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7.55 p.m.
Baroness Anelay of St. Johns: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Ellesmere, and the Select Committee for their work. I must start by declaring an interest, albeit most definitely a non-pecuniary one, as president of my local citizens advice bureau in Woking. I welcome the report because
it recognises that there are increasing concerns about the growing gap between the "information rich" and the "information poor", and it makes the point at paragraph 5.64 that,
- "The Information Society is not an exclusive club. Every British citizen should be able to become a member".
The advent of the information age could revolutionise the information and advice world.
The National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux gave evidence to the Select Committee and believes that it is able to fulfil a key role in extending access to the information superhighway of the future. It can make sure that both the information-rich and the information-poor have access to clear public information through the information superhighway. In that regard, I welcome the comments of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig of Radley.
There is a CAB service in over a thousand cities, towns and villages across Great Britain and Northern Ireland handling over 7 million inquiries each year. One in seven of us uses the CAB service every year. When giving evidence to the committee, NACAB said at paragraph 4.31 that its clients,
- "on the whole are what we would term the have nots, who might be left behind in the information society...the people who come to us are largely fallen on hard times, and they come to us for advice and information. So we have the confidence of the have nots...Citizens Advice Bureaux getting involved in the superhighway means we can bring them aboard to some degree."
I am using the CAB service as an example of the way in which the advent of the information age could revolutionise the information and advice world simply because it is an organisation which I know well. I am aware that much of what I say today could be relevant to other advice and counselling agencies. Like many organisations, CABs are looking at the superhighway and asking: what is it going to do; how will it fit in; and will it help us to do our job better?
I believe that the information superhighway gives us the potential to improve information and advice services in two major ways. It can make it possible to improve the quality and quantity of the traditional forms of advice work done by over 30,000 CAB advisers, over 90 per cent. of whom are volunteers, and it can be used to develop innovatory services, especially direct access by members of the public to the information they need.
This development of advice services will depend upon two factors: first, that the government make information readily available; and, secondly, that the Internet develops into a fully fledged superhighway offering two-way real-time video transmission and interactivity. If those two pre-conditions are met, then how could CABs be involved in exploiting the potential of the information superhighway to bring improved advice services to the public?
The opinion of the Select Committee at paragraph 5.67 is that,
- "The Citizens Advice Bureaux could become more effective and efficient if all their bureaux were linked to an on-line database system to make unnecessary the regular manual updating of their current databases."
Behind those rather bland words, "the regular manual updating", lies a mind-numbing task, as I know. I have done it in my time.
The database is a 70-volume, 12,000-page paper system held in every bureau. Updating it is a scissors and paste job. It means that by the time NACAB has collated the amendments and posted them, and the bureaux have done their scrap book work, the information may be up to six or seven weeks old. Just think of the time which could be freed up for better use if this job disappeared. It would mean that the CABs could see an extra 500,000 clients a year. And the advisers would have much enhanced access to accurate up-to-date information. I am pleased to say that the CAB service nationally already has plans to satisfy the Select Committee's observation. It intends to create an on-line database accessed by bureaux via ISDN lines to regional file servers. The database would be updated daily. The system would be further developed through the addition of case law from courts and tribunals, copies of the relevant statutes, and a range of advice tools such as calculation packages which would help to manage clients' debt casework and cope with social security benefit calculations. And of course a useful by-product of such a change would be the training of 28,000 CAB volunteers in IT skills which they can export into paid employment, if they so wish.
But what of other innovations which rely upon the development of the superhighway and could improve the provision of services to the public by CABs? It will be possible to improve and extend services to people who live in remote rural areas or who have mobility problems. Using the superhighway, advisers could make home visits distant from the bureau and be connected via a lap top computer to the national information system and to their parent bureau office systems. Video-conferencing facilities would be valuable for outreach work too.
The Select Committee took evidence of how the public could have direct access to the Internet and recognised that,
- "Public libraries and CABs can also provide a supportive environment in which people can try out new technologies to which they might not otherwise have access, either at home or at work".
When the committee took evidence, the noble Lord, Lord Gregson, pointed out that the have nots are so often the cannots as well, and asked what use public access points for Internet use would be for them. I believe that advice agencies endorse his observation and will make sure that when the public use access points they will be assisted by trained advisers whenever appropriate.
There have already been significant initiatives in the use of IT taken by CABs in Northern Ireland, Scotland and some parts of England. For example, a CAB in Gloucester provides an advice service on the Internet. It is used by people with disabilities and those who are housebound to help them communicate with the outside world. The London division of the CAB service in partnership with Thames Water provides up-to-the-minute advice to the public on a range of specialist subjects, including money advice, welfare rights, computer development and social policy through the use of information technology. CABs were delighted
to be invited to participate in two of the three pilot projects announced by the Government at the launch of the Green Paper government.direct. These are Direct Access government, a one stop shop on the Internet to allow access to government forms and regulations, and the Touch Screen Pilot which has been developed by the Inland Revenue, the Contributions Agency and Customs and Excise to provide information. Spennymore CAB in County Durham is one of the eight sites being used for this pilot scheme. But until now the use of IT by bureaux has been decidedly patchy because of disparate access to resources. Each bureau is autonomous and responsible for securing its own funding.I was made acutely aware of the results that that could have a few years ago when I visited Belfast for the first time. I had left Woking in the midst of negotiations to upgrade our creaky PC (an Amstrad) to a series of 486s, desperately trying to avoid having to settle for 386s. I then visited the CAB on the Shankill Road. There was delight that somebody had just given the bureau the chance to upgrade to an electronic typewriter. The quality of its advice was excellent, but its ability to deliver it as widely and efficiently as it would like was severely hindered.
NACAB's strategic plans to equip every CAB and each part of the national association with hardware, software and telecommunication links, plus training and support will require funding. It will have to be outside the bureau's usual local resources. As the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Ellesmere, said in opening the debate, NACAB has taken an innovative approach. It has applied to the Millennium Commission for 50 per cent. of the costs in addition to seeking £2 million from government and £8 million from the private sector.
I believe that the development of the information superhighway and its use by advice and counselling agencies is a major way of ensuring that the most disadvantaged groups share in, and benefit from, technological change. The development of the information superhighway provides the opportunity for all to face the challenges and grasp the opportunities of the information age. I welcome the recommendations of the report.
8.6 p.m.
Lord Methuen: My Lords, I am sure that noble Lords will agree that we have just listened to a most interesting and enlivening debate on one of the most important topics of the moment, as was brought out in this excellent report for which I thank the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, and his committee. Unfortunately I have had only limited time in which to digest its comments and so I shall confine my remarks to some of its technical aspects.
As other noble Lords have said, we are facing in the information society a revolution comparable to that of the industrial revolution 200 years ago. I spent some 30 years in the IT industry of which the last 19 were spent with Rolls-Royce, from which I retired two years ago, where we had an almost total information society ranging from a paperless shop floor, inter-company
E-mail, video conferencing and total networking world wide. We had a computing-secure environment to prevent unauthorised access.The need for computer literacy from the worker on the shop floor to the managing director is obvious and emphasises the need for IT education at the earliest stage of school education. The noble Lord, Lord Haskel, may like to note that my son-in-law who suffers from RSI does all his input by voice recognition, and that has been very successful.
There is one minor point in the report which needs correction. Paragraph 1.13 concerns coaxial broadband cable systems. Those are perfectly capable of providing bi-directional data paths at megabit speeds and have been widely and successfully used on university campuses and on large industrial sites since the late 1980s. We had three of them at Rolls-Royce, so perhaps I speak with experience. One would however of course now use fibre optic cables for such installations.
I turn now to the information society. Teleworking is capable of making vast changes in people's lives, reducing the need for commuting, and is already doing so for many people. As the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, said, the coming together of television and personal computers, which surely should be made much more practical with the onset of digital television, will provide a vehicle for the domestic, office, and industrial user to obtain the maximum benefit from the information available on the networks. In many ways we are only just at the beginning of this revolution. We have yet to get the best out of expert and knowledge-based systems which can offer guidance to the layman and the professional in the performance of their occupations. That is particularly appropriate to organisations such as the CAB.
However there is, as other noble Lords have said, further work required to improve the security of the network and data and to tackle the issues of privacy and data quality, some of which of course are trivial and irrelevant. Government leadership and sponsorship, in conjunction with industry, are essential if the UK is to maintain its position in the leadership of the information society. Therefore I strongly support the formation of the task force or panel as mentioned by many previous noble Lords.
There are two final points I should like to mention. The information explosion will lead to an increase in manpower working in the IT industry. Already a substantial amount of that work is being exported to countries such as India and the Ukraine where good quality personnel is available at substantially cheaper costs than in Europe. The excellent communications facilities make the distances quite irrelevant. It is therefore imperative that we have a well-trained workforce to minimise that job loss.
I should like to mention in this forum the problems associated with the year 2000. Many existing software systems only employ a two-figure year and that recently resulted in a Marks & Spencer batch of baked beans with a "use-by" date of 2000 being rejected as being 96 years old. That problem is of enormous magnitude and worldwide is going to cost billions of pounds to put
right. At a recent meeting in Scotland 150 IT managers were asked who was doing anything about it. Only two put up their hands. This matter is so serious due to the unknown content of much software in such areas as air traffic control and embedded micro controllers that it is suggested that one should not fly in the 48 hours between 31st December 1999 and 1st January 2000. The manpower needed to overcome the problem is enormous and there may not be sufficient skilled people to do the job particularly on legacy systems.
It is not a question of budgets. Time does not stand still and will simply run out and may leave many companies with unusable software. I hope the Minister can give some comfort to those of us who are aware of this problem. Otherwise the reputation of the information society may well be left in tatters.
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