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Information Society: Science and Technology Committee Report
5.45 p.m.
Lord Phillips of Ellesmere rose to move, That this House take note of the Report of the Science and Technology Committee on Information Society: Agenda for Action in the UK (5th Report, Session 1995-96, HL Paper 77), and of the Government's response (Cm. 3450).
The noble Lord said: My Lords, before I turn to my main task of inviting the House to take note of the Report of the Science and Technology Select Committee on the Information Society: Agenda for Action in the UK and the Government response contained in Command Paper 3450, I trust that your Lordships will forgive me for first paying tribute to my friend Lord Sherfield, whose recent death has saddened us all. Lord Sherfield was one of the prime movers behind the establishment
of the Select Committee on Science and Technology and for this, and in many other ways, we owe him a great deal. For me it is a particular sadness that he cannot be in his place today to take part in this debate.The Select Committee study was launched almost exactly a year ago under the title, "The Information Superhighway: Applications in Society". A wide-ranging call for evidence was issued and, in accordance with a tightly-defined timetable, written submissions were received from 97 individuals and organisations, 27 of whom gave oral evidence at 16 formal sessions in Westminster. To all of these witnesses the committee is most grateful. In addition members of the committee visited a number of leading organisations in the UK, including British Telecommunications plc Laboratories at Martlesham Heath; Nortel Technology Laboratories at Harlow, and Acorn Online Media, together with St. Matthew's Primary School and Netherhall School in Cambridge. It is a pleasant duty for me to record the committee's thanks to the staff of all those organisations for the trouble they took in showing and explaining to us their work and the many new opportunities that are arising.
In addition to these visits in the UK, some members of the committee also made an intensive visit to three centres in the United States: Boston, Washington DC and Raleigh, North Carolina, where we benefited greatly from the revealing accounts of current policies and developments given by many American witnesses. On those visits we were much helped by UK officials stationed in the US, particularly Mr. Poston, HM Consul General in Boston and his staff, and Dr. Don Rolt, Counsellor for Science, Technology, Energy and the Environment at the British Embassy in Washington.
As a relative newcomer to this House and to membership of the Select Committee I must also make it quite clear that the study could not have been carried out without the unflagging interest and enthusiasm of the members of the committee, who included two co-opted members, the noble Lords, Lord Butterworth and Lord Hollick. I am personally most grateful to all of them, but I should make special mention of my noble and gallant friend, Lord Craig of Radley, who undertook to take my place as chairman if I was for any reason unable to act, and did indeed most ably chair one session of the committee that I was prevented from attending by ill health.
I must also acknowledge most warmly the assistance of our specialist adviser, Professor Charles Oppenheim of De Montfort University and the help of Dr. Bradshaw, the committee's specialist assistant, who accompanied the delegation to the USA and made many other contributions to our work. Above all, however, I must offer the committee's thanks to our Clerk, Dr. Phillipa Tudor. The report was published last July in the traditional form on printed paper and was at the same time published electronically on the world wide web--as seems most appropriate given the subject of the report. This was the first report of a parliamentary Select Committee to be published in this way and the public reaction, which can be monitored by noting the number of times the report was examined on the web, was most satisfactory. More than 6,000 people in three
continents accessed the report during the first two weeks after publication and a high level of interest was maintained for the following month, a clear indication that publication on the web reaches places that the traditional method does not reach. Happily the Government's response has also been published on the web, in accordance with the expanding use of this medium under the "Open Government" programme and I understand that this will become the standard procedure for making such reports and responses available to a wide public in the future.Your Lordships will be well aware that the Select Committee addressed a complex, wide-ranging and rapidly evolving subject and I must admit that our report, long and complicated though it may seem, does not cover all aspects of the subject in adequate detail. In particular, we have not provided a full guide to the advanced technologies that are now available and coming into use. For those of your Lordships who would like to study the subject in more detail I commend to you the excellent POST report, Information 'Superhighways': the UK National Information Infrastructure that was published in May 1995. For later developments the weekly supplements published by major national newspapers illustrate vividly the rapid pace of advance--both technical and commercial--that continuously introduces new ideas into the debate. For example, the introduction of the world wide web in 1990, led to a rapid and enormous increase in the number of computers connected to the Internet and only in the last year has prompted the development of a new programming language, JAVA, that is consistent with all the major operating systems now in use and has given rise to the concept of the network computer in which relatively inexpensive workstations, with limited local facilities, are linked to powerful servers and networks. The full implications of a shift to this system have yet to be worked out, but there will be major implications for the design of installations in schools, libraries, citizens advice bureaux and so on.
Over recent years Government have been increasingly active in this important area and it is a pleasure to note the many publications that have been aimed at increasing public knowledge and awareness of the potential value of the new technology in all aspects of national life. In these efforts the Department of Trade and Industry has been particularly active and I look forward eagerly to the response of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, to this debate. nevertheless, turning to the committee's recommendations I must admit to some disappointment that the Government have not been as accommodating in their responses as we had hoped. Although the Government have shown some measure of agreement with more than half of our recommendations they have failed to accept a number that we consider important and, since I am sure that noble Lords speaking later in the debate will be intending to address many of these outstanding issues, I shall confine myself to remarking on only four of them.
First, I refer to our proposal that the Government should set up an information society task force, chaired by an enthusiast, to advise government on the agenda
for action in the UK and publish reports. We were encouraged to make this proposal by two observations; first, that the government publications by a number of different departments of state and agencies have had less impact than they might have had. Many of these publications have been well produced and attractively presented, but all too often they have lacked the detailed information and guidance that are needed by potential users of the technology in society and the general effect, I fear, has been rather diffuse. Our second observation was that the Untied States Advisory Council on the National Information Infrastructure has been very effective in providing guidance to American communities on the steps they can take to connect themselves to and take advantage of the so called information superhighway.The differences between the two national approaches are well illustrated by the nature of the Kick Start Initiative published by the US Advisory Council, which encourages
- "community leaders across the Nation to provide all individuals the opportunity to access and use the Information Superhighway",
and goes on to elaborate a wide variety of methods that have been used to achieve this objective. One of the case histories that is described concerns the initiative in the State of North Carolina that we were able to study during the committee's visit to the United States. There we saw, among other things, how a highly qualified teacher at a central school could give a lesson over the highway to classes at a number of remote schools with the active co-operation of teachers in those schools.
I shall return briefly to education, but my aim here is to ask the Government to think again about the need to bring their initiatives and guidance into better focus and to reconsider the value that an information society task force might have in acting as a generator, promoter and focus for information and ideas. No doubt, much is going on and there are almost continuous announcements of government initiatives: those highlighted by the Lord Privy Seal in his evidence to the committee included not only the very welcome Cabinet Committee, which he chairs, but also the Central Information Technology Unit (CITU), the DTI's Information Society Initiative (ISI), the DTI's Multi-media Industry Advisory Group (MIAG), the DfEE's Education Superhighway Initiative (ESI) and the contributions of the Technology Foresight Programme.
Since our report was published we have had the Government's Green Paper government.direct--A prospectus for the Electronic Delivery of Government Services--and next month we are promised IT for All, which is to set out
- "the most ambitious programme of its kind ever attempted in a major nation".
That is a bold claim and we shall wait to see it with eager anticipation. Perhaps it will, for the moment, pull together all these initiatives and point the ways ahead, but I shall hope to see also the introduction of a process able to carry us forward in a rapidly evolving scene.
The second issue that I must touch on briefly is the Government's rejection of our recommendation that the restrictions on telecommunications companies either conveying or providing broadcast entertainment services in their own right should be reviewed as a matter of urgency. Here again we live in a rapidly changing world and hardly a day goes by without the announcement of some major development in the global telecommunications industry.
In recent weeks we have had the proposed merger of BT and MCI and the amalgamated of the Cable and Wireless "Mercury" operation with three UK-based but largely foreign-owned cable companies to form Cable and Wireless Communications (CWC). Only today I read in The Independent newspaper that AT&T is objecting to the BT/MCI deal on the grounds that the UK telecommunications industry is not as open to competition as that in the USA and that,
- "the key principle behind competition in the UK, which encourages operators to build rival cable networks, is acting as a barrier to genuine customer choice".
This is complicated territory and I understand very well the reluctance of the Government to change the rules set out in 1991 that have helped to encourage a great deal of investment in the cable infrastructure in the UK. Nevertheless, the development of the cable industry in recent years suggests strongly that the expectations of 1991 were rather wide of the mark. Who anticipated then that cable TV companies would be profitable only in the provision of telephony or that their penetration of the TV market would be so low? This reminds me of the advice that we were given by the Director-General of OFTEL early in our inquiry that the main problem is the provision of attractive material for transmission--content, as it is known in the often repeated saying "content is king". I am sure that others will address this issue, but I hope for my part that the Government will think again--perhaps influenced more by AT&T than by the committee--about the problems that have arisen over the provision and control of content packages and the impact they have had on the viability of the cable companies.
My last points are quickly made. Together with the other members of the committee, including most especially my noble friend Lord Flowers, who is prevented by ill health from being with us today, I fear that the Government view--or perhaps I should say the education department's view--of developments in education, particularly at the primary and secondary school levels, seems to us complaisant. We are not persuaded, for example, that an adequate range of good quality software designed for the UK national curricula already exists or that teachers are being properly trained in the use of the new media. Here again there seem to be too many organisations and agencies involved and there is a clear need for the Secretary of State for Education and Employment to take the lead in improving teacher training in IT. On this front we were also extremely disappointed by the Government's negative response to our support for the enterprising Free Computers for Education scheme.
On the other hand, we were encouraged that the Government is sympathetic to our proposals for networking public libraries and citizens advice bureaux--though we note that progress towards these two highly desirable goals depends upon the support of the Millennium Fund. I would wish to encourage the Millennium Commission to consider favourably the applications they have received from "Information for All", on behalf of the public libraries programme, and the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux. Implementation of these schemes could go far to minimise the risk of our society being divided between those who benefit from the IT revolution and those who do not.
There are many other issues addressed in the report of your committee and in the Government's response, but I trust that the most important ones that I have neglected, including those that affect the provision of healthcare, will be taken up by other speakers. I look forward to a lively and constructive debate that will lead to further advances. I beg to move.
Moved, That this House take note of the report of the Science and Technology Committee on Information Society: Agenda for Action in the UK (5th Report, Session 1995-96, HL Paper 77), and of the Government's response (Cm. 3450).--(Lord Phillips of Ellesmere).
6.4 p.m.
The Earl of Selborne: My Lords, the House will indeed be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Ellsemere, for the clear and comprehensive manner in which he introduced this important report. Indeed, he reminded us that Lord Sherfield, way back in 1979, was instrumental with Lord Shackleton in advising the House that we should have a Select Committee specifically to address science and technology. The terms of reference were very wisely drawn up in the widest possible terms to consider issues of science and technology with which, in the opinion of the committee, the House's attention should be concerned.
If ever there was a subject which meets fairly and squarely that specification, this is it. As we speak the information society is permeating every aspect of our government, of our lives, and is clearly critical to our competitive status, to the quality of our life and to much else besides. It affects every branch of central government, local government and industry. It clearly affects this House, and it is very difficult to think of an area which would embrace so many different aspects of our lives. It is complicated by the fact that this subject is technology driven; that technology changes by the day--one could perhaps say sometimes even by the hour--and clearly a report of this nature will be out of date very soon as, I have to admit, will be the Government's response.
It is clearly important that we address this issue and look at what is a masterly overview from the committee. I can say that because I was not a member of the sub-committee which produced the report. I find a compelling echo of the Clinton administration's "agenda for action" in this report. We clearly need to bring
together and co-ordinate a large number of initiatives which are taking place in this country and make sure that we are taking the best possible advantage of those initiatives.It is clear that there are a number of advantages of which we can be proud and of which the Government can be proud. It is clear that the decision to deregulate the telecommunications industry very early on compared to other countries has been of inestimable advantage to us. It has given us a flying start. We can go back some 15 years or so when the original scheme to put personal computers into primary schools allowed our society to become very much more aware of the opportunities that personal computers offer. We have in fact in this country a greater penetration of computers in the home and in the school than in many other countries and we also have the rapid investment in the infrastructure. It is haphazard; it tends to follow the route of the cable companies and, as the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, reminded us, it is in danger of leaving some embarrassing gaps. Nevertheless, they are advantages on which we simply have to build.
It is only fair to say that in our Minister for Science, Mr. Ian Taylor, the Government have a Minister with great knowledge and enthusiasm. The noble Lord, Lord Phillips, and I went to speak to him before the Select Committee started this inquiry. I think we must recognise just how many initiatives have emanated from the different parts of government.
Having said that, I would draw attention specifically to an area, for example in the aspect of health care, where the report demonstrates some opportunities, perhaps missed at the moment, to provide the information society with the benefits of which we are clearly not making use. Paragraph 5.81, for example, talks of the opportunity to reduce the administrative load on general practitioners. There is not a doctor in this country who would not complain about the amount of paperwork. There are opportunities spelled out in paragraph 5.81. If only we can network GPs' practices to consultants and to hospitals so that one can have on-line appointments. But we need a secure, confidential, intranet system.
That will not happen by market forces; it will not happen if a cable company happens to be passing that way. It has to be planned. Likewise, at the moment a GP has to provide records on paper. It was a central provision in an earlier age. But of course nowadays, if records are to be kept in electronic form, it is quite absurd to require GPs to copy them out on paper. Paragraph 5.82 states what will happen, but nothing has happened yet. I hope that the Minister will assure us that that matter is in hand.
Paragraph 5.83 refers to the number of forms which are duplicated and the figure of £100 million is mentioned. I do not know whether that figure is right, but I know that there is a log-jam and that modern technology can and should move it. Again, someone must be responsible for doing that.
Paragraph 5.85 refers to the handling of health scares, which is a topical subject. Only last week we heard about the sad effects of the scare about the pill a year
or so ago. Had an Internet with the network been available to pass on information securely and confidentially, I have no doubt that the unnecessary damage which was caused by that scare would have been avoided. Opportunities will not happen unless there is a co-ordinating body bringing together the local provision of networks, the local requirements of the health authority and other legitimate requirements of the area.I was interested to read the evidence which the committee took in North Carolina. It also reported on progress in New Brunswick and Wales. All three are centres of excellence in their own respect. In each there is a clear theme; there is a regional agenda which is well defined by a co-ordinating and leading agency, bringing together the requirements of the GPs, hospitals, libraries, primary and secondary schools, further education and industry.
As a result of the way in which we determine departmental responsibilities, it is difficult at a regional or central level to obtain that degree of co-ordination. In the United States and Canada it is clear that central government have been proactive as policy makers in setting guidelines and in getting things moving. The noble Lord, Lord Phillips, reminded us of the United States' "Kick Start" initiative, which is well named. It implies that the United States Government--Al Gore and President Clinton--have seen themselves as very much responsible for making things happen. It is the "can-do" society, to which the report refers.
As regards education, the report highlights the centres of excellence which have been built up by experience and a number of inspired initiatives. Paragraph 5.71 refers to those centres, while Appendix 7 refers specifically to Netherhall School in Cambridge. I have had experience of city technology colleges, specifically the Thomas Telford School in Telford, of which I was the first chairman. A large investment was made in new technology but it is expensive to keep that up to date. There is now talk of laboratory schools, which is an important concept, to determine what is best practice and what lessons can be learnt from other schools.
After five to seven years, with centres of excellence and information technology, some lessons are already clear. It is extremely expensive to provide multimedia networks within schools, let alone between schools and local communities. They need to be updated at least every four or five years. That is inevitable due to the speed of the technology. Incidentally, one always under-estimates the capacity of the band network required.
Enormous opportunities are available not only as regards giving access to schools, further education establishments and libraries, which is undreamt of through the Internet, the web and local networks, but there are also opportunities for the rest of the community to benefit by further distance learning and adult education. There are also opportunities for industry to benefit from the facilities on offer. Some of the best initiatives are providing just that and it is truly impressive.
Of course, we have a log-jam. Super-Janet can just about cope with the research institutes and parts of higher education. Further education is hardly provided for and it is not clear how on earth we shall provide the kind of capacity which Super-Janet has for all those centres of education, including secondary and primary schools, which would derive enormous benefit. Clearly, it will be expensive and technical support will be required in schools and colleges of further education. We must be able to maintain highly sophisticated terminals and networks and a great deal of servicing will be required. I know that the Thomas Telford School has invested heavily and in a pilot scheme has had access to educational trust funds. However, it is clearly important that nationally we face up to the consequences in all our schools.
I return to the requirement to provide a co-ordinating, overall focus. I realise that the Government are always chary of task forces which appear to override departmental responsibilities. It does not fit easily with the concept of Cabinet responsibility. Nevertheless, that is precisely what we need and I am sure that is why the sub-committee recommended the task force. If the Government cannot bring themselves to support the task force, will they at least recognise that in a similar area--that of sustainable development--we were faced with precisely the same issue?
Like the information society, sustainable development permeates almost everywhere. There is not an aspect of central or local government on which sustainable development does not have some bearing. In 1994 the Prime Minister recognised that and appointed a round table of 30 people to advise. He also appointed five people to the sustainable development panel. I had better come clean immediately and say that I am one of that panel of five and therefore I like the idea of panels of five. Its convenor is Sir Crispin Tickell and its responsibility is to advise the Prime Minister on any aspect of sustainable development pertaining to government policy. It has produced a number of initiatives and some advice which, on the whole, have been followed up by government.
If we cannot have the task force which the report recommends, why not opt for a well-focused panel with a leader who can get things done, as the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, suggested? Why cannot we have a focus which will demonstrate to government time and time again what is needed? I am sure that when the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, said that some of the Government's response smacks of complacency, he was probably making a very fair point.
6.17 p.m.
Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde: My Lords, I welcome the Select Committee's report, particularly the chairman's opening remarks. It is good to have the Government's response available today because it focuses our considerations. The debate on this topical issue is well timed and it will be ongoing. This is a major contribution to the national debate.
I wish to refer, first, to paragraph 6.8 of the report and to the Government's response dealing with the regulation of illegal and harmful content. The regulative
framework is right in highlighting the need to review the framework of regulation and the approaches to regulation. Traditional approaches will not be capable of application to these new services and technology in the same way and with the same effect. The relationships are so different. For example, the user of the new services can also be the content provider, often anonymous and untraceable. There are no geographic boundaries so areas of jurisdiction are not apparent.Furthermore, there are too many regulators. Perhaps I too should declare my hand, as did the noble Earl, Lord Selborne. I chair one of the regulatory bodies in this sector. The fact that there are too many regulators is accepted by the regulators themselves. The figures vary but ICSTIS, the body which I chair as paid chairman, looked at the numbers involved in content regulation and identified 13 different organisations in the UK. Others will say that there are more, but it appears that the number of regulators grows with the strength of the argument to reduce them. Surely, it is confusing for the consumer, quite apart from the overlap of the regulatory bodies. One must question how much falls through the holes between the regulatory bodies.
Within the framework it is essential not to ignore the effectiveness of industry and self-regulatory solutions which have evolved in the UK to great effect. That has not always been the case but there are some very good examples of the type of regulation which has worked; for example, in telephone services, direct mail and advertising. In this debate we should ensure that initiatives which are effective and which offer systems of redress at no cost to the taxpayer have their place in any future regulatory framework.
Some of the discussions today about the reorganisation of the regulatory framework assume a clear separation between content and economic issues. The report takes a more pragmatic view and the Government response recognises that it is not a straightforward matter to draw such a neat distinction between the two. I agree with those views. We need to consider how it would work in practice. For example, economic regulatory levers may need to be applied in order to influence issues which relate to content. There may be a need for quality thresholds.
While traditional forms of regulation, current models, and arrangements on which those are based are not necessarily relevant to new services, it is important that the experience of what has been developed is not lost: for example, the procedures to ensure user/consumer involvement in policy development; transparency in decision-making; and systems in place to ensure effective and impartial redress.
Paragraph 6.9 of the report refers to the Internet Service Providers' Association--ISPA, which is a new body. I was interested to see in the report that page upon page of abbreviations already exist in this domain. They seem to grow by the day. But let us talk about ISPA. That is a new body and one to which the Government have given their support, along with the code and the Internet Watch Foundation, the IWF. That is not the International Wildlife Fund; it is the Internet Watch Foundation.
Three principles articulated in the documentation from those new organisations are rating, responsibility and reporting--the new three Rs perhaps of this new superhighway age. I gather that at this stage they are merely proposals and that nothing has yet been established or is working. Rating will provide a rating service for news groups, which is the area of greatest concern, for members of the organisation. I gather that there is little progress so far, but it has great promise.
The responsibility aspect seeks to ensure that all players--service providers, users, and enforcement agencies such as the police--must take responsibility where they can and, within their powers and competence, do what they can to ensure co-operation in relation to standards and action to maintain those standards.
The third R is reporting in the form of a hotline for the public which I gather has yet to be established. That would enable both members of the organisation and the public to ring in and report illegal material. It is not dissimilar to other initiatives which have been established in other sectors of public policy development.
Inherent in any system of regulation, statutory or voluntary, must be the commitment of those to whom it applies. It must have their support. Without that, it will not succeed, as has been demonstrated so often. And in this world of new technology, which is developing at such a pace, any regulation must be capable of adaptation.
The new ISPA and IWF initiative is to be welcomed and should be supported. It is in its early days and is concentrating its focus on illegal material, which at the moment is the area of greatest public concern. As the new initiative develops, I suggest another three areas on which we should concentrate to ensure the integrity of the system. They relate to the consumer but also, in overall terms, to the industry itself. I call them the three Cs--coverage, confidence and clarity.
There must be coverage because the system can work effectively only if it is supported by all. Often breaches of what is regarded as acceptable by an industry are perpetrated by those not part of the system--those who choose to be outside the ground rules. What can be done to bind those people?
The industry initiative and blueprint has been promoted in Europe and seems to be receiving support. The DGXIII communication on illegal and harmful content adopts much of that model. However, as the European communication notes, in order to achieve coverage there will need to be the effective co-operation of enforcement agencies at an international level. This industry has no boundaries. There are several such agencies--the UN (ITU), the OECD and the WTO.
The second C--confidence--is another essential element of the model. It needs to develop the confidence of those to whom it applies--the providers--and the confidence of those for whose benefit and protection it has been established; that is, the public, the consumer. The scope for introducing independence in decision-making needs to be considered too as that will contribute largely to the building of wider confidence.
The third aspect is clarity. That is crucial in the standards it sets and the procedures by which it seems to apply those standards. Clarity in terms of accountability for decisions and identifiable and public indicators by which its success can be measured will need to be developed.The report highlights and recommends the ICSTIS model, of which I am chairman. ICSTIS regulates what is known as the premium-rate telephone service sector of telecoms where the revenue is shared between the network operators and the service providers. It is shared by virtue of a contract. The authority of ICSTIS is gained from telephone companies which agree to support the code of practice and regulations and require their service providers, by their contracts, to abide by the ICSTIS code.
In turn, ICSTIS has a contract with the telephone companies. It is neither a statutory nor truly self-regulatory model but a model of independent regulation funded by the industry but with no industry representation on its board. The organisation is 10 years old this year and I am pleased to inform your Lordships, with some small degree of pride, that it has just become the first regulatory body in the United Kingdom to achieve the ISO 9002 world standard for its complaints handling system.
In their response to the committee's recommendations, referring to the ICSTIS model, the Government refer to the licence condition obligation which the director general imposes on network operators as an indication of why they do not feel that the ICSTIS model may be relevant for this new technology because the committee recommended that it may be a model on which to build.
The licence condition referred to by the Government is only for live services, which currently represent less than 5 per cent. of that 250 million-calls-per-year industry. The remaining 95 per cent. do not have such a licence condition.
The relationships between service providers, network operators and callers are different in this new technology in the premium rate telephone sector. Of that there is no doubt. It is not possible to apply the model as it stands. However, the features of such a voluntary model are there to be built on. Independent complaints handling and decision-making processes build consumer confidence in an industry system. Standards applied through a code with sanctions to back them up ensure that they are applied equally. There must be flexibility to update and upgrade the code to ensure that it remains relevant to changes in the nature of services. That is all-important in any open regulatory system.
I was pleased to read in paragraphs 5.64 to 5.69 reference to universal access, I am sure that we all agree with those proposals. Some of us--and I include myself--would have liked to see a stronger reference with matching recommendations. The technology now available and the developments taking place almost weekly could provide many opportunities, and many of our citizens are currently missing out on those opportunities. It is essential that we do not have a have
and have-not division in our society in accessing the superhighway. Some may say that the division is already occurring.These new developments provide the chance, if we take it, to start to change opportunities in a real way. I know that that was the intention of the committee and I support it. That is why I support the libraries in their bid for millennium funding, referred to by the noble Lord in his presentation of the report. What a marvellous way to start to open up access and opportunity in our communities irrespective of the income levels of the individual members of those communities.
I thank the Select Committee for its very detailed work. We are indebted to it, as Members of this House, for the thoughtful considerations and recommendations put forward and for the evidence from witnesses--and the calibre of those witnesses--so many of whom are key players in these developments.
It is a report which we will refer to continually in our business in this whole area of public policy as this topic and debate carries on and indeed is widened.
6.32 p.m.
Baroness Hogg: My Lords, I must start by declaring an interest--or, rather, interests--as I am shortly to become chairman of London Economics, which does a substantial amount of strategic analysis and competition casework for broadcasters, telecoms businesses and indeed regulators in the converging media markets. I am also involved with a number of financial services businesses, which have a fast-growing interest in the electronic markets for their products.
I wondered whether I should try your Lordships' patience with a still longer list of interests, simply to make the point that every business and organisation is actually or potentially affected by the digital revolution. But I will leave that to the register.
As a member of the sub-committee, I should like to start by expressing my thanks to, and my admiration for, the chairman of our committee, Lord Phillips of Ellesmere. The noble Lord navigated us most skilfully along the superhighway, as well as through various international air terminals.
The Internet is the offspring of the academic and defence communities, of which we had also other most distinguished representatives on the sub-committee, notably the noble Lords, Lord Craig and Lord Flowers. On security, on research and educational uses of information networks their expertise was invaluable. The noble Lord, Lord Flowers--who I am very sorry could not be here today--could run a personal advisory service on the precise timings of the daily traffic jams on transatlantic superhighways. I wish him a speedy recovery and happy surfing meanwhile.
Lest your Lordships should suppose these are unique honorary members here of the nerd generation--I note that the noble Lord, Lord Peston, has already registered his claim--you may be interested to learn, as we were, that Compuserve has more private subscribers over the age of 50 than under the age of 30.
I wish to single out only two of the 40 recommendations made by the committee for your Lordships' attention. It is easy to be intoxicated by the potential of digitisation. Our ability to transform all forms of information--data, text, picture, sound, even to replicate the sensations of touch--into a digital stream, and to transmit massive quantities of information worldwide virtually instantaneously, is an extraordinary power which has been associated with the notion of a second Industrial Revolution. The exponential growth of the Internet--driven by the market, not by some government plan--is evidence of the potential speed of development in this area. Such developments challenge our notions of national regulation and sovereignty; there are, as has been said, no Customs posts in cyberspace. Internet-type systems pose very difficult issues with respect to intellectual property of the kind your Lordships were discussing earlier today. At the same time, they offer obvious opportunities for the more effective delivery of government services, from education to health.
But it is important to keep at least one toe on the ground. Markets for many of these services have yet to be established. Who will be prepared to pay for any of these, and how, are questions taxing both the public and the private sectors. Thus the first recommendation to which I would wish to draw your Lordships' attention is the need for the creation of a task force or a panel of some kind outside Whitehall to advise Government.
The Government's own paper on the electronic delivery of government services is a very welcome step on which I wish to congratulate my noble friend. He will perhaps forgive me if I stress the need for continuing vigilance to ensure that individual government departments do not all insist on their God-given right separately to reinvent the wheel. In conformity with the objectives of the Citizens Charter, I trust everything will be done to see the problem of access from the individual's point of view and to work cross-departmentally to aid navigation. This is the kind of issue on which an external task force or panel, or whatever, could be a useful support--or do I mean goad, my Lords? I am sure my noble friend will give further thought to this.
My second point concerns the regulatory framework. Witness after witness testified to the benefits the United Kingdom enjoy from the liberalisation of our telecommunications market, which has permitted new information services to grow faster here than in the rest of the European Union. But the framework within which this has taken place needs to evolve along with the market place. The word "convergence", with respect to these industries, is bandied about all too loosely. The digital revolution will not destroy all distinctions between, let us say, entertainment and financial services. What it will do is enable a much wider range of products and services to be delivered along networks hitherto specifically dedicated to either broadcasting or telephony: fibre optics, cable, terrestrial, satellite or good old twisted copper pair. This changes the nature of competition in these markets. Thus the committee
concluded that a new regulatory regime for these industries would be needed by 1998. Some serious work will be needed--very soon--to get that regime right.6.37 p.m.
Lord Porter of Luddenham: My Lords, I was not a member of the committee which gave us this excellent report, so may I thank my noble friend Lord Phillips of Ellesmere and his committee and say how much I have benefited from reading it.
The report compares the recent advance of information technology with the shift from the agricultural to the industrial economy. The Government response was no less positive when they modestly described their own proposals as "IT for All". It is probably true that information technology will be seen in the years to come as one of the principal contributions of the second half of this century to the technological and scientific history of mankind. The only other advance of comparable importance since the war is surely the discovery of molecular genetics, with its own incomparable code of information transfer.
Information technologies have been developing throughout our history, from speech and writing to the printing press, the typewriter, the telephone, radio, and then on to calculating machines and computers. But there is no doubt that a seachange has taken place in the last few years and is advancing at an incredible rate today.
The discoveries which made today's information revolution possible were principally those of solid state physics and in particular the transistor--that tiny electronic switch which provides one bit of information. It was discovered largely at the Bell telephone laboratories in New Jersey by Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley. In 1949, Claude Shannon, also at Bell, had advanced information theory through his brilliant synthesis with the second law of thermodynamics. In those days several of the great industrial laboratories--especially in the United States--left their top scientists free to follow their own ideas. The information revolution which followed owed a great deal to that policy.
At first sight it seems clear that information must be a good thing and that ignorance is bad. But there are exceptions even to this apparent truism and the recommendation in paragraph 6.9 of the report, the one most strongly supported in, I believe, the whole report by Her Majesty's Government, refers to the need to eliminate information which is illegal and to discourage the transmission of other information which is objectionable in a civilised society.
The report points out, perceptively, that the technology needed to eliminate such unwanted material is in the hands of every citizen, it is called an on-off switch, and parents, in particular, should know how to operate it. Nevertheless, the undertaking by the UK Internet service providers, mentioned in the government response, to implement a code of practice enforcing the removal of such material, is most welcome.
I shall refer to only two other recommendations of the committee, which, considering their importance, received rather scant encouragement from Her
Majesty's Government. Both are about education. Recommendation 6.22 expresses the need for an information technology module in all initial teacher training courses. The government reply tells us of many things under consideration but little that is actually happening. Thus we hear that the TTA, the teacher training agency, is looking at further means to improve teacher confidence in IT, exploring means to help teachers identify their training needs and is also currently considering its research priorities. These, we are told, are likely to include the effects of IT on teaching and in particular the use of IT in relation to improving literacy and numeracy--I shall return to that in a moment.The other recommendation, 6.24, is about extending the use of IT,
- "to develop [the] educational content...[of the] British curriculum...by a targeted R & D programme, for which public funding should be made available".
The Government admit that there is scope here for further development, that this is an area where the private sector is active, but that,
- "the extent to which programmes with support from public funds are required will depend on a variety of factors, including the nature of emerging technologies, the pace at which they develop".
That really is not good enough and the Department for Education and Employment, which is responsible for co-ordination in this area, should recognise the need for more positive, urgent action.
Already we are communicating regularly, through e-mail, with colleagues and associates throughout the world. The Internet is widely available in universities and some schools. The word processor has made it possible for students to type their publications or their thesis for themselves, and they are now expected to do this--gone are the days when they employed others for such simple tasks. Students will soon be in deep trouble if they do not have the skills or the means to do those things. Incidentally, those advances affect not only students; they are equally valuable to older users like myself when they find their own random access memory becoming ever more random.
We have heard several reports only this month about the inadequacies of British children in mathematics, particularly their mental agilities, without the computer. We are also aware of the parlous state of spoken and written English in many schoolchildren who have been deprived, in recent years, of a proper education in grammar and the reading of the good English.
These problems are closely related to the proposals about education in the information society. It is not just that teaching time is limited so that when new areas such as these are introduced to the curriculum others have to go, there is a "trendency", seen increasingly since the sixties, to suppose that the new technologies will replace the stuffy old things like English grammar and even, in extreme cases of post-modernism, that watching television is a substitute for reading.
Information technology can, of course, be a valuable addition to reading and to communication by writing and speaking, and an invaluable tool for the teacher. But it is not a substitute and must never be allowed to become one.
Therefore, while recognising fully the immense importance of teaching all our citizens, especially the young, to be computer literate and to take full advantage of the great superhighway of information to which they are being given access, let us not do this at the expense of teaching numeracy and the proper use of language.
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