Introduction

Steve Gallagher
It is getting more and more difficult to deliver something that will make a difference to people’s lives. That difference is broadband, the technology that allows more data to travel down one "pipe" into a home – and fast.

Broadband sounds boring, but it potentially means a wholesale review of the way we live and communicate. The technology has endless possibilities: video conferencing, interactive public services and councillors – or doctors – holding their surgeries over the internet, to be beamed into thousands of homes. Broadband opens the way for the invention of technologies, ideas and services that do not yet exist. Its potential, if harnessed correctly, could provide services that not only delight the consumer but also empower the citizen.

But it is a technology that remains trapped in a chicken-and-egg situation. Citizen-consumers will not take up broadband if they see no distinct benefits for their lives, and industry will not invest in ways to utilise the technology until enough people have taken it up. Technological progress is in stasis – and, with it, modern ideas and plans for e-governance.

Our delegates discuss the issues surrounding the broadband and e-governance stalemate.

David Elstein
The first thing the government needs to do is get its house in order. Government tends to grab at this whole digital broadband issue, biting chunks out of it but never digesting them.

The Department for Education and Skills alone has issued a press release on digital issues and initiatives virtually every day since Labour came to office. If you add everything else the government has been doing, there are probably 15 different government departments all with their own toe in the digital water. This is all competing, conflicting and half thought through, and is just confusing the consumer. About 95 per cent of the information could be well correlated with a bit of thought, but it is just all over the place.

So perhaps the first thing the government needs to do is set a good example of how to organise its internet interface with the public. There is a lot of anxiety out there – I would not call it Luddism – about all things electronic.

A while ago, initiatives were being launched for UK online, an expensive advertising campaign was being run on the theme "Get yourself connected", and it was completely wasted. It was money straight down the drain for the purpose of appearing to be on-message and trying to do things.

So the first thing I would say is: get yourself a joined-up government.

Steve Gallagher
You will wait an awful long time for central government to get joined up. Two hundred years of working in one way does not change overnight. But the focus should be on local government, because that is where things will get joined up and joined up very quickly. Central government will join in with that approach. I do not think you will see a transformation of central government per se; what you will see is central government responding to a local government agenda that is about a radically different way of interacting with citizens.

Lord McNally
My worry about the government’s approach is that they become obsessed by targetry and then worry when their self-imposed targets are not met. I think it would be far better for the government to get its own house in order in the things that it can deal with. A great deal is already going on in Whitehall to try to get the big departments ready; that may have a bigger impact more quickly than any of us imagine. But I think that it is going to happen not through some great digital bound, with lots of target dates being met, but by the various parts doing their own thing and getting on with it.

Andy Smith
One of the other big dangers about targets, particularly around 2005, is that the easiest way for the public sector, local and national government to meet the targets would be to enable all the services they are doing now. The result would be great – ticks in boxes all the way down the line – but would you have joined-up government? Would you, hell! There is a sense in which, because of their size and scale, it takes a long time to move some central government juggernauts around. If you were trying to achieve e-government, you would not start from here – but, sadly, they have.

Chad Wollen
The challenge is about moving government away from a model that has been about talking effectively and projecting things out into the world. They are just starting to understand how to listen, but the sets of structures and institutional arrangements that allow them to converse with the public are completely different. The skills of conversing are immensely labour intensive and involve not technology but people.

Richard Allan
There is a concept in government that unless everybody can have a service, nobody can have it – and I think it has grown under the present government. That means we all move at the pace of the slowest. Generating competition could create three or four routes into a service for different people to take. As long as they are all good, there would be benefits – some people could do it themselves, while government focuses resources on helping those who still need the traditional service. But that means a conceptual change, to saying: "We are prepared to roll out services that only a proportion of the population will access in the first place" That is a conceptual barrier that exists in government.

Steve Gallagher
I do not think we are moving at the pace of the slowest. A national strategy for e-government is coming out at the end of January. This will still clearly contain an expectation that there will be either pioneers or pathfinders which will be funded to move the service agenda forward and create opportunities and better services that are more joined up, to use the cliché.

We have been part of a pathfinder programme which has been doing exactly that. It has been based partly around life events, which means that you do not provide services by departments. If somebody has a new child or suffers a bereavement – one or other end of the spectrum – they will be able to access the whole range of services through one portal, for example, or through one telephone call. This is not just about the internet. Most of our people want to contact us by telephone or face to face. So it is about using technology to improve services at that end. It is not just about the internet.

Chad Wollen
If we are talking about technological divides, do we mean a divide in access, in which case access to what – digital television, mobile phones, PCs, video games, consoles, all these different ways of accessing? Or do we mean usage? Many homes have these technologies, but the usage might not be at the sort of level we all imagine for the demanding consumer or the responsible citizen.

Or do we mean a divide in knowledge – which is one of the oldest issues politicians have been discussing? One can go back to the debates about access to knowledge, the foundation of Birkbeck College 150 years ago, the diffusion of the school system and so on. We have to be sure what we are talking about. I agree that access is not so much of the issue. If we are talking about technology, it is more about usage. And if we are talking about usage, we have to stop talking about technology and start talking about benefits.

David Elstein
There is ministerial confusion across a number of issues – the digital divide is perhaps the most obvious. Did we ever have an anxiety about the Encyclopaedia Britannica divide? It is virtually impossible to have any new addition to society’s knowledge assets without it being spread slowly. You cannot go from zero to 100 on any realistic timescale.

Therefore, you have to ask, what are your real policy objectives? What is the anxiety about a digital divide based on – that people will not get access to certain things? Well, think of another way of getting access. Great, let’s have internet cafés; let’s have UK online centres in libraries; let’s find low-cost, low-tech ways of making available to people that which we believe they benefit from, including training, particularly for providers of material and resources.

Richard Allen
Within the parliamentary context, we are always talking about access to our information. We used to have a system whereby what we said in parliament was distributed as a bound volume of Hansard that went out to central libraries very slowly. If anyone wanted to access them, only a very small number of the population could get to a library, understand the indexing system and get the information very late.

We now have it on the internet, and people worry because 60 per cent of people cannot access the online Hansard; but 40 per cent of the population can now access what we say in parliament from 8 o’clock in the morning the very next day. So the glass is definitely half full, not half empty. But we sometimes have this psychological barrier to seeing ourselves going forward; we always see ourselves as having gone downhill from where we used to be.

David Elstein
Just get it out there and let people work it out for themselves.

Lord McNally
I do not believe in trickle-down technology, but I think we have far too much angst about the digital divide. Probably every generation has had a technology divide, but we are the first that seems to have had such angst about it. I suspect that it will work as a pincer movement – that the top layer of people will embrace new technologies because of personal wealth or education – but that Steve is right as well. The way in which the new technologies offer new ways of getting services to the most deprived will have an impact.

Steve Bowbrick
I wonder whether it is worth listening to the tech industries, and particularly the consumer technology industries, a bit more. For decades now, these industries have been wrestling with the issue of how you roll out technologies to resistant and often refusing communities of consumers. They do not call it the divide, do they? They call it the chasm and there are books about the chasm and how you get technologies from the early adopter groups out through the laggards and the refusers. I wonder whether it is worth listening to them. They use techniques which are mostly about rolling cheap, depreciated technologies into communities of people like my Dad, who adopt these things very late. Perhaps we should focus on action at the edges, the fringes of the network. How were the last 20 per cent of television viewers persuaded to adopt television, for instance?

Lord McNally
I was looking at this report that mobile phone penetration in the UK is now 73 per cent. That has happened in just over a decade. But in the early 1990s, nobody was sitting down working out mobile phone penetration and targets. That also answers the question, how did the last 20 per cent convert to television? Certain technologies are must-have technologies. People did not switch to colour television because of a government campaign or government leaflets – they wanted colour television. There are technologies like this out there. It is not always easy to spot them, which is why there are successes and failures, but the must-have technologies sell themselves. It is ridiculous to waste too much angst on it. Those consumers will demand them.

Chad Wollen
We have to stop talking about technology and understand that so much of what we are talking about is cultural and political values and visions in our society. One reason why Finland and Scandinavia are so good at technology is that they do not have such preconceptions about who should be using the technology and who should not. When I am sitting around with our colleagues in the technology sector, I am amazed at their attitudes to the elderly – that their only use of a mobile phone is to call the ambulance and things like that. I do not believe that Scandinavia has the view that we have of the elderly population, so that it starts to feed into assumptions about the market and where things should go.

Stuart Hill
While we wait for government to lead this agenda, perhaps it is the responsibility of people in this room to help deliver it. But there is one big danger. Lord McNally talked about the 70 per cent penetration of mobile phones across the UK. If people are using the internet from such a vast base, and their knowledge is so high, they will form cyber-communities to get around what they feel the government does wrong. I do not mean tax returns or state benefit, but environmental or political issues. Perhaps ten million or even 50 million people could become involved in such a pressure group. Where we now have local pressure groups campaigning about the town hall there will be pressure groups at national and world level. That is why I think the government has to get these e-envoy activities driving change because otherwise there will not be a marriage with the citizen in the ways that count. The deferential citizen will become an unbelievably demanding and incisive effect on our industry and our lives in this country.

David Elstein
It is terribly easy to be confused between the ultimate policy objectives and the mechanism for getting there. There are still ministers who believe digital television is a good way of accessing the internet, but it is a very inefficient way of accessing the internet. Stephen Byers was on the record before the election, when he was at the DTI, saying: "Digital television is essential for getting citizens to access the internet" It is just nonsense.

Gerry Bastable
The reason why people think TV is the answer is that everyone has a TV but different TVs do different things, and not everyone has a digital television.

David Elstein
It has got into ministerial heads that analogue switch-off is in itself desirable, because it releases spectrum that might be reallocated or sold – nobody knows how much it might be worth. The problem is that analogue switch-off is unbelievably difficult , far more difficult than any minister or senior civil servant is willing to acknowledge. We have embarked upon immensely costly exercises with no cost-benefit analysis. Just think of the cost to the public of launching digital terrestrial television long term. The probable cost to the public is £10bn before we get to analogue switch-off. Nobody ever asks, should we do this? We just launched ourselves into it. We do not agonise over £10m here or £20m there.

Peter Bazalgette
When the government launched radio in the 1920s, they did not concentrate on radio sets: they made sure the content was good by setting up the BBC. Content in the end is what will get people to use these services. And, by the way, it does not have to be good for you: cod liver oil is good for you, but you do not want to drink it. They want to enjoy it immediately, and a lot of that is to do with entertainment rather than learning how to claim disability allowance, although that would also be a service. So I say, abolish the switch-off, let the organic growth take over and follow your market.

I would like to see policy from the government not just on hardware and technicals and turning off signals. I would like to see policy from the government about content that does not say, "People will watch cartoons," which is what they are doing now. They are saying: "People will have digital boxes in their houses. They are prescribing. I would like to see policy on content that said: "Let a thousand flowers bloom" Let’s have a really productive marketplace.

Andy Smith
It is about turning services around and putting the citizen first, so that you are focusing on what it is that the citizen wants to pull out. When you are talking about what is going to make people use services, you have to turn around and look at it from their point of view, not from the point of view of the providers: "We think we are providing something great on digital TV – why aren’t they using it?"

Mike Bracken
The most success happens when the government follows and does not lead. UK online is an exercise in trying to predict where we are going to be in three or four years and meet those targets. Somebody said: "We will meet these targets" I have no idea how anyone knows that because the lesson of the past seven or eight years is that no one is driving this thing. The only people who know where it is going – unwittingly, the ones who will define it – are the users, the people who pay my wages and use our services and products. I am constantly surprised by the fact that, when we set all these targets, one target we do not look at is what users do with government services. Say that in three years we want to launch a product or feature: how do we know whether it is going to be successful? Let us have some usability studies and find out what users want from government services. One thing we should not do is predict what users want.

One thing that government is not very good at doing is taking an initiative: "We are set up to lead, and this is the target we are going to lead to" The problem is that we do not know where we are going, so how can they lead us there? What government is better at doing is enabling the people to go where they want to go, not trying to lead them.

If the combined weight of God knows how many MBA skills and the finest level of commercial leadership can only come up with the enormous waste of money that was the dotcom boom, how is the government going to get it better anyway? When we have debates like this, we talk about the government leading and hitting targets, but across the board in commercial areas, there are one or two salient lessons we can learn: set standards; join up departments; get as much scale as you can for as little investment as possible; listen to your users; and act upon what your users do. Those five tenets could work across local government, central government, commerce and on a European scale. We are getting too far from those tenets in setting unrealistic targets and goals, which is a recipe for disaster.

Lord McNally
My comment is do not expect the private sector to do more than is of interest to their shareholders. The idea of a socially munificent private sector is not realistic. They will do their bit, and government can encourage them, but in the end they will do what they see as in their commercial self-interest – which is why the government cannot be entirely passive on these matters. Individual companies acting in shareholders’ self-interest may be short-term and destructive of the overall process if left to their own devices.

Chad Wollen
The analogy of refrigeration or central heating fits here. The benefits of central heating were clearly articulated in public policy around better housing for you and your family. People could understand that and mobilise behind it. Refrigeration was a public health issue, helping to reduce the spread of disease and making your money go further. Nobody talks about benefits for this technology in a way that people can understand. No wonder they are struggling with this and are confused at every level about what it is for: "How does this fit into my life? How does it benefit my life?" We need to talk about benefits that people can get their teeth into; we should talk less about access and more about how that drives usage. But we should also be sure that, in the end, it is a knowledge divide, one of the oldest problems and one we still grapple with. Remember, we are still trying to get people to understand why education is a benefit.

Chad Wollen
What are we trying to do with digital? We are trying to deliver better services and applications, or even discover new services and applications. Quite clearly, one way to drive innovation and creativity is to let a thousand flowers bloom and allow experimentation. On the other hand – this is probably more about what the public sector can do and how we deliver public services – I disagree that we cannot know what people want. In fact, I think it is amazing we do not spend more time trying to understand people’s needs and what they want. We just say that we cannot do it, but you can start by talking to people, listening to them, getting involved in what makes their lives work, and start to get to their needs.

One of the key things is a desire for a more consumer- or citizen-centred response from government, reaching out to understand how you actually deliver value to citizens or consumers. That really means starting to understand how we meet their needs – even answering the questions: "What are their needs?" "How does the technology help us to deliver for those needs?" So, in a considered and objective approach, the government can start to ask the people they are meant to be accountable to, "What is it you need, and how do we deliver policies that start to fit those needs?"

Peter Bazalgette
Big Brother is a piece of compelling content – a single idea, loosely speaking an entertainment idea – that works across about seven or eight media simultaneously. It exploits each of those media for what they do best. I have always thought that the word "convergence" was a misnomer. I think that what we are talking about is "parallel" – there are these things that happen at the same time in parallel and offer the consumer, the user, the viewer, a different bite.

So, with Big Brother, there was a half-hour traditional documentary on TV which was cut from the rushes by a director in the traditional way, manipulating material in order to tell a narrative. But on E4, the video material was streamed almost live and there were chances to see archive from two hours before. The viewer was able to get a completely different experience, of virtually seeing the raw material and mentally moulding it in the way they wanted.

On the web, as well as that same material streamed, there was fanzine material and lots of interactivity and micro-sites where you could bet. SMS allowed messages to alert you to news and interesting things that were about to happen. All these things were different. It enabled people who were interested in one idea to access it throughout the day in a different way. There could be six different pieces of access in a day, each one different but with one idea, one concept, one piece of intellectual property driving it. That has to be the philosopher’s stone, doesn’t it? How you drive take-up of so-called new media, how you wed new media to old. We all know that you can stick anything on the web, but nobody will ever find it. But when you link it to a traditional medium called broadcasting, which is a marketing medium of its own, it is a very powerful proposition.

The Chairman
I personally feel a lot of money should be poured into new forms of digital content services and other content providers, of which there are many created by the industry. That would be a way of stimulating broadband content – a thousand flowers, 100 flowers, 200 flowers, however you want to do it.

Steve Bowbrick
Perhaps we should look at the internet, where many ideas are already blooming, and some might already deliver some of the public service requirements we badly need. Perhaps part of the new public service framework should be about mandating the platform owners to permit access to those platforms – or these flowers, so many of which are already blooming, might be stifled. We should be developing compelling applications, content and concepts, and just market them out on to these platforms in an interesting way.

David Elstein
Citizens’ interests and consumers’ interests are not identical. All kinds of things will happen that consumers want but not all citizens want them. Consumers are well able in this world to make judgements about all kinds of consumer goods out there without a government telling them what to buy and what is good value. It is a distraction to imagine that which is possible is also universally desirable. We have to limit ourselves and decide how much we want to manipulate the consumer in the interests, nominally, of the citizen. Many things are very useful for citizens and it is very good that local government and national government should think about using the internet and broadband generally and even, to a modest extent, TV. But to imagine that without universal access to digital we will somehow as a society miss out is, for me, just too dirigiste.

Richard Allan
The government started to understand and said: "We want broadband content that will develop "pester power" and spread broadband via millions of small children telling their parents that they must have it at home" Children are only going to say they must have it at home if the educational content looks and feels like Big Brother – not literally, but it has to be relevant and related to the stuff they do like. That will demand a level of flexibility that I am not sure the government possesses.

Steve Gallagher
One of the things we are trying to do is capture, for want of a better phrase, the power of the Playstation in terms of learning materials for young people – people who are not receiving an education. That has an amazing attraction for kids when you capture it in ways that can deliver something more than just entertainment.

Steve Gallagher
Is it about empowerment, giving people more control over their own lives? Part of what we do, and part of what we need to do more of – and perhaps part of the role of government – is getting people to develop more of their own content. We got people with learning disabilities to create a life skills CD that helps them with their daily living tasks. That was a challenge for us; it was certainly a challenge for those who produced content for us, who were not used to working on these things. We have created a website with older people for older people. It might not look as we think it should, but it is what they said they liked. So some of the government’s role is about getting communities in on this act, so that communities are creating their own content. It gives them the means and opportunities to act for themselves. That is where some of the money needs to be invested.

Richard Allan
An exciting project for the government would be to license EastEnders characters so community groups can use them – perhaps using Playstation technology. It is that sort of coalition of partners that would develop an interesting product which could then be distributed, rather than the government, as you say, just contracting with the BBC as they always have done or trying to change EastEnders as a programme. But the community group on their own will never do it – they do not have the kind of clout to talk to these big players. It is that combination I think the government could oil with small amounts of money – huge amounts would not be necessary.

David Elstein
There is a great deal of wishful thinking and confusion, and many misconceived policy objectives based on a desire to climb on board the digital bandwagon. Again, the government could do themselves a favour by sorting out in their own mind what is important, what is relevant, what is achievable and desirable.

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