Centre for Policy Studies

"The best dissection and analysis...of the authoritarian madness that is Labour's IT policy" - Computer World UK

The UK Government will spend about £16.5 billion on IT in 2009/10, equivalent to 1.4% of GDP. Most of this money is wasted, with only 30% of projects succeeding, writes IT expert Liam Maxwell in a new report (It's Ours: why we, not government, must own our data) published by the Centre for Policy Studies and described as a "must-read" by the Ideal Government Project.

Effective use of Information Technology (IT) can do much to improve public services. In particular, it has the potential to break the central monopoly by giving individuals the ability to exercise real choice and control over schools, GPs, hospitals and other services.

But improving government use of IT is not just a question of effective project management. Rather it is a matter of changing the assumptions behind the government's use of IT. For a clear choice is emerging:

• EITHER to continue with the "Transformational Government" agenda. This relies on the State holding, in the words of Sir David Varney, the Government's adviser, a "deep truth about the citizen, based on their behaviour, experiences, beliefs, needs and rights", with huge centralised databases directing public services to the point of need (as judged by the State).
• OR to abandon expensive and failing centralised IT projects and give control of personal information to individual citizens - the model that the commercial sector has used successfully applied for many years.

An example of how this might work in practice is the storage and use of individual medical records. Currently, the government is trying to build a huge central computer on which all medical records are stored. This is estimated to cost between £12 billion and £20 billion; is very late; and has stifled the development of smaller, more innovative IT solutions.

The alternative is to use services such as HealthVault or Google Health to encourage and enable the individual citizen to use to store and analyse their own health records. This alternative would eliminate the need for the NHS database (and be practically cost-free).

This approach would require all public services to use open data standards to ensure that data can be easily and securely transferred from one data provider to another in the same way that customers can today transfer their accounts from one bank to another.

SUBSTANTIAL POTENTIAL BENEFITS include:

• estimated savings on government IT expenditure of 50%;
• the ability to reform public services so that the needs of parents, patients and other end-users are uppermost;
• greater security and privacy over data; and,
• far less intrusion by the State into the everyday lives of its citizens.

This approach, concludes Liam Maxwell, does not require huge investment in the creation of untested and largely unnecessary new technology. It would, however, reverse the Government's attempt to nationalise data by giving control back to those who should own it: us.

Commenting on the report, Shadow Minister for Science and Innovation Adam Afriyie MP said: "This report starkly highlights both the grotesque intrusion by State officials into our everyday lives and the wanton waste of taxpayers' money.  We're working on a different view of government's use of IT and Liam Maxwell's ideas offer a reason to be hopeful and an alternative path for an incoming government with change in mind."

The full report is available to download here. To comment on it, visit the CPS blog here.

Liam Maxwell has written an op-ed article on the report for The Yorkshire Post and there is further coverage in the specialist media, with Computer Weekly describing it as an "excellent paper" and Glyn Cooper's blog at Computer World UK praising it as "probably the best dissection and analysis I have read of the authoritarian madness that is Labour's IT policy."