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Smarter Government

My Lords, I welcome what I hope is the beginning of the end of the current situation where one half of the Civil Service spends their time monitoring and inspecting the other half, who spend their time responding to those inspections and very little leaks out to the benefit of the taxpayer. However, I really wanted to ask about the electronic or internet side of this. I notice that the Government are trying to get a million more people online. Are those new connections? Are they in urban areas or in rural areas, where they are really wanted? If it is only £30 a connection, is this just waffle, encouragement and PR? The Government are committing to spend £1.3 billion in putting services online. How does this square with the ideas in the Digital Economy Bill of throttling back people’s internet connections and possibly cutting them off, because then they cannot access these e-government services? If they are throttled back to below a useable speed of 1.5 megabytes per second, you will not be able to receive podcasts, and some government websites will "time out" on you, so you cannot submit your forms. That seems to be an example of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. I am delighted that the Government are going to free public data from the Ordnance Survey mapping and boundary data. At last, perhaps farmers, Defra and the RPA can all work off the same database. I hope this means that the RPA will release its data sets to the farmers for free, so that we can work off the same sets. But, on the other hand, who will pay for that? The Ordnance Survey has to make a profit at the moment, so presumably this will have to be funded from somewhere. However, I welcome it as a proper step forward in the right direction of having some joined-up government.