Digital politics - Liberal Democrat IT policy with a focus on e-government

Written by Richard Allan MP on Sat 6th Sep 2003

I spent much of last year drafting a new IT policy for the Liberal Democrats which can be found in full at www.makeitpolicy.org.uk

Anything you write about new technology inevitably rapidly becomes out of date but I hope that the themes we have set out will remain relevant for some time.

The use of technology by Government continues to be an issue of great concern in the political arena. We are critical of the Government's crude target to make all its services "online" by 2005. We fear that this has led to investment in placing a technological veneer on many services, rather than encouraging the fundamental reform of a smaller number of services to allow them to really benefit from new technology. The fact that there has been a relatively low take-up of e-government services is indicative of a lack of success in this area.

To deliver better online services, we should be looking at how people work online and changing Government services to fit in with this rather than just putting a web interface onto what is essentially an unchanged offline system. The Canadian government have shown how this can be done effectively and their Government portal at www.gc.ca compares very favourably with the very poor UK equivalent at www.open.gov.uk.

Another area that rightly receives a lot of attention is the way in which Government purchases and implements new technology. The size and complexity of many Government projects is reducing the number of bidders, which in turn is reducing the effectiveness of the competitive process. Indeed, the Cabinet Office has just agreed a multimillion pound IT contract despite the fact that it had only one supplier in the running after others pulled out.

We wish to see an effective market in IT services to the public sector and would take a number of steps to ensure that this remains the case. We would look at breaking down contracts into modules for which smaller, more specialised contractors could tender. The aim of this is to increase the number and quality of bids, and reduce dependency on large proprietary solutions, which can lock public services into expensive relationships where the balance of power lies too heavily with the contractor.

Our policy also strongly advocates more attention being paid to both open standards and open source solutions. The development of open standards can bring huge benefits to the sector as a whole and we are concerned that any extension of software patentability could frustrate standards development. Open source methodologies may also be particularly applicable to the public sector where there are large potential developer communities who would contribute to projects with a public benefit if empowered to do so.

IT is increasingly moving centre stage in public policy as services like the NHS and tax and benefits can only deliver improvements with sound technology. A strong IT policy is therefore more important than ever and we intend to continue developing Liberal Democrat policy as technology moves on. Any comments or contributions to me at allanr@parliament.uk would be more than welcome.

Richard Allan MP is the Liberal Democrat Party Spokesperson on Information Technology.