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7.19 p.m.
Lord Butterworth: My Lords, as a member of the committee, I thank and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, on his chairmanship of it. Indeed, he was the skilful pilot who brought a complex report safely to port.
I shall focus entirely on those parts of the report which deal with education. Information technology has already begun to produce changes which, cumulatively, will amount to a social revolution. Education must be given a primary role if society is to be adequately prepared to deal with those changes as they occur. The changes are revolutionary because,
- "They will change the way we work and the way we live together. They will bring about a fundamental change in the way we communicate with each other, a fundamental change in how we use information and understand knowledge as a product".
An impressive amount of work in this field has already been undertaken in the UK. A recent study of G7 countries showed that in secondary schools the United Kingdom has the most computers per 100 pupils--12 per 100 pupils. We were the third highest in primary schools after only Canada and the United States. However, as has been said so often this evening, leadership is now urgently needed in the whole field of information technology. Not only must different activities be co-ordinated but they must be drawn together in a national strategy. Thirty thousand independent purchasers--for there are 30,000 individual schools--can make many expensive mistakes if they are not given clear guidance in a co-ordinated national strategy. Some schools and colleges are moving forward admirably. About 5,000 schools and colleges are already connected to the Internet. But the divide is widening between schools which are moving forward and those
which are not. If we are to make a success of the information society, every child must be entitled to these information and communication technologies.This problem knows no boundaries and it certainly cannot be contained within the ambit of individual government departments. We need a co-operative, co-ordinated approach and leadership within an agreed national framework providing guidance but at the same time allowing local initiative and competition. For instance, in the field I am looking at this evening why should we not create a school intranet, to provide a national education framework? The intranet could drive connectivity through all the schools. The intranet could enable government and the department to communicate electronically with all schools and colleges, an innovation which might ultimately be self-financing and even save money. It is estimated that the department currently spends in excess of £9 million a year on postage in communicating with schools.
The intranet could become a prime means for communicating with all staff, especially in academic fields and matters of the curriculum. It would provide a minimum platform of appropriate standards and it could harness expenditure and minimise the risk of inappropriate expenditure. Again, as already pointed out, we were not convinced that the present arrangements, including the new Cabinet Committee GEN 37, working within government protocol, could produce the kind of galvanised leadership that we have in mind. Incidentally, it would be quite interesting to know how often GEN 37 has actually met in, say, the past six months. Perhaps the Minister, when he replies, will let us know.
The most important point I want to deal with is the committee's concern with the state of teacher training. Our fears have not been allayed by the Government's response. First, we recommended that all initial teacher training courses should contain an information technology module. I do not know whether noble Lords will believe it, but the teacher training agency has still not confirmed that information technology will even be included in the national curriculum for initial teacher training. For established teachers the agency is considering information technology as part of the profile for newly qualified and experienced teachers. But that does not go far enough. A modular accreditation should be available to all serving teachers to enhance their qualifications. Accreditation is what is needed for that would create a market in the teaching profession for the development of information and communication technologies. Moreover, teachers should be offered opportunities to develop IT skills through the technology itself; through networks, CD ROMs and the like. Why not offer financial assistance to teachers to help them in purchasing their own equipment in order to have personal access to this new world?
In this section our report concluded:
- "Despite the vital need to remedy IT skills shortages amongst teachers, our enquiry identified the need for improved co-ordination between the DfEE and the various agencies working in this area before this need can be addressed fully. The ultimate responsibility for sorting out the present confusion over who should be taking the lead in improving teacher training in IT rests with the Secretary of
- State for Education and Employment. We call on the Secretary of State to investigate this area as a matter of the highest priority for her Department".
Finally, perhaps I may mention the field of educational software, a new industry in which we ought to be commercially dominant, for educational software carries the culture of the country. British educational software should be exporting our educational system, our culture and our social values. We have so much operating in our favour. We have the expertise, we have the educational credibility, and we have the English language. Yet the software market is dominated by the United States, including the CD ROM market and the on-line content of the Internet. Moreover, software production requires a global market to support it but our home market is not big enough on its own to ensure automatic access to global markets. Some government assistance is essential if we are to be successful. However, it is a delicate area and it is important not to distort the market so that it becomes unsustainable. Consultation is needed with the software or content industry on what might be the most helpful method of giving assistance.
The industry itself is rapidly changing and now consists not only of software suppliers, but also of book publishers, television producers and some film producers. Suppliers and purchasers may be helped by a cental source of information. The National Council for Education Technology (NCET) already has reviews of over 400 CD-ROMs on its web site. It is interesting to note that its pages are currently being accessed over 1,000 times a week. This might be a nucleus which could well be extended.
We were among the leaders in understanding the impact of information technology. We urgently need a galvanised leadership within an agreed national framework if we are to be successful in the new information society, and education is a key area.
7.30 p.m.
Lord Craig of Radley: My Lords, I should like to touch on three points in particular in this very interesting debate. But before I do so, I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, for his excellent chairmanship. He will understand as much as anyone how pleased I am that he has stayed the course so fully.
In response to our report the Government say that they are encouraging departments and agencies to make good quality information available to citizens and businesses electronically on-line. That is good. They appear to agree with the recommendation of the Select Committee that wide use of this medium should be made to publish official documents and information. Further, the Government say that they will revise advice when necessary to promote this objective. Those of us who have had access to government.direct on the worldwide web will have had a foretaste of what is being done. It is excellent. In the same section of their response and elsewhere the Government say,
- "decisions on what information should be selected for placing on line are best left to individual Departments and Agencies".
As individual and stand-alone statements of government policy, these three are hard to fault. But am I alone--and I judge not by the tone of this debate--in believing that, taken together, they hardly add up to a very pro-active stance or really strong encouragement of a far wider exploitation of the electronic medium? It would be welcome if the Government were much more enthusiastic and forthcoming in their drive to make the public aware of what is becoming available. Until I plugged into the worldwide web, I was quite unaware of what was on offer through the excellent CITU web pages at government.direct.
The recently published Green Paper seems at last to go some way towards bringing these issues to greater public notice. There is a clearly stated commitment to make all kinds of government information available electronically. I welcome that and the forthcoming IT for all trial. I hope that the Information Society initiative for small businesses has been well received: it deserves to be.
However, as we identified in our report, there appears to be a particular hang-up over Crown copyright. When will the Government be ready to announce their decisions on the future management of Crown copyright? Have they set themselves a target date? It would be great encouragement to know that this is soon to be resolved. It would give much greater scope for departments to publish electronically. Incidentally, I was really dismayed to learn that the report of the Select Committee Towards Zero Emissions for Road Transport just out will not be published by this House electronically. Surely that is a subject of very wide public interest. It is high time that all parliamentary reports and publications are available electronically. It is marvellously convenient to be able to access, with a few key presses on one's lap top, the text of a House report or what a noble Lord has said a few days or perhaps weeks ago.
However, the costs of keeping information up-to-date are growing more and more and are expected from these resources. Are the Government confident that these costs will be contained and offset by savings elsewhere? The noble Baroness, Lady Hogg, also posed that question. I have seen no examination of it to date.
My second point relates to the proposal in Paragraph 6.20 of the report that a programme of information sharing and mutual assistance between Commonwealth countries in the development of information super highways should be set up. What became clear in the course of our inquiry is that there were others in the Commonwealth apart from the United Kingdom, who have been gaining considerable experience and making good progress in the applications of IT. The Canadians, particularly in New Brunswick, and the Singaporeans, for example, have set themselves demanding targets for super highways and their uses.
The Singapore Minister of Communications, speaking last June, said that after lagging far behind the developing countries for so long, Asian countries today are either planning or are implementing cutting-edge information technologies which will enable them to
leapfrog ahead of developed nations. We can find the whole speech on the Singapore Government's home page on the Internet, together with the full text of 17 speeches made since June on IT topics in Singapore and much more besides. Goodness, have they not leapfrogged us in spades on the worldwide web!The Government's response to our recommendation about drawing on the expertise of other Commonwealth countries seems to brush a joint approach rather to one side. They concentrate on what the United Kingdom Government are doing to support Commonwealth scholarships and the like. That is worthy, but what we had in mind was much more exciting and dynamic.
During our visit to the United States, I was struck by the considerable efforts being made by the United States Government to make IT infrastructure available to a number of African states. One I have read about is a fibre optic ring main on the ocean bed around the whole of the African continent to enable individual nations to plug in and gain access to worldwide high capacity telecommunications.
There seems to me to be a very important issue here; namely, that worldwide availability of text, sound and video may become as important in the future as the availability of the BBC World Service, for example, is today. We need to be thinking how the right news and the wealth of other information about us and our interests are going to be accessed and projected around the world in the 21st century.
A concerted effort by the more electronically advanced Commonwealth countries is called for so that national and Commonwealth ideals are made widely available and not compromised otherwise we might find ourselves, on a global scale, caught out by some dominant gatekeeper with little interest in spreading the information which we judge important. I do not believe that it is too early to be giving these issues serious consideration as the information revolution spreads around the world.
Happily, some remote regions are becoming more able to access and use expertise to help their activities; for example, SatelLife a not-for-profit organisation, which exploits the speed and versatility of the electronic medium to allow information exchange, for example, between medical workers in remote jungle areas, which have never had any telephone access to the rest of the world, and the appropriate consultant specialists in a western hospital. Not infrequently, the calls from such outposts are not for blankets or food but for more of this kind of speedy satellite communication. But there is a long way to go before it becomes widely and readily available.
Pervasive to much of the evidence taken by the committee--this is my third point--was the problem of security of information stored and transmitted digitally. Whether it be patients' records in a paperless NHS system or the way in which chargecard and other payment methods are transacted by computer screen, we urgently need to find appropriate solutions, to explain them to the public and to reassure ourselves that the methods adopted are reasonable and trustworthy. Much of this will be international in coverage and will
therefore need agreements at government level. I hope that we can be reassured about this level of commitment and approach to so important a topic.Only last week a newspaper article reported that the United States Government had lifted its ban on the export of high grade cryptographic systems. If this is true, perhaps the noble and learned Lord can say whether the Government are satisfied with what the United States have done. As the report makes clear, the committee welcomes the Government's proposal to license trusted third parties as a step in the process of protecting information and preventing fraud. In the Green Paper government.direct I was pleased to see in the list of strategic principles (set out on page 13) the emphasis placed on the principle of public confidence. Without it, the IT revolution will be a drag and not a boon. Incidentally, the list of principles makes no reference to a need for material retention and archiving. Surely, this needs to be addressed to set out a clear policy on what records government departments must keep and in what medium. Much of the use and value of IT will hang on the confidence that the public has in these all-pervasive arrangements. I look forward to hearing what the Minister says about it.
Finally, I should like to draw attention to the committee's recommendation in relation to citizens advice bureaux. I should like to underline a point that has already been made by the noble Lord, Lord Phillips. I believe that these bureaux should be linked to an on-line database. If we are to avoid a new divide between the information rich and the information poor, wide support for the steps that the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux has in hand is called for. It is at the vanguard of planning to make information available to those who cannot afford to provide IT facilities for themselves or are unable to fathom their workings. Its efforts to support an information system on CD-ROM, to link its offices together electronically and to provide public self-help databases accessible through user-friendly terminals in libraries, CAB waiting rooms and other public areas, deserve strong support.
There can be fewer more helpful ways of providing on a nationwide scale something of real value to citizens. I hope that its bid to the Millennium Commission will be rewarded with the grants needed to realise its plans and that its ambitious and far-sighted project will attract the support of the Government that it deserves.
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