Stephen Timms MP

The British Computer Society Awards

For nearly 50 years, the British Computer Society has been championing excellence in professional IT and project implementation. That work is vital for the UK to remain at the forefront of this industry that now affects everybody and is making such a big impact on UK competitiveness.

International benchmarking, which we pay close attention to, places us consistently among the world leaders for e-business. The Economist Intelligence Unit's measure of "E-readiness", for example, places us 3rd in the world, level with the US. It is vitally important that we sustain and strengthen our position.

There are over a million people in Britain in ICT related occupations. The industry contributes quite disproportionately to the improvements in productivity, which we need to see across the economy, so the success of this industry has a very far-reaching significance.

We have seen a dramatic leap in broadband availability and take up over the past year. This time last year, we still had less than a million broadband connections. Today we are at around two and a half million, and the number has been going up by about 150,000 per month. Competition between service providers has been key to the progress - the market is very evenly split between connections based on ADSL and on cable modems, and there are over 200 competing providers of retail broadband services using the BT wholesale ADSL offer. In the future I think we will see increasing provision of wireless broadband, to sharpen the competition further. We recently overtook France to become the second largest broadband market in Europe, and the gap between us and Germany, at today around 3.8 million connections, has been narrowing rapidly.

About 80% of UK households are now within reach of broadband via ADSL, cable or wireless, but that still leaves 20% who aren't. Public sector broadband demand will in my view be one of the key levers for extending broadband further. My colleagues the Ministers responsible for education, the health service and other public services have calculated that they need to spend a billion pounds over the next three years on broadband connectivity in order to deliver the improvements they are committed to, and I want to make sure we use that investment in the most effective way possible, including maximising its impact on extending broadband to new users outside the public services.

By November, we shall have set up a Regional Aggregation Body - or RAB - in each of the English regions. They will bring together the public sector demand for broadband in their region - initially from schools and from the health service. The RABs will then go out to the market and seek bids from service providers to meet not the separate requirements from each customer, but the aggregated demand from all of them. Substantial, assured long-term demand from a gilt-edged customer - central and local Government - lowers the risk to investors and changes the business model fundamentally for broadband in rural areas. It means that there will be sufficient demand to justify investments from the service providers in many more places than would be the case if each department proceeded on its own.

It is already the case that every single public library in the country now offers internet access - and over 90% of them do via broadband. What I hope we will see is libraries becoming increasingly wi-fi hubs, so that students and others with wi-fi enabled laptops - as laptops and PDAs increasingly will be wi-fi enabled - will be able to visit local library and be able to surf the web from their own machines via wi-fi.

We have more wi-fi hotspots in the UK than any other country in Europe. I was in Silicon Valley back in May to visit some of the numerous start-ups, which have appeared over the past year and a half and are developing wi-fi, and I was very impressed by a lot of the technology that is emerging.

One of the issues that arose was over the relationship between wi-fi on the one hand and third generation mobile on the other. We saw this year the launch of the first 3G services in Europe, in the UK and Italy, and they are both doing well. We have a very high level of mobile penetration in the UK, though not quite as high as the level in Italy. My Italian counterpart informed me recently that there are now more mobiles in Italy than there are people.

But in Silicon Valley I enjoyed soliciting admiring gasps by playing back to them on my 3G mobile handset video highlights downloaded before I left the UK of the West Ham-Manchester City Premiership match. The quality is very impressive. It was suggested rather unkindly afterwards that what really surprised them in Silicon Valley was seeing West Ham actually winning a match. But the view I brought back with me was that wi-fi will make many more people able to benefit from working outside the office, and that in turn that will build demand for the fuller mobility provided by 3G - that the two will support each other.

Improving mobile technology is supporting public service improvements as broadband is. Junior doctors in Glamorgan are using mobile phones to send picture messages of X-rays to specialist consultants for advice on the best course of treatment, instead of using slower methods like couriers as in the past. I want to see many more applications of the skills of this industry to delivering the improvements in public services people are increasingly and rightly demanding.

The industry has been going through a tough time, and faces big challenges. Demand has been faltering in the world economy. European stock markets followed US markets downwards and it will be some time before we see again the rates of growth this industry was enjoying three years ago.

We are helped by the relative strength of the UK economy, with sound public finances, a robust framework of monetary and fiscal policy and substantial programmes of public sector IT investment and we have a superb industry. There have been encouraging signs just in the last couple of weeks of an increase in ICT vacancies - the highest number of IT vacancies for 2 years being advertised at the moment. E-Skills is the sector skills agency for this sector, doing a great and vital job, and the Board was upbeat about prospects for the sector when I met them earlier this month, though realistic also about the scale of the challenges ahead.

For the UK to remain a leading global player we need to develop innovation and entrepreneurship. The IT Professional Awards underline one of the BCS's key roles in this - to nurture and applaud individual ingenuity and entrepreneurial success. The awards rightly help to draw attention to the vital contribution made by the IT profession to the economy and to public services.

We also need to ensure that the industry has access to a talented pool of skilled people. Skills are a key issue for us at DTI and it's emerging as one of the key levers for augmenting UK productivity. That is why earlier in the summer we launched our Skills Strategy with the Department for Education and Skills. We want to give employers much greater influence over the provision of skills, to match what colleges and others are doing much more closely with the needs of business. We need really effective collaboration - Government industry and colleagues working in partnership to ensure we bring on talent and develop it for the future benefit of the industry;

We are also investing an additional £1.25 billion by 2005/6 in science, technology and engineering to boost the UK's economic performance and raise levels of innovation and growth. Science is key to our future. We want the commitment to broadband in every school to encourage young people to get online and to benefit from technology, firing their interest in the skills we are celebrating at this event tonight and helping to draw in future talent.

We need to ensure that we attract quality and skills from as diverse a pool of talent as possible. The Board of E-Skills UK told me how hard it is proving to harness enthusiasm for the industry among girls at school, and to increase the participation of women in the IT industry, and in IT jobs in other sectors. I particularly congratulate therefore BCS on its election of Prof Wendy Hall as next President of Society.

This summer we launched Equalitec - a web based resource to encourage young women into careers in the profession. There is still evidence, though, to show that we are losing more women than we are gaining, especially at senior levels, and we realise that retention is a critical issue for women in IT jobs.

As companies are required to be increasingly flexible, constantly changing to meet new demands of their customers, entering into new collaborations and looking for creative ways to leverage their corporate resources, they also need greater diversity in their workforces. They need people who can bring creative ideas, new skills, lateral thinking and different ways of working if they are to flourish in the future.

We want to help build the business case for diversity, understanding the costs of missing out on the talent and skills available in one part of the workforce, in particular to help raise up the priority list the importance of women playing a full role in business leadership.

To all the winners of tonight's awards I extend my hearty congratulations. It is your contribution and the work of the BCS that mark out the IT Profession as the profession for the 21st century. I wish you well for tonight and for success in the year ahead.

Thank you.