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10.22 am
Mr. Michael Fallon (Sevenoaks): In the usual way we would have congratulated Ministers at the Department of Trade and Industry for securing a Friday debate when we first heard that there was to be a slot for trade and industry and we wondered which aspect of the Department's work would be highlighted.
We wondered whether we would be hearing about the consequences for industry of the Budget and just how hard Ministers had tried to fight the Treasury's raid on business pension funds. We thought that we might be told about the current state of the economy. Just this week, the Engineering Employers Federation warned that the damaging combination of rising interest rates and the ever-strengthening pound had serious consequences for manufacturing industry.
We thought perhaps that the Government might explain how, within just nine weeks, the country has been plunged into an extremely damaging strike. We thought that the Deputy Chief Whip might have selected for debate early-day motion 216, which was signed by so many Labour Members, calling for intervention in the British Airways strike. Then we might have heard from the Minister of State whether the Government backed the trade union that sponsors the Prime Minister or his favourite business man who is chief executive of the airline.
Instead, we are debating the information society and I welcome that. It is good that the House can look ahead a little and take stock of the technological change that confronts us. As the Minister correctly said, the Government have a large role to play.
The Opposition certainly relish the debate. We have a proud record in encouraging all aspects of information technology. That record would not have been possible had it not been built on the firm foundations of privatisation and liberalisation. Unlike the Labour party, we believe in an information society not for its own sake, but for what it can do to empower people. Before I address each of those three points in turn, I should like to welcome my hon. Friends to the debate.
I am particularly pleased that the House is to hear from my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr. Taylor), the Minister's predecessor. He made an enormous contribution to the interface between the Government and information technology. He was the Minister who provided real leadership and coherence to the Government's programmes and it would have been nice had the Minister of State acknowledged that my hon. Friend launched the information society initiative and was the first to seriously warn about the millennium bug. He was an excellent Minister and we look forward to hearing from him later today.
The Minister for Small Firms, Trade and Industry (Mrs. Barbara Roche):
The hon. Gentleman is making an extraordinary speech. He appears to have denied the importance of the subject and has underlined that by the fact that he obviously was not listening when my right hon. Friend the Minister of State paid a generous tribute to his predecessor. Was the hon. Gentleman not listening at all?
Mr. Fallon:
We were certainly listening. It is nice to have that generous tribute reconfirmed. My hon. Friend
The Conservatives have a good record in these matters. It is encapsulated in the information society initiative which brought together the programme for business, information technology for all, our support for digital technology, the super-highway initiative at the Department for Education and Employment, Government Direct, the millennium ICT project and so on.
First, the initiative understood that the super-highway would be in a free market. It is not and cannot be a single, state-controlled, state-funded, fibre network going into every home. As Sir Peter Bonfield once said, it is rather a network of networks--a patchwork of interconnecting links, using mixed technology.
Secondly, the initiative properly reflected the choice that we want to result from the new technology. It built in from the start not provider preference but customer choice. Thirdly, it was future-friendly. It understood--because we understood--just how markets work and that it is not for Government to specify a particular technology, but rather for the market to sort out competing technologies and properly test them. My goodness, if we had had a Labour Government in control for the past 18 years we would be back in the age of Prestel or the Minitel system that we were offered by the French Government. Who knows? We might have had a British computer corporation subsidised with billions of pounds of taxpayers' money assembling some mini-Battle out in some assisted area. The information society initiative was right in that it stressed not the kit itself but the uses to which it should be put. The application of hardware, software and skills really mattered rather than the kit or the technology.
We bequeathed the information society programme of some £35 million of new money spread over four years to the new Government. We shall therefore want to know before this debate closes whether that new money still stands or whether it has been caught up in the Department's long-term spending review. We shall also want to know--my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan) has been pressing the Minister for an answer--whether the money earmarked for the millennium ICT programme still stands and whether the budget lines for technology foresight still stand.
If the Under-Secretary does not know the answers to those questions now, it is only fair to give her notice that my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham will be pressing her on the matters. What is required urgently is not joined-up thinking but joined-up money.
Mr. Fallon:
If the Minister is going to confirm that all those programmes that are funded by new money still stand, it would at least be of some reassurance.
Mr. Battle:
That is no problem. The budget that we inherited stands and it will be carried through. Only this morning, I honoured a scheme that was a commitment, and funding has been allocated to it. There is no reduction in or cutting of any scheme that we inherited. We made
Mr. Fallon:
It is nice to have that reassurance about the existing programmes. I shall therefore move on to the two new programmes that have been announced.
First, there is the national grid for learning. I was not quite clear from the Minister's speech, to which I listened very attentively, whether money for that programme was to be made available in the current financial year or whether, as he seemed to imply--I shall give him the opportunity to correct his comment--no new money will be available until the next financial year.
The second new programme is the university for industry. The House will be surprised to hear that that has an initial budget of only £5 million. If that budget stands, the university will easily be the tiniest one ever to have been established in this country. Will the Under-Secretary say just what funding is likely to be available when that university for industry is at full stretch?
Mr. Battle:
I know that the hon. Gentleman is younger and handsome, so he may have forgotten that exactly the same remarks were made about the Open university. It was said that it was being launched on a shoestring budget--but look at it now.
Mr. Fallon:
If the university for industry is to be serious and successful, it will have to attract the kind of resources that were devoted to the Open university by the previous Government over the past 18 years. If we had that commitment from the Minister, we might have something worth talking about. What is not worth talking about is a university funded by only £5 million. I defy the Minister to nominate any university in this country that can survive on such a budget. Ministers really cannot have it both ways. If they want to share the credit for our programmes and to develop new ones, they will have to confirm existing and new budgets. Otherwise, they should come clean and admit that such programmes are possible only under a Conservative Government.
On the subject of existing programmes, I was a little surprised that the Minister did not say very much about our important initiative, Government Direct. He did of course stress the importance of new technology embracing the public services, so perhaps he was referring to Government Direct when he made those remarks. The programme was pioneered by my colleague Roger Freeman, who was one of the unsung heroes of bringing the Government closer to business. He took full responsibility for £2 billion-worth of spending on technology in central Government.
I was a little surprised to find yesterday at the Government Direct exhibition in the Upper Waiting Hall, which I hope my hon. Friends have had time to visit, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster posing in front of the cameras. My hon. Friends will recall that, just three months ago, when a statement was made on Government Direct, the then shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the right hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Foster), dismissed the programme as a "last-gasp
technology gimmick". Yet, his successor was at the exhibition yesterday preening himself in front of the cameras.
Government Direct can of course be developed. It points the way to fresh challenges. The key question is not just that of confidentiality but the amount of information that is made available to the public. I understand that a White Paper is to be published later this month, although the Minister did not confirm that. I also understand that legislation is a very long way off. I commend to the Minister a check on the current state of the open government site on the worldwide web. I think that he will find that it may need a little updating.
The amount of direct access to Government is of course something that we can debate. The whole area is neatly encapsulated by a document which was published recently, which I hope the Minister has seen, "Citizen Direct", written by Karen Swinden, Tim Jackson and William Heath. One does not have to agree with all of it to appreciate the fresh angles that they take to the whole relationship between citizens and their Government.
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