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11.44 am
Dr. Ian Gibson (Norwich, North): I can be relatively brief because it is clear that the hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Mr. Taylor), who is extremely knowledgeable, has a vision which is largely shared by Labour Members.
I should like to recount one or two of my experiences relating to the information society. I was the dean of a large biology department in East Anglia where it took me four years to get the intellectual elite to e-mail each other regularly. The difficulty was that they were not computer literate and, unlike our young people, had not been trained on computers. The only way I managed to get them to use computers was by banning memos and by asking the secretarial staff to refuse to send those individuals any information. It was amazing how, overnight, those people got computers on their desks and became versed in them.
My other endeavours relate to cancer research. The discovery of the DNA sequence from a laboratory in Australia or wherever in the world has been of key importance in advancing research. I am of a mind to ask for the DNA sequence for Euro-scepticism because it sounds as though there may be a joint interest in patenting that.
I am also interested in what people find out from their experiments. If someone is conducting an experiment in Cincinnati, Ohio, I can know the results--I assure hon. Members that there is still collaboration in research--within a matter of hours. One no longer has to send to the United States those terrible blue airmail letters with which we all grew up in the 1970s. Nowadays, with e-mail and similar connections, the fast transmission of scientific facts is most important for advancing scientific research.
If we want to know what effective treatments patients are receiving in various hospitals in any part of the world we can get that information up on our screens quickly. That means that the best and most effective treatments can spread around the world quickly.
Mr. Nigel Jones (Cheltenham):
I welcome the Minister for Science, Energy and Industry to his relatively new responsibilities. As the hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Mr. Taylor) has said, he has the best job in government. I wish him well in the task ahead and I am sure that he will bring to the job his usual enthusiasm.
I also welcome this early debate on the information society. In common with the hon. Member for Esher and Walton, I regret that a few more hon. Members are not present. I thank the hon. Member for his contribution. He and I took part in the National Children's Home cybernet debate during the election, which was a fascinating experience. We also did one or two others. The hon. Gentleman told me that he intended to ramble on; he did not do that, but gave one of the best speeches that I have heard in the five years that I have been in the House. I compliment him on that and the work he did in the previous Government. I hope that we will hear from him on many more occasions.
Hon. Members will be aware that, before entering the House, I spent more than 20 years in the information technology industry. As a former member of the Select Committee on Standards and Privileges, I should mention that I have declared in the Register of Members' Interests that ICL and Telewest have kindly lent me some of their state-of-the-art technology. I thank them for that.
There is a lot of comment, much of it exciting, some of it hype, and a lot of it downright ill-informed, about the information revolution and the information society in which we will live. Much of that society is based on British invention, including, for example, fibre-optic technology. Like it or not, that revolution is here and there is no way in which we can stop it. As I have said in the House before, the invention of fibre optics and the information age will have an impact as dramatic as that of the invention of the pencil.
The merging of computing and broadcasting technologies in the digital age will offer mankind both opportunities and significant dangers through changes in the way we live. There are huge opportunities for government, both central and local, to improve the services they deliver to the citizens of our country. I want to emphasise one point, which was referred to by the Minister--the right of every citizen, wherever he or she might happen to live, to access the new services. Universal access must be the key phrase.
There are two parts to the information society--the infrastructure that we need to put in place and the services that the infrastructure will deliver. Many of us are familiar
with the sight and inconvenience of cable companies digging up roads and pavements in our constituencies to install the green pipes that will deliver communication services, 57 channels of entertainment and, I hope, a bit more.
The information super-highway could and should revolutionise our lives. At the moment, we are scratching at the surface of what it can deliver. There are concerns about band width and the amount of data that can be squeezed down the pipe. It may not be sufficient for the two-way moving picture services of the future.
My hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey), who popped into the Chamber earlier, is concerned that the good people of Kingston, having suffered the inconvenience of having their streets dug up once, may have to suffer it again so that the right technology can be put in place.
There was a significant problem with the previous Government's policy on infrastructure. They were right to encourage competition, but they were wrong to ban British Telecom from transmitting entertainment services. They were also wrong to let franchises only for the installation of cable in lucrative city and town areas. That cherry picking has left rural areas out in the cold and out of the information revolution. I appreciate that radio frequencies--microwave technology--can be used to get into the rural areas, but the previous Government's policy created a new category of poor, the information have-nots. Indeed, the ban on BT broadcasting live services was the equivalent of shooting Linford Christie in the foot at the start of the 100 metres. If we have a world beater, we should encourage it, not discourage it.
The cable companies and BT are the key to installing the infrastructure for the information super-highway. A report from the House of Lords entitled "The Information Society Agenda for Action in the UK", published on 23 July 1996, recommends that BT, Mercury and other public telephone operators should be allowed to provide and convey broadcast entertainment services by 2001. I want the Government to tell us at some stage, not necessarily today, whether they will allow that to go ahead so that BT can help us to get the infrastructure in place.
There needs to be a national plan to ensure that everyone who wants access can get it. It is all very well for our great cities and large towns to make use of new services, but rural areas should have the same facilities. Rural areas of Gloucestershire, Devon, Cornwall, Scotland and Wales should be as much a part of the future as our cities and towns.
The principal recommendation in the report was for a national information society task force, modelled on the United States advisory council on the national information infrastructure, to bring together all the private and public sector players to give a clearly focused lead in moving the UK rapidly into the information age. The previous Government were satisfied with the existing diversity of consultative bodies, but I hope that the new Government might adopt the report's recommendation.
There is far more to the information society than 57 channels of entertainment. As we heard from the Minister and from the hon. Member for Esher and Walton, it will have a profound impact on the way we work and
live. With the digital age, computing and broadcasting technologies are merging, and Britain is uniquely well placed to make a success of that change. We have superb engineers to design the communications hardware for the information age. Our software scientists are the best in the world--and I speak as a former software scientist.
Britain is a relatively small country, but our broadcasts have a reputation for excellence and we have the English language. If we put all those together, we see that Britain has a unique opportunity to create wealth and jobs in the new technology industries.
The Internet of today is not a super-highway. The super-highway envisaged by Vice-President Al Gore and my right hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil (Mr. Ashdown), who is very well up on these matters, is a broad band system that allows high-definition pictures in both directions and text to travel from any point on the super-highway to any other point. Businesses will use the technology--some already are--to promote their services. Holiday companies will offer a see-before-you-fly service, which I am sure the hon. Member for South Dorset (Mr. Bruce) will be keen to view.
Mr. Ian Bruce:
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for advertising south Dorset. I am sure that he has been to Weymouth and Portland and seen our wonderful coastline. Of course, we can already dial up the Internet to find out what is happening in Weymouth and Portland. I hope that everybody listening to this debate or reading it in Hansard will do so.
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