which suits the people we want to use them, opportunities which we need to work together to make the most of. The power of new technology, coupled with the scale of investment which has been committed to the reform of public services, provides us all with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve the quality and the responsiveness of the services we are responsible form, and to deliver a step change improvement in the efficiency with which they are delivered.

Last November, the Prime Minister hosted what we dubbed the e-Summit at Westminster, when we invited e-Government leaders from around the world to a symposium to compare notes on progress in our respective countries. We attach great importance to benchmarking our progress against that in the other G7 countries. We published for that event an authoritative benchmarking study, which concluded that the UK is the second best place in the world for e-commerce after the US. And the Prime Minister announced that we will be committing £6 billion to e-Government over the next three years. One billion of that, he said, would be specifically for broadband connectivity. And because I have a particular responsibility for broadband rollout, I wanted to focus on that first of all in my remarks this morning.

Just over 70% of the country’s population now has access to affordable broadband, broadband provided by ADSL, cable or fixed wireless. That is as high a figure now as it is in the US. And over 40% of the population has a choice of affordable broadband provider, with a much higher proportion in London able to choose between telephony based and cable TV based broadband services. It is not quite the case yet that we have 100% broadband availability in London, because there are some areas, like North Woolwich in my constituency, which are too far from the local BT exchange and do not have cable TV. But we have a very good position on availability in London as a whole, and that is one of London’s strengths as a location for business.

Across Britain as a whole, take-up of broadband is now rising at a fantastic rate. Last October we flew past the one million mark and it was only in May, less than eight months later, when I was able to announce that the UK had achieved its second million. Well over 100,000 new broadband connections are established each month, which is one of the fastest rates of growth for broadband anywhere in the world. So if we do the maths, we can see that we are, in July 2003, already well on the way to getting the third million.

The 2.2 million broadband connections in the UK are almost evenly distributed between ADSL and cable. Last night both the cable TV provider NTL and BT held receptions in Westminster. Simon Duffy, the new Chief Executive of NTL, confirmed that NTL continues to enjoy a very high rate of broadband take up on its networks and is looking at the potential for wireless to extend access further still. And BT announced that it is announcing thresholds for another 400 BT exchanges, so that if all of those exchanges reach their broadband demand thresholds and are upgraded for ADSL, that is if enough customers in each of those exchange areas sign up as wanting broadband, then 90% of UK households will be within reach of the service.

Our overall target for broadband is for the UK to have the most extensive and competitive broadband market in the G7 by 2005. By maintaining the competition that already exists, building on it to create more customer choice, and working in tandem to increase availability throughout the UK, we believe we can keep on track to deliver the target. It looked a very distant prospect when I arrived in the department to be greeted by a headline in one of the Computing papers proclaiming that the UK was neck and neck with Croatia on broadband. But the latest analysis of our progress, in an assessment completed in May, now lists the UK as third in the G7 for competitiveness. We are only fifth for extensiveness, but the gap is narrowing and we have caught right up just behind the USA.

We want to stimulate competition in the market, interfering as little as possible. We don’t believe in providing generalised subsidies to the market. We have seen, most recently I suppose in the instance of mobile communications, how effective an approach that is to achieving innovation and creativity in order to secure rapid and widespread roll out of new communications services.

We can point to a number of examples of how the market is proving effective and innovative. Demand registration schemes are a case in point. BT’s trigger level initiative seems to be working well, with around 400 exchanges having hit their trigger point already and many of them having been upgraded for ADSL, with as I have said many more to come.

There are well over 200 re-sellers of BT’s wholesale ADSL product in the market. And, again in May, visiting rural users of satellite broadband in Sussex, I was told that they had twelve service providers to choose from. That is all encouraging evidence the market is proving effective in delivering broadband.

And new entrants to the market, with new applications and technologies, such as wireless on a commercial basis, will help things along further.

One of the key elements in extending broadband access is the subject at the heart of this conference, what the public sector can do with its own requirements and purchasing power, the way in which the one billion pounds announced by the Prime Minister will make an impact. The one billion pounds was not decided upon because somebody has decided that broadband is a good thing, or a worthy cause. But rather because my colleagues the Ministers responsible for schools, for health and for the other services, and local authorities too, have decided that they need to use a large chunk of the extra funding they are receiving to implement broadband, in order to improve their services. So for example,

• by 2006, primary schools will get a minimum 2 Mbit/s two-way connection, while secondary schools will get a minimum 8 Mbit/s two-way;
  
  
• all GP surgeries, hospitals, primary care trusts and health authorities will be wired up, in order to implement electronic patient records and the NHS University which will deliver professional development online to NHS staff in their place of work;
  
  
• the criminal justice system will be modernised, moving away at last from paper based operation.

I was the Minister for Schools before moving to DTI and it does not require too much imagination to see how big an impact on learning broadband can have. I know that many in London local authorities have grasped that vision too. With the Curriculum Online programme now going forward with the support of the BBC, there is a growing wealth of superb material available online and we can see the prospect of young people increasingly being able to follow a wider range of courses, and being able to work at a speed which suits them best. The opportunities are immense.

Young people will not be the only beneficiaries. Yesterday, the Government’s white paper on skills was published, reflecting our conviction that workforce skills are a key area to get right in order to improve the levels of productivity across the UK economy and help to bridge the productivity gap with countries like France and Germany. Online delivery of skills training will be one of the keys to success.

A few weeks ago I opened in East Ham Newham College’s Learndirect Centre on the High Street next to East Ham station and on probably the busiest spot in my constituency. Since April 2000, Learndirect has reached over 880,000 learners who, between them, have taken up more than 1.8 million courses. These are services that people want to use, and are personalised around their needs.

In Higher and Further Education, we already have a world-class broadband network in JANET (the Joint Academic Network) and its high-speed backbone, SuperJANET.

And in line with the ambitions of the People’s Network, thanks to the efforts of every local authority in the country, public libraries across the country are having broadband connections installed. Over 90% of the country’s libraries already do have broadband, in Northern Ireland, every library does. And some areas’ libraries have very high bandwidth broadband, such as Derby, at 16Mbps links, Luton, which has 100Mbps links and, better still, Middlesborough, with a staggering 2Gbps connection! What I would like to see is every public library becoming a wi-fi hotspot, so that students will be able to go into their local library with their wireless enabled laptop, increasingly all laptops will be wireless enabled, and access the library’s broadband connection via wireless to surf the Net and pursue their studies.

I set up the UK Broadband Task Force last November to lead on the aggregation of all this public sector broadband demand. That will enable us to maximise value for money for the public services, but crucially it will bring broadband infrastructure to a wide range of places where it is not available at the moment, giving us the chance to extend the services to users who do not have it at the moment.

I am chairing the Ministerial Group that is overseeing the project. And I am confident that the investment being made by the public sector in purchasing broadband will be a major step in opening up access to other users’ in new areas. We want to make sure that, for example, where a local school has broadband under aggregated procurement, this investment can be capitalised on for provision to local SMEs and households. There are examples of that happening already, for example, a broadband-enabled school in Cheshire has set up a fixed wireless broadband service so that people in the surrounding community can gain access. Elsewhere, perhaps, BT’s provision of broadband infrastructure for GP surgeries will enable it to set a lower trigger level for ADSL-enabling the local exchange. Those are the mechanisms we need to explore and get right.

And I believe the public sector has a key part to play in driving the take up of broadband too, because the public sector has a high proportion of the really compelling online content which people will want broadband in order to access. We are seeing some great use of the web by London boroughs, and I hope they will increasingly exploit the potential of broadband. Jobcentre information and Learndirect are examples I have already mentioned, another key one is NHS Direct. A broadband experiment carried out by Telewest in Birmingham last year demonstrated the very high level of demand for good quality NHS Online information. NHS Direct receives around 120,000 calls a week to the telephone helpline and NHS Direct Online receives gets half a million hits a month. Increasingly I believe we will see public sector agencies providing the content that will drive up broadband take up, and I hope local authorities represented here will play a strong part in that.

I have concentrated on broadband this morning because I believe the potential is huge and I have a particular responsibility for its deployment. But broadband only accounts directly for one billion of the six billion pound e-Government commitment over the next three years. We have already made major achievements that we will continue to build on. We have one of the most advanced e-Government infrastructures in the world.

The UK online portal provides in-depth access to Government information and services. With the Government Gateway, the portal provides a quick and easy means of carrying out transactions with Government, like filling in self-assessment tax forms. But we are not yet where we believe we need to be. Until now, much of the emphasis has been on putting individual services online. The target of 100% service availability online by 2005, which was set by the Prime Minister in March 2000, has been a powerful driver. But the real challenge is not just to get more and more services online, but to get them online in a form which people want to use, and to take advantage of the opportunity for reform and improvement which the technology makes available.

Between us all, central and local government conduct something like 5 billion transactions a year with citizens and businesses, spread over 20 large departments, 480 local authorities and more than 200 agencies. It can all be pretty confusing. We now need to be more radical in designing services based on the needs of their users. Customer focus is at the core of public service reform. We need to provide services that people want to use and that achieve high levels of take-up.

The UK online programme is designed to provide that customer focus, organised around people, not institutions. The Government Gateway that provides the cornerstone of this initiative is already in place. Registration, enrolment and transaction handling are fully operational. In the future it will be possible to undertake electronic transactions involving many departments at once, ensuring a genuinely joined-up service.

We want the services, which people most want to undertake with government to be made available electronically with the highest priority. So we are giving a greater focus to getting key services online, like those related to health and education and those provided to business.

When dealing with government, the first place many people turn to for help and advice are the voluntary sector and organisations like Citizens’ Advice Bureaux. Clearly, intermediaries, acting on behalf of customers, can provide valuable access to e-government services too.

So it is important that we create the right market conditions for a mixed economy for providing e-services. This will involve opening up the market to private and public sector intermediaries, to social enterprises and others. Creating a market place where government, partners and players can come together to deliver e-government services that better meet user demands. Our aim is that in five years time there will be a fully developed mixed economy in the supply of public services.

I would like to draw attention to one particularly important venture of London Connects, the London Connects WARP. No, nothing to do with Star Trek, the letters stand for Warning, Advice and Reporting Point. It’s a means of sharing information on IT security vulnerabilities, and threats to electronic systems, and acting as a broker to enable Boroughs to collaborate on policies and deal with problems in a trusted environment. That may not sound very exciting, I know, but it takes forward what central government and major industries have been doing for some time, but without the overheads, and will offer London Boroughs the benefit of a service tailored to their particular needs.

Since the WARP’s launch in April, a lot of work has been going on behind the scenes, and I know this will in time help many of you here today. About half the London boroughs have signed up so far. Support from the WARP has come from the Cabinet Office, NISCC and from industry, who all recognise its value to the London Boroughs, so I’d like to congratulate London Connects on the progress so far.

There is a tremendous opportunity in e-Government to bring about many of the improvements and the changes for the better which all of us in London Government believe in. We all believe in public services and so we all have a powerful motivation for wanting them to work better, to meet people’s expectations more fully, to avoid disappointing and frustrating those on whose support we all depend. We came into London Government to help make these changes happen, and the technology gives us the chance to make that a reality. As Leader of Newham Council a decade ago I started to understand the possibilities, and today the evidence of real achievement is clear for all to see, but equally clear is how much more we all need to do.

I commend London Connects and Val as Chair for the progress so far – what I hope is that we can all work together in the next few months to make the most of the possibilities which all of us can see ahead.

Thank you very much.