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e-Government

I, too, welcome the opportunity to debate this issue and I commend my hon. Friend the Minister for his remarks. Those who are not participating in the debate may feel that those who are doing so are a bunch of IT nerds and sad techies, but I have no IT knowledge whatever, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Andrew Miller) will confirm; he has just had to fix my pager. The debate is not about IT itself but about having a passion for transforming public services so that they can be delivered to those who need them most in the most appropriate way for those citizens. It is deeply political and central to what this Government are about. We tend to lose that point in some of the debates that go into techie language on the minutiae of portals and so on. There is passion in Government, and I commend the funding. Way back in 1997 when we talked about e-Government the deeply cynical said there would never be enough investment, but there is more than enough investment. In the most deprived part of my community, Bury park, along one street—Dunstable road—there are at least four or five IT centres. Every school is so IT-connected that one cannot move for the number of up-to-date white boards, computers and every IT gadget one can imagine. The Government's passion for delivering the agenda is proven; we have delivered on our target. People say that the Government produces targets but does not deliver, but here we are. We will achieve our target of 100 per cent. services online by the end of the year and the expected £1.2 billion in efficiency savings by 2007–08. That is also to be commended. It is fundamentally recognised by the Government that a transformation agenda has not only produced those efficiencies but can deliver the kind of quality services that our citizens deserve. Hon. Members will forgive me if I sound a little frustrated; as leader of Lewisham council, prior to entering the House, I was one of the people who were advocating and delivering the e-Government agenda in the mid-1990s when some of it was not fashionable. When I was leader, Lewisham was one of the first councils to deliver online, joined-up services. My background was in housing; we recognised that the delivery of housing benefit to the most deprived people was appalling. How could a Labour council justify delivering some of the worst services to those who were most in need? We set out about joining up our housing benefit services online, linking housing and the DSS. There were issues of data sharing, but we fought through them to ensure that that service went from very poor to excellent. Leadership and passion need to be shown in local government to prove that such things can be done, rather than falling back on the sometimes simplistic argument that things cannot be done because of data sharing and various other ““can't-dos””. This is a can-do agenda and I know that one thing the Minister will be doing is driving that passion and enthusiasm and the can-do agenda through e-Government. We have to ask ourselves, however, whether we have gone far enough in some of the things that the Minister said he wants to achieve. Have we gone far enough in central and local government to break down silos? The old departmentalitis is still with us. I get very frustrated, particularly when local authorities tell me gleefully that their services are online, but they are not joining them up. Have we identified what ““online services”” or the 100 per cent. target mean? My local council in Luton claims almost to have met its target because it has set up a brand-new call centre. Actually, the response times in that call centre, as external auditors have shown, are appalling. The quality of service is not good, but the council is able to tick the box to say that it has online services. There is something fundamentally wrong not only in the definition of e-Government services, but in the quality of those services. Have we done enough to make e-Government citizen-focused? I want to return to that. Have we done enough to ensure, as other hon. Members have said, that the services reach the people who need them most and not just the usual suspects, giving them another opportunity to lobby for the extra services in the way that they lobby already, and giving them a greater advantage in access to services? Citizen-focused service delivery is essential, and the quality framework for UK Government website design and human-centred design standards have been successful. Their use should be the norm rather than the exception for central and local government. Have we done enough to achieve the wired society? That is one of our big challenges. Like other colleagues, I have argued for some time for one IT Minister, not simply because we want excellent people such as the Minister here to be in elevated positions, although we do, but because there is more to the e-Government agenda than simply local and central Government. We should be looking to a wired society. Those of us who visited Canada many years ago saw how schools were joined up to skills training, education and service delivery. There was a unified offer to citizens not only for delivery of certain services, but across the board, including the voluntary sector. At the time when we went to Canada, its greatest claim to fame was the online moose hunting licence. Perhaps that was not the best example to show us in those days. Nevertheless, the vision was good. We need to consider how we can make maximum use of all our IT opportunities for all our citizens and not just those in public service delivery. Have we done enough on the take-up of IT services? As has been mentioned, we have slipped down the league table slightly. There was a little thing called the general election, which may have taken our eye off the ball slightly. We must ensure that we are up there with the leaders—the US, Canada and the Nordic countries—and we have much more to do to ensure that online services are the preferred channel in the UK. We have to admit that in the course of this project we have not always been wholly successful at ensuring that Government sites are the most exciting and accessible. Let us be blunt; in many cases, they have been difficult and boring. Until the UK matches other Governments, let alone the private sector, such people are not excluded because of lack of simple and accessible systems, systems that are simple enough for MPs such as me to access. I do not believe in the arguments about the digital divide being impossible to resolve. The social exclusion agenda that I see increases social exclusion. I was involved in one of the first online discussions between parliamentarians and citizens about issues of concern. It was a project called WomenSpeak and involved survivors of domestic violence. We made it our target to reach those who were least likely to have any contact with any agency. By definition, survivors of domestic violence are in that position but, even beyond that, we asked who was least likely to have any contact with any agency and least likely to go online. We extended the outreach and the first survivors online were a group of Irish women travellers in the north of England. The second group was Bangladeshi women in Luton in my constituency. People said that it would be impossible to set up such a project, but it was not and its success was that those Bangladeshi mums are still online using school facilities and have skilled themselves. Most did not have English as a first language and their lives consisted of home, school and nothing else. They are now IT literate and have access to a world that was not previously available to them and to skills and opportunities that were not previously available to them. Far from creating a greater digital divide, IT can increase access and opportunities in a way that we must pursue with even greater vigour. Reference has been made to the problem of confidence in our IT systems and, as with other colleagues, I think we must do a great deal more to ensure that we build that confidence. I have heard it said that the fragility of confidence in the delivery of Government systems is such that we are only a scandal away from another meltdown. That is the popular perception of where we are with Government IT systems and service delivery. We must remember that some of our IT transformation projects are the largest of any Government anywhere in the world. Goodness knows, the Department for Work and Pensions has some problems, but the level of transformation and the IT projects are enormous. Of course, we must address the failures, but, like other colleagues, I think we should commend those projects that have been successful. As chair of EURIM, I am pleased to say that we are undertaking to bring forward and highlight those Government projects that have been successful and have been delivering e-Government but are not generally acknowledged. Are we delivering the services that people want? I have referred to the departmental silos which still exist in central and local government. There is still too little joined-up service delivery. I had a vision about four years ago, which I presented to the then Minister, when I said, ““This is your challenge. If you can deliver this””—we have not—““you will have cracked joined-up online services.”” It was an idea for survivors of domestic violence to be able to report and resolve their problems online. Why should a survivor of domestic violence have to visit their housing benefit office, housing office and social security, as well as trail their kids to the education service and, perhaps, Citizens Advice at a time of absolute crisis and homelessness? I will throw that challenge to the Minister again. Those who need our services most should benefit most from a joined-up online service provision. I wonder whether what we are doing is far too much top-down, rather than bottom-up. I sometimes despair of local government recreating their services as they are online without any transformation. I have seen it far too often. I have also despaired at the lack of citizens' involvement. I commend the Minister for his comments about ensuring that we have citizens' involvement and feedback. We urgently need online feedback loops. We urgently need online consultation. We have to ensure that e-democracy is integral to this e-Government offer. That is a completely different debate but one that is essential if we are to have ongoing improvements in service delivery. If our citizens are to have choice, as well as receiving services online, they need to be able to tell us online whether those services meet their needs and what else they feel is appropriate. We should look more at whether some of the large resources going into local government need to go into the community organisations and social enterprises who are doing the bottom-up, joined-up service delivery. I am trying to get funding for a project in my constituency called Click Bury Park, a service that is being designed online by young Pakistani and Bangladeshi men who have the highest unemployment rate in my constituency. They are designing a one-stop service shop so that people in the Bangladeshi and Pakistani community who are most deprived and who are least likely to access a range of services can find information about those services on one portal in their languages and in an accessible form. That is the community doing it for itself. It is about regeneration, access to services, information and training those young people. It brings all sorts of benefits. They want to do e-democracy. They want to talk about forced marriages online. That is the sort of innovative project that we should support. But because it does not fit in a box, the funding streams do not allow it to be funded. There is something seriously wrong when we have a system under which one bit can be funded, but not another.