Government looks to IT for cost cutting

Stephen Timms, Digital Britain Minister

As government grapples with ways to cut spending and pay back the public deficit it is placing a sharper focus on mobile and internet technology to generate multimillion-pound savings and become more efficient.

Earlier this week, Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced a plan, dubbed ‘Smarter Government’, which entails moving public services online, including student loans, Jobseeker's Allowance, child tax credits and child benefit services.

To that end, the government will seek to foster ‘an IT economy’, ensuring that the appropriate communications infrastructure is in place and that the erstwhile digitally excluded are brought online.

“We will see some important and large-scale changes in technology, particularly around next-generation broadband,” Digital Britain minister Stephen Timms told Computing. “We need to make sure those high-speed connections are available across the country and not just in the main urban centres.

“We will see more and more use of knowledge technology in delivering public services. This will represent a premium on efficiency over the next few years. We have to halve the deficit, which means we have to be a lot smarter and spending a lot less,” he said.

Timms added that improving connectivity is also a priority to further develop local economies and is “at the heart of wider business success” in the UK over the next few years.

“We will also see a lot of changes in mobility and increasing capabilities in mobile broadband and 4G technology. We have some measures in the Digital Economy Bill to ensure that we can make best of use of this plethora of new technologies,” he said.

According to the minister, the government is also seeking to encourage knowledge-based start-ups in rural areas.

“In areas such as Cornwall, they have great evidence to show how providing good quality broadband has encouraged the growth of start-ups. That would not have happened if the infrastructure wasn’t there, so we need to make sure it is there and available in 90 per cent of UK households by 2017,” said Timms.