Tories plan to use IT to make government more open

Webcameron: In future will all politicians look like this?

The Conservatives have laid out their plans to use technology to make government more open, transparent and accessible to the public.

Shadow science and innovation minister Adam Afriyie told delegates at the Guardian Activate conference today that the Tories want to create a government of “digital natives”.

“When it comes to using technology better inside government or between citizen and state, it’s not about whether you come from the left or the right. It’s really about whether you ‘get it’ or you don’t,” he said.

“For the political establishment, this is a make-or-break moment. For all politicians, the question now is, do they understand how technology is changing people’s expectations? Do they know how to meet demands for openness, accountability and transparency?”

If the Tories win the next General Election Afriyie said they will use technology to “transform” politics.

“In the digital age, we can empower individuals by ending the information imbalance between citizen and state. We can improve access to government data. And we can stop the expansion of the centralised, authoritarian database state,” he said.

A Tory government would publish online every item of spending above £25,000, and encourage councils to publish information using standard data formats. Whitehall would also publish more data for re-use elsewhere.

“This is public data, not government data. It carries huge social and economic potential. And it could underpin a new culture of government accountability, if only it were available,” said Afriyie.

“We will create a new ‘right to data’, so you can tell us which data sets would be most useful. The bureaucrats who collect the data cannot be expected to understand all its potential value. So we’re going to throw open the floodgates, harnessing the wisdom of crowds.”

Prime minister Gordon Brown announced last month that web pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee had been appointed to advise the government on opening up public sector data to allow greater transparency.

And in the US, President Barack Obama is opening up more government information to the web, with the launch yesterday of a Federal IT Dashboard, publicly displaying the costs and progress of some 7,000 government technology projects.