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Government IT and Software Procurement

I agree. The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point, and the more we converge around open standards, the fewer arguments—arguments of the sort that I am involved in now—there will be. In fact, Microsoft is not the only villain of the piece. The BBC was forced to withdraw its net learning project—at least in part, the BBC is a Government agency—because it was judged by the EU to be anti-competitive. The point is that the Government have a huge impact in the market as purchaser. They can use that power partially or fairly. They have the capacity to distort the market, and they can render it less open and less competitive. It seems to me that the Government are, in part, in breach of EU regulations. A prima facie case can be made that here we have illegal state aid—a similar case to that made with regard to the BBC iPlayer. The public sector is the biggest procurer in the UK. If the public sector skews the market to favour certain companies and if the Government distort the market by their actions as a prime purchaser, it is not the same as a private company doing so; in a sense a private company is free to do so. The Government are spending public money, and in doing so, it is difficult to see how they are not also breaching state aid rules and providing illegal state aid. If someone cannot access benefits online without using a Windows-based computer, as is currently the case, I do not see how the Government can be doing anything other than involving themselves in illegal state aid. They simply do not need to do that as it would be technically possible to access the system some other way. Personally, I put up with the fact that inside the Palace of Westminster I can no longer use an Apple Mac computer to surf the internet, which the Parliamentary Information and Communications Technology department has said is because of security, although it has never actually explained how. Why should benefit clients have to purchase Windows Vista, which costs a few hundred pounds, when technically, if the Government allowed them, those clients could do the same thing for free on an operating system such as Linux? Why are the Government making people do that?