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e-Government

: The particular game that I am completely addicted to is ““Civilization””. It is the most fantastically educational game, which teaches us, in ways that I never expected, about history and how societies advance. A very valuable website, ePolitix, has given the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood)—the hon. Member for GCHQ, if I can refer to him as that—and I some useful briefing. It referred to the fact that the eZeSchools network has found that education can make huge advances through e-Government, and I am delighted that it has. Having said how valuable e-Government can be, there are nevertheless dangers and risks of which we must be aware and guard against. Much is being done in e-Government and we rely heavily on computers; nowadays even our fridges, telephones and cars have chips in them. If those technologies come under attack from outside through hacking or cyber warfare, the risk to the coherence of our society is serious because of the pervasive dependence on information technology. I am lucky enough to be a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee—I am its resident geek—and I have constantly raised the fact that critical national infrastructure relies heavily on information technology. I worry that we do not spend enough time on, or have enough fear of, the ways in which critical national infrastructure is vulnerable to attack from outside. In 2004 the Intelligence and Security Committee said:"““We recommend that the threat to the UK's Critical National Infrastructure and vulnerability to electronic and other attacks should be examined by the JIC and considered by Ministers.””" While we rely so heavily on information technology, it is essential that we protect that technology. My second concern about our reliance on information technology was mentioned in the excellent speech of the hon. Member for Cheltenham. There is a worry about fraud in voting systems, for example. The hon. Member for Luton, South (Margaret Moran) said that we need to move forward with e-democracy. However, if we are so concerned about postal voting—I am sure that those concerns have not been cleared up; we are still worried about the amount of fraud there could have been as a result of the all-postal ballots—consider how much more difficult it will be to guard against fraud in internet voting. Following the Minister's excellent opening speech, I wonder whether he could reassure us that the Government will not go down that road unless they are absolutely certain that they have guarded against fraud in a better way than they did with postal voting.