Ultimately, the great British Public end up paying for investments in our networks. The question is what mechanism we employ. It’s tricky sometimes to know what would be more popular: paying out of general taxation, paying more for existing services to fund future investment, or waiting for the new investment and then paying a big premium if you want it.
In the normal course of events, it’s the latter model which you might expect. Companies would to borrow to fund a speculative investment and reap the rewards afterwards. But sometimes this doesn’t happen as quickly as people want. And government intervention doesn’t usually work this way – so how would you find the money for the investment?
For the purposes of this discussion, we should probably assume that we don’t have the ability to authorise big spending cuts anywhere else in the public sector!
Working in the Department for Business puts me right on the divide between the public and private sectors. Our ability to achieve our policy objectives often means flexing tht boundary, either through spending, regulation, direct involvement in a market or some other intervention. The current political climate sees a lot of discussion about how much of all of this the state should have been doing, or should do in future. Some people are claiming that decades of belief that we should have a small state letting the market prosper might be coming to an end, with the pendulum swinging towards a highly interventionist state.
While communications policy hasn’t endured such a dramatic twelve months as the financial sector, the same issues are at play. Virtually nobody really hankers after renationalisation of our telecoms networks, for instance, but lots of people want to see a very active state providing investment in next generation broadband. In broadcasting, the consensus around the BBC’s role in the country’s culture might be cracking a little bit at the edges, but I would argue there is a general acceptance that it will play a massive role in our future, tempered by a concern that commercial alternatives are starting to look under severe strain.
So how should the government react? People will always look to the government to ‘do something’. It sometimes takes a brave minister to say there is nothing for us to do. As always in politics, the trick is to get the balance right and make the intervention the right one that leaves the market able to function properly. Maybe that’s what Digital Britain will ultimately be judged on.
The minister has been visiting overseas this week but will be right back into the Digital Britain swing from Monday.
For those of us working on the project, the level of interest and focus on the issues is way higher than many other (terribly worthy but not newsworthy) issues the government has dealt with in the past. I have worked on projects that if they garnered a single passing reference in the FT, we would be taken by surprise. In the case of Digital Britain barely a day goes by without a mention on the radio, in the broadsheets and definitely online – perhaps the media really like talking about themselves?
This adds up to a climate of expectation in which we’re expected to change the world, fix the economy and have everything tied up in the next few weeks. Certainly very senior people in government are citing Digital Britain as one of the most important projects going on at the moment. In many ways, this is helpful in that it keeps momentum up and gives the project licence to be ambitious. But in others, it can leave you a bit daunted by the task.
Anyway, another Friday to pound through online comments and pick out all the stuff we missed, and then onwards to next week.
We’re going through the paper responses to the report, of which there are nearly 300, and the stack stands a good foot off the table. They range from one page emails to thirty or forty page submissions.
It’s too early to summarise them in any detail, but a few themes have emerged. Most obviously, there is a lot of discussion about our ambitions for broadband – plenty of people saying 2MB/s isn’t enough, but also plenty of nervousness over who is going to pay for it. Likewise, there has been a fair bit of comment over the supposed ‘old media’ focus of the report, although the established broadcasters quite rightly point out that people still watch a lot of television…
But plenty of people have raised slightly different angles, and questioned why, for example, there isn’t a greater emphasis on carbon reduction or technoloygy development. We’ll have to consider all of this as we go into the final report.
Finally, we’ve got the challenge of how to capture all the online comment about the report. Like it or not, the civil service still works mostly on paper (or at least on pages) and it’s actually much easier to precis, file and refer back to a twenty page submission from the BBC than it is to capture the back-and-forth of an online discussion between four or five people. But it’s more important in this project than ever that we demonstrate we’re listening to the online chatter.
