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e-Government

: Yes, I agree. In this country, we are used to benign government and people respecting the rules not only that Government lay down but that people think Government ought to have laid down, whether they have or not. In other words, we are used to people behaving well. However, we cannot be certain that that will exist for ever, particularly given the changes that the new world order, which we keep being told about, is beginning to introduce into the Government of this country and, indeed, the Governments of western democracies in general. We may find that our freedoms are limited and our privacies curtailed in ways that we cannot currently predict. We need to build into the system safeguards against the abuse of those freedoms and our privacy being pried into. That said, I do not want to concentrate on the dangers of e-Government; rather, I want to say how valuable it has been. I started by saying that e-Government was extremely valuable, and I continue to think that. Labour Members, particularly the hon. Members for South Swindon (Anne Snelgrove) and for Ochil and South Perthshire (Gordon Banks), talked about the need to have e-Government more readily available to those who might be thought to be less accustomed to using information technology, and they are right. In one sense, that is a short-term problem, because as our children, who all programmed our videos—remember those?—grow up, they will become used to the idea of using technology, so the problem will decrease with the generations. However, the current problem is real. People who are too old to have been familiar with Amstrads when they were introduced in the 1980s and to have used them regularly will have no interest in taking up e-Government because they will not see any benefit in going through the mind-numbing process, as they would think of it, of learning how to use these awful computer things. Actually, computers are extremely valuable to everyone, but there is a lot that the Government need to do in that regard—for example, ensuring that libraries have a lot of computers readily online and free to be used by people who cannot afford to have them at home. The Government also need to encourage small businesses to be more optimistic about the value of e-commerce. If, as the hon. Member for Cheltenham said, e-commerce begins to take over at local level, small businesses may well suffer. They find the high cost of developing and maintaining websites prohibitive, so they may lose out on the local business that one would think they were ideally placed to pick up. The Minister said that on one of his visits—to mid-Kent, I think—he was told that Government websites left something to be desired. Of course that is true because unlike commerce, Governments do not have the important driver that if they do not get their website right, they will be out of business. It is therefore important that the Government should benefit from the experience of commerce. The parliamentary website is one example of how a website should not look—[Hon. Members: ““Hear, hear.””] I am delighted to say that it is just about to be revamped.