Below is the text of the speech made by the then Health Secretary, Alan Milburn, on 15th April 2002.
The debate in the country about the future of our public services is crystalising. The Budget this week will make those dividing lines even clearer. As the Prime Minister, Chancellor and myself have all made clear in recent weeks, the biggest political issue today is whether we are prepared as a country to provide the resources and make the reforms necessary to bring about improvements to our key public services, in particular to the National Health Service
As a party and as a government we believe that we should be prepared to do so. Our formula is simple: investment + reform = results.
The debate is now sharpening, not just because of the imminence of the Budget and the progress of the Spending Review, but also because of the position now being taken by our political opponents.
Today I want to set out both our analysis of the position being taken by the Conservatives and our own analysis that we have made of why a reformed NHS – funded through general taxation – is the right way forward for Britain.
Our report – The Right’s Remedy – which we are publishing today, highlights where the Conservatives have got it wrong.
Within the last week we have heard twice from the Conservative Party about the future of health care in our country.
First, Liam Fox spelling out – in his Secret Speech – the Conservatives’ strategy on the NHS seeking to “persuade the public that the NHS is not working…it has never worked before and will never work” as a prelude to what he called more people having to “self-pay”.
Second, yesterday the Conservative’s publication outlining what they call “Alternative Prescriptions” for health care in our country. Whilst this second publication avoids plumping for any specific solution – that as Liam Fox makes clear will come later and is dependent upon first undermining public confidence in the NHS – it does now illustrate the clear direction both of Conservative thinking and the Conservative’s strategy.
They are in the first stage of their approach: undermining the NHS and suggesting there is a better alternative to it. This is a cynical and destructive softening up operation that should be seen for what it is.
For them the NHS, as Liam Fox puts it “cannot work and won’t work”, and as IDS puts it in today’s publication, “the system is not working.”
They quote approvingly in their document (page 54) those countries with up to 30% of spending undertaken in the private sector as offering an acceptable level of fairness. This sits interestingly with Liam Fox’s determination to encourage more people to “self-pay” and is the equivalent of up to £20 billion of UK NHS spending.
What this all points to is that for all their grand study tours of Europe the Conservatives are opting for an American-style solution. A two-tier health care system – for the poor a Medicaid style NHS and “self-pay” solutions for middle income families with top-up services having to be paid for privately. Low income Britain would pay the price through second rate services that are poor because they only serve the poor. Middle income Britain would pay the price through increased costs and extra charges.
The Conservatives have brought the post war consensus on health to an end. Indeed it is revealing that no-one reading their document could believe they remain committed to a universal NHS that is free to all and accessible to all. Instead they talk up the advantages of other health care systems.
Their examination of the supposed superiority of other systems for funding health care tells is partial and selective. We too have examined the case for other systems of funding. But, like the BMA who conducted a similar examination last year, we have found these other systems wanting.
The report we are publishing today contains analysis from a range of academic sources across the world about the fault lines in different systems of health care funding.
In essence, the problem with social insurance systems is who bears the majority of the costs of the total health care budget. It is estimated that at 2003-4 levels of funding the additional costs of a wholesale move to a social insurance system here would be the equivalent of an extra £1,500 per worker per year using the French model and an extra £1,000 per worker per year using the German model without a single extra penny to currently planned NHS funding.
In essence the problem with private health insurance – whether compulsory or voluntary – is that it would increase bureaucracy and decrease efficiency. Compulsory private insurance is simply replacing a single state-managed risk pool with numerous, complicated, less efficient private risk pools. Tax incentives to encourage voluntary private insurance are costly, inefficient and inequitable. They tie up millions in dead-weight tax breaks for people who already have insurance before a single extra person takes out private cover. Tax incentives have a cost to the Exchequer and thereby, reduce the levels of investment available to the NHS.
The truth is there is no perfect health care system in the world. All have strengths. All contain weaknesses. What is wrong is to pretend that the only way to address the weaknesses is to move hook line and sinker to a new system. When the Conservative Party says the NHS should be reformed, what they really mean is that it should be adandoned.
From a pragmatic point of view the disruption in doing so – not to say the costs of doing so – would delay precisely the improvements in services that people long to see. From a principle point of view we would end up throwing out the baby with the bath water.
There are many things wrong with the NHS but it does have great strengths. It should be a cause of national pride in our country that no-one asks for your insurance policy or credit card before you get the care you need.
Without the NHS the sophistication of modern treatments – and of course their cost – would put individual provision of health care beyond all but the very wealthiest in society. Without it the sick would end up paying for the privilege of being sick. In a world where health care can do more and costs more than ever before having an NHS based on need not ability to pay, with services that are free and comprehensive, is a real source of strength for our country and security for our people. So the NHS should be supported with our heads as well as our hearts. The relevance of its values make it the best insurance policy in the world.
Where it is weak is on two counts
First, while its values are right its structure is wrong. For decades it has been run as a top down, centralised, monopoly service where patients interests have too often played second fiddle to the system’s interests. It is these faultlines in the system that the NHS Plan seeks to address. By devolving power so that locally run primary care trusts control NHS resources.
By introducing new incentives so that the best hospitals get more freedoms and the poorest are helped to change or else are taken over. By securing greater diversity with better co-operation between the public, private and voluntary sectors. By giving patients more choice over when and where they are treated. These reforms address precisely the structural weaknesses that the critics of the NHS pretend can only be delivered by rejecting the health service.
Second, the shortages of capacity that are the cumulative effect of decades of under-investment. On any count comparing health care investment in this country with investment in other developed countries shows that the NHS has been short-changed for decades. It is not a superior system of funding which France and Germany have enjoyed. It is a superior level of funding. The gap on public spending between France and Germany and the UK has been substantial: according to latest OECD figures French per capita public spending on health as a precentage of GDP stood at 7.1%. German public spending at 7.8%. The UK figure was 5.7%. It is this gap that is now being closed. Indeed in the last few years while in France and Germany health spending as a proportion of GDP has been falling, since 1997 in Britain it has been rising.
The point is this: the NHS can be fixed providing there is the right level of resources and the right programme of reform. The reforms are as important as the resources. Indeed the more cash goes in the more the public have a right to expect they get out. The greater the programme of investment, the bolder the programme of reform. It will take time – the NHS Plan is for 10 years – but what we have started we should now finish.
This week the battle lines for this Parliament will become clear. Labour committed to building up and reforming the NHS and the Conservatives committed to talking it down, as a prelude to forcing more people into paying for their own care.
Below is the text of the speech made by the then Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Alan Milburn, to the PFI Transport Conference on 2nd February 1999.
Introduction
Thank you Adrian for your warm welcome. We have been very privileged to have Adrian Montague to head up the Treasury Taskforce on PFI. Under Adrian’s leadership the Taskforce has done a first class job – getting actively involved with projects on the ground and enabling progress where previously there was deadlock.
What I would like to do today is to outline the Government’s progress on PFI, the further plans for reform we have in mind and our wider commitment to developing and defining other forms of PPP.
Government’s progress with PFI
Indeed, since we came to office in May 1997, this Government has revitalised PFI so that today we can rightly say that it is a key tool in helping provide effective and good value public services. Since the election, we have signed £4 billion worth of PFI deals and we have got PFI working in sectors like health where it had not worked before. By the end of this year, we estimate private sector investment in PFI projects will account for around 14% of overall public sector investment. Accompanying this turnaround has been a tremendous upsurge in confidence both in the public and private sectors that PFI can deliver the goods. And we are now seeing its benefits spread to other parts of the public services such as our schools.
As Lord Whitty will explain later, transport is a sector that led the way in PFI. It’s worth remembering that it was John Prescott a decade ago who first proposed the sort of public private partnerships arrangements that are now delivering the goods in transport. Schemes on the stock range from those of national and indeed international significance such as the Chunnel high speed rail link to smaller schemes such as the Nottingham Express Transit where PFI is making possible an integrated public system within a busy urban area.
The Government is proud of our record on PFI. We have been able to get it moving for three reasons.
Firstly, because when we came to office we were prepared to take tough decisions. In my previous job as Minister for Health for example we had to prioritise a number of major new hospital projects in order to break the logjam that had been allowed to build up. Health service need now dictates which PFI projects get the go ahead. To date 25 new hospital developments have been given the green light as part of the biggest hospital building programme in the history of the NHS. Work on 9 is already under way. The challenge now in the NHS is to get PFI working in smaller scale projects in primary care, mental health and at the interface with social services.
The second reason we have made been able to make PFI work is because we have been prepared to take head on some of the logistical problems that bedevilled PFI in the past. As you know, one of our first actions was to appoint Malcolm Bates to review the PFI process. He did a great job in analysing problems and more importantly finding solutions. Since Malcolm reported we have fully implemented all of his recommendations.
We have also recognised the importance of getting the management of staff right when evaluating bids and contracts. Openness between bidders, trade unions and staff is an essential part of any well run procurement process. PFI should not be a secret process because it is about providing better services to the public. That is why we have published guidelines for the consultation of staff and other interested bodies.
The third and final reason why we have been able to rejuvenate PFI is because this government is committed to public private partnerships in general and PFI in particular. In the past, the dogma of the right insisted that the private sector should be the owner and provider of public services. And the left insisted this was all the responsibility of the state. The modern approach to public services rejects these arguments both of the old right and the old left.
In some areas, the private sector is best able to provide the services. In others, the public sector is in the best position. And in many cases the best way forward is through new partnerships between the public and the private sectors. Where each brings something to the table. Where we combine private sector enterprise experience with public service values. For this Government the key test is what works. We recognise that what the public want is better quality, more responsive public services. Quite rightly, they want their services to be both dependable and modern. Their concern – like the Government’s – is about outcomes not ownership.
This is where PFI fits in. One of the main drivers behind it is to give the public sector what the private sector has long expected to be the norm – modern, well-designed purpose-built buildings that maximise savings over the whole life of the project. Better designs means less wasted space, more efficient energy management, lower maintenance costs. It also means more savings that can then be reinvested in frontline services.
Take the example of the contract recently signed by Falkirk Council, involving the replacement of five schools. It has been enthusiastically received by teachers and pupils alike who all stand to benefit from a decent environment for education. It is also delivering a 15% saving over the life of the contract compared to conventional procurement.
So we are pioneering new ways of doing things. New partnerships between the public and private sectors. A new understanding that improved public services and better value for money go hand in hand. The Government is committed to investing in our key public services. From April this year there will be an extra £40 billion for health and education. But it is not something for nothing. It is money in exchange for modernisation. PPPs and PFI are one way we are pursuing our investment for reform agenda.
And we will go on doing so. We have come a long way in the last 21 months. We are proud of what we have achieved but we recognise that there is more to do to make PFI and PPPs more generally a genuine national success story.
First, then we will be taking action to make PFI deals easier to complete. We are now looking at how to streamline the process of putting a PFI deal together. There is little doubt that the similarities between many PFI deals means that both time and money could be saved by having more standard template contracts. We will publish a guidance paper on standard model clauses by the end of this month. And next month we will publish guidance on accounting treatment that will help determine the optimal level of risk transfer that will deliver value for money.
These are both important developments in PFI because they will improve the efficiency of procurement, reduce transaction costs and secure better value for money.
Bates II
Second though we will continue to improve, identify and develop new opportunities and partnerships with both the public and private sectors. As many of you will know, with the impending expiry of the Taskforce’s 2 year mandate this summer, we have asked Sir Malcolm Bates to take a second look at the PFI and public private partnerships more generally to see how the government could further improve our approach.
I am not able to speculate about the contents of Sir Malcolm’s report but I am looking forward to reading his report in a few weeks.
Looking beyond PFI
What I can say at this stage is that the Government is committed to taking forward a whole range of public private partnerships. That will of course include PFI but not to the exclusion of other forms of partnership. We are committed to making PFI work even better. But not all of our eggs will necessarily be in the PFI basket. Again for us what counts is what works.
One of the reasons we extended the terms of the second Bates review is that we want to develop PPPs further to exploit all commercial potential and spare capacity in public sector assets.
Because we are not wedded to a single model for financing arrangements, it means there are new opportunities opening up to enable us to modernise the infrastructure and improve the quality of public services. We need look no further than the Channel Tunnel Rail Link to see the benefits of our flexible approach. Here we are completing the fast rail links between London, Brussels and Paris by restructuring the deal so as to make it commercially viable.
Elsewhere in transport we are developing very different forms of PPP. In the case of London Underground and National Air Traffic Control, for example, we are restructuring public ownership. Here PPPs are allowing investment above and beyond what would be possible directly through Government. And so we can begin to tackle the legacy of under investment and inadequate maintenance in those organisations.
Elsewhere we are pursuing other public private partnerships that involve greater commercial freedom for services with a core public function. The Post Office and the Royal Mint are good examples.
Our Wider Markets Initiative takes a different approach still. It is looking at how we can make better use of the public sector’s great many under-utilised assets. Some assets are surplus – so it seems a nonsense to hold on to them. Other assets can’t be disposed of but are under-utilised. So we are looking at how we can use these assets to the benefit of both the private and public sectors. So for example, the private sector might take a lease, run it, and bring private sector work and services into it. Or make recreational use of Forestry Commission land. Or commercially exploit the intellectual property derived from defence research.
Each project is different. That reflects different problems and different motivations in very different settings. Improving the quality of public services. Getting value for money. Providing incentives for effective business management. Correcting under-investment. Sweating public assets. Optimising capital investment flow. This diversity calls for the development of new approaches to enable public and private to work together. The Government will be taking a lead in that process in the months ahead.
Conclusion
In developing and defining PPP models we will build on our success in getting PFI working. Ours will be a twin track approach. One, improving and extending the PFI. Over the next three years we expect that PFI deals will contribute £11 billion pounds worth of investment in our public services. And two, building on the reservoir of expertise that is growing by the day in both the public and private sectors in finding forms of PPP that best suit the specific needs of particular public services. Today’s conference will help build that capacity still further. I am sure you will find it productive. Thank you for listening.
Below is the text of the maiden speech made by Alan Milburn in the House of Commons on 11th May 1992.
It is with a great sense of pride that I rise to make my maiden speech—in, appropriately enough, a debate about the future of British Rail. As hon. Members will know, the railways and the town of Darlington, which I am proud to represent, are virtually synonymous. Darlington, however, has another reputation, of which hon. Members are probably aware: its reputation as a barometer marginal seat.
It is my pleasure to say a word or two about my predecessors. My immediate predecessor, Michael Fallon, was a man of impeccably right-wing views. Indeed, he remained a devoted follower of Mrs. Thatcher even when that fell somewhat out of fashion on the Conservative Benches. He was, none the less, a hard-working Member of Parliament who rose to junior ministerial rank, and I wish him well in his new career outside Parliament.
I also pay tribute to my two immediate Labour predecessors, Ossie O’Brien and Ted Fletcher. Ossie had the misfortune to serve in the House for only six weeks after his splendid victory in the 1983 by-election; Ted, by contrast, sat for nearly 19 years, often bucking the national trend by dint of his diligence and personal popularity in the town of Darlington. Like those hon. Members, I will always put Darlington’s interests first, and will do my utmost to maintain their record of service to the town’s residents.
As hon. Members will know, Darlington gave birth to the railways, and so helped to spawn the first industrial revolution. Happily, that spirit of engineering enterprise and skill remains alive today in the string of top international companies for which Darlington is home: Cummins, Bowaters, Torringtons, Rothmans, and Cleveland Structural Engineering, to name but a few. One of those companies, Cleveland Structural Engineering, beat off international competition last week to win the contract to build the Tsing Ma bridge in Hong Kong. The bridge will be the largest structure of its kind in the world, and, like the Sydney harbour bridge, the Tyne bridge and the Humber bridge, it will be built in my constituency. I hope that hon. Members on both sides of the House will join me in congratulating both the work force and the management of CSE on their well-earned success. Whenever I have visited the Yarm road factory, I have been immensely impressed by the skills and commitment that I have seen there; now, they have obtained their just reward.
Although I am delighted by Cleveland’s success, after hearing the Gracious Speech I am less optimistic about the future for British industry as a whole. The speech was virtually silent about the economy, which remains in such dire straits. That the word “unemployment” did not even earn a mention is an insult to the 4,740 people in the Darlington district who remain without work. The recession has already cost 1,300 manufacturing jobs in my constituency, but all the major forecasts suggest that unemployment is set to go on rising.
Last year’s record fall in industrial investment risks plunging the country into a repeat of the economic mistakes of the mid-1980s—capacity failing to meet demand, thus forcing up imports and prices and lea ding inevitably to a Government-engineered slowdown. Companies such as CSE deserve better than that. They should be able to rely on the same support as is available to their foreign competitors from their home Governments: measures to stimulate investment in training, transport and technology. Yet here, in the middle of the longest recession since the war, we have the spectacle of the Durham training and enterprise council being forced to cut adult training by more than 20 per cent. in Darlington because its budget has been squeezed dry once again. It is a scandal that those offering youth training will have to provide more for less. Funding for non-endorsed training weeks has fallen from £31 to £28. What was training on the cheap is rapidly becoming training for a pittance.
These cheap and nasty cuts are pouring Darlington’s future down the drain. I fear that, without a change in policy, Darlington’s very real potential for economic take-off will be grounded, even before it has started. That would be a tragedy because, as Cleveland’s success amply shows, we have much to be proud of in the town of Darlington. The town is ideally placed to be at the core of a new industrial revolution that will bring more high-quality, high-skilled, high-tech, and high-paid employment.
Darlington’s fortunes, however, depend upon the Government removing the ideological blinkers that so restrict their vision and rethinking their hostility to manufacturing and their indifference to the north. The Government’s preoccupation with the privatisation of the railways is, classically, a triumph of ideological hope over the experience of those countries who owe their fast, efficient and safe railway systems to Government policies on planning and investment. The dictum that the market, and nothing but the market, can bring prosperity to areas like the north has proved disastrously wrong. After 13 years, unemployment is higher, the number of people in work lower and the gap between the rich and the poor ever wider.
Last week I listened with great interest to the Prime Minister’s promise to open up the powers of Government to public scrutiny. I hope that he will go one stage further and devolve power out from Whitehall to the regions and nations of our land. If the Prime Minister is serious about breaking down concentrations of unaccountable power, he will begin by reversing that process of creeping centralisation that has so characterised Conservative party policies since 1979. The north not only needs restoration of regional policy and proper investment in our transport infrastructure to allow us to compete against better placed regions and nations at the core of the single European market, but we need the right to determine our own future through a new structure of regional government that will take power from the centre.
Any process of devolution should include giving towns such as Darlington the right to run all their own services. In 1974, Darlington lost its county borough status because of the last Conservative reorganisation of local government. Ministers now have an oppportunity to put matters right by returning to the people of Darlington the powers that are rightfully theirs. I am looking not for any special favours for Darlington, but for policies that will rightly reward the vigour, loyalty and skill of its people. Too many of my constituents have paid the price for the records that the Government have set in the town in recent years—record bankruptcies, record mortgage repossessions and record hospital waiting lists.
I fear that the policies in the Gracious Speech mean yet more of the same. Darlington deserves a new spirit that forsakes the short term, the quick fix, the “me at the expense of the rest”—a spirit that says that all of us rely on common services because we are all part of the same community.
For those of us who grew up in the north-east, the past few years have seen a loss of that sense of community which used to characterise life there. When the Conservative party declared that there was no such thing as society, it acknowledged that, by its policies, people had been cut adrift from their communities, and as community has been denied so hope has been smothered. Hope can return to the communities of the north-east, but it needs policies that put talents to use rather than allow them to go to waste; policies that will reduce crime by putting sufficient police officers on our streets. It means policies that will restore pride by cleaning up our environment. It means tackling the obscenity of homelessness and investing in our hospitals and schools. It means, above all, giving regions such as the north-east and towns such as Darlington the chance to compete. It will be my privilige to fight for those policies in the House, I hope for many years to come. I shall do so in order to benefit the whole community of Darlington.
Below is the text of the speech on the Open Government Partnership made by Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office Minister, in Paris on 24th April 2014.
It’s a great privilege to speak here in Paris about open data and transparency.
And it’s a particular pleasure to be the first to welcome Minister Lebranchu’s announcement that France is joining the Open Government Partnership (OPG). This is a major step forward for the OGP and one that we see as important to the long term viability of this growing but still fragile organisation.
We now have all but 1 of the group of 7 nations as members or committed on the path to membership. It’s no secret that I very much hope that that we can soon welcome an announcement of an intention to join OGP from the remaining great global economy, whose voice has so far been absent around the table.
Last year I was here in Paris and met with Minister Lebranchu to discuss a different area of our common responsibilities – civil service reform. Her insights, and those of her officials, were a powerful influence on the development of our programme of Whitehall reform. I also had a stimulating discussion with the team at Etelab and then met with the then Minister for SMEs, Innovation and Digital Economy, the impressive Madame Fleur Pellerin. And in October we welcomed the French team to London at our OGP summit.
I look forward to building on our legacy of cooperation and co-working. As close allies and close neighbours who share so much, there’s a great deal we can achieve together. France I suspect will come to play a central role in the global movement for transparency and I hope it’s not too long before we will be welcomed back in this amazing city for an OGP summit meeting.
To paraphrase a great Parisian, Victor Hugo, nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. And transparency is an idea whose time has definitively come. In the past 2 and a half years, OGP has developed in a way that is little short of overwhelming. Starting with just 8 members in 2011, there are now 64 of us – embracing a third of the world’s population.
We’re all at different places along the path to greater openness, but we come together so we can support and learn from one another. I’m delighted France is now part of this. I know there is much we can learn from your experience.
From Australia to Ukraine, Bulgaria to Sierra Leone, Chile to Tunisia, OGP is spreading the message that transparency is a friend of the reformer.
And it’s vitally important that this message is heard by those countries that have gone through the biggest changes – and so the world can see that openness is a path to democracy and stability and prosperity. It’s also crucial that openness is baked in to the very fabric of government.
Attitudes to openness
In the UK we have a Frenchman to thank for our first ever exploration of the power of data collection.
After the Norman invasion of 1066, William the Conqueror – as he’s known on our side of La Manche – sent his emissaries to every corner of England to assess the value of property and livestock held by each landowner.
William’s Domesday Book was about consolidating information – and by extension power and wealth – in the hands of the privileged elite. And that set the pattern for most of what followed.
Governments have tended to hoard information. It was kept under lock and key, away from sight: never open; never shared; never scrutinised.
But in the 21st century, those in power can no longer take such an approach.
The networked, decentralised spirit of the internet age has started to permeate how we work, how we socialise and how we think. Technology has revolutionised the relationship between citizens and the state; it should both compel and empower governments to work in new ways.
Even the Domesday Book is now freely available online as open data.
At the same time, governments around the world are wrestling with how to respond to long term demographic and economic challenges, and rising public expectations.
In the UK – and throughout Europe – austerity in public finances will be a fact of life for some years to come. I recently met with an energetic selection of my counterparts in Madrid, including Minister Lebranchu, to discuss these very challenges. There will continue to be pressure on governments – of all political colours – to deliver more for less. Two paths are possible: the low road of salami slicing departmental budgets to impose top-down savings; and the high road of redesigning public services from the bottom up. Governments owe it to the public to take the high road. And that calls for a complete transformation of how we design and deliver public services and how we interact with citizens. And transparency needs to be central to that transformation.
5 principles for public sector reform
Our thinking in the UK led me to propose 5 principles for public service reform to help us meet these challenges. To be frank, we didn’t start out with these ideas. I come from the JFDI school of government – Just Do It. And just doing it has worked in the UK. For the first time ever we have secured real folding-money efficiency savings – an unprecedented £10 billion from central government in 2012 to 2013, the last year for which we have audited figures.
Out of this action we’ve started to distill some theory. And that’s these 5 ideas:
The first is tight control from the centre over common activities – such as property, IT and procurement – because this reduces costs and encourages collaborative working. This accounts for the lion’s share of the efficiency savings we made in the UK last year.
The second principle is looser control over operations: shifting power away from the centre and diversifying the range of public service providers. We strongly support staff-owned mutuals, joint ventures and social enterprises which raise productivity, improves services and cuts costs. These are alternatives to red-blooded privatisation and empower the very people who know best how to drive up standards.
Third, we need a properly innovative culture, so public servants have permission to try sensible new ideas, moving away from the risk aversion that has tended to hold back progress. I’ve seen for myself how Californian ideas such as ‘move fast and break things’ or the Israeli start up culture of failing – but failing fast and learning from it – underpin a truly creative environment.
An innovative culture means listening to different and non-traditional voices when making policy. One of the great things about the Open Government Partnership is it allows government and civil society to sit around the same table and learn from one another.
Fourth, digital by default. If a service can be delivered online, then it should only be delivered online, because as well as being cheaper, online services can be faster, simpler and more convenient for the public to use.
And the fifth principle – the most directly relevant to OGP – is openness. Because being transparent and publishing open data makes government more accountable to citizens and strengthens our democracy; it informs choice over public services; and it feeds economic and social growth.
Accountability
Too often, transparency is a fair weather friend. In opposition all politicians think transparency is a great idea. When they come to power they continue to think it’s a great idea for the first 12 months while all they’re doing is exposing what their predecessors did. And then they tend to get less keen.
But transparency shouldn’t be an optional extra, an add-on, or something that’s ‘nice to have’: it’s a fundamental part of good governance.
People should be able to see the inner workings of their government – after all, it’s supposed to work in their interests and act in their name.
Equally, taxpayers have a right to see where and how their money is spent.
And ultimately, public data belongs to the citizen, not the state.
It’s why in the UK we now publish all central governmental spending over £25,000. We also publish Quarterly Data Summaries to give a snapshot of how each of our departments spends their budget and they use their workforce.
And we publish all government contracts over £10,000 on our Contracts Finder website.
Of course, transparency can be very uncomfortable for governments where it exposes waste or highlights failure. But you can’t just cherry-pick the bits you want to be transparent about. It has to be all or nothing, otherwise it doesn’t work.
Because if you’re open about problems as they arise and you tell people when things go wrong, then they’re far more inclined to believe you when things are working and you want to talk about your achievements. Over time, being open builds trust.
This is the experience we had in the UK when we decided to publish assessments of the progress of our major projects, everything from new railways to transforming welfare.
When we first suggested including ‘traffic light’ ratings – red, amber, green status updates – some inside government were horrified. To be honest; some still are.
And, for sure, there were a number of bad headlines to begin with – but, when the dust settled, actually we got quite a few plaudits. People could see we meant what we said when we talked about being transparent and ultimately we got the credit for being open.
Open data
But transparency isn’t just a noble concept. It’s a practical tool for improving public services – delivering measureable results for citizens and for taxpayers.
Better performance information can help you to see where to save. Mastodon C is an example of a big data start-up company, incubated at our Open Data Institute and working with Open Health Care UK. By using prescription data from across England, variations in spending on different classes of drugs can be identified. It is then possible to calculate the potential savings to be achieved by moving from prescribing branded drugs to generic drugs. From statins alone, we could save around £200 million per year. When extended to all classes of drugs, the total potential savings could amount to £1.4 billion per year.
Similarly, transparency leaves no hiding place for failure. The release of NHS heart surgery performance data, for instance, has helped bring about dramatic improvements in survival rates.
But there is something more fundamental at work. Because giving people more information is another way of giving them more control. Transparency is about putting people in charge of the services they use and giving them a greater role and a louder voice in deciding what’s best for them.
Publishing exam results lets parents see whether their local school is improving so they can make the right choice for their children.
And publishing local crime statistics helps homebuyers to decide which neighborhood to move to – and empowers communities to demand more from their local police forces.
It’s a chance to create truly 21st century services, responsive to people’s individual needs and delivered in a way that’s convenient to them.
Over the last 4 years, the UK government has committed to release more and more public data to give our citizens real choice over their public services.
Our web portal, Data.gov.uk, is to transparency what the Louvre is to art. There are over 14,000 data sets there already, it’s the largest resource of its kind in the world, and more information is being added all the time.
Growth
On this scale, open data can be a raw material for economic growth – just like iron and coal were to the industrial revolution. It supports the creation of new markets and jobs – businesses of the future, which can help deliver lasting growth.
Every day more and more data is being generated, while new types of computing power give the ability to reap its true value. McKinsey has said that across Europe data could be worth £250 billion – the EU says £140 billion. Either way it’s an eye-watering amount. And to think – all this time governments had data sitting unused, when it could have been stimulating economic growth and innovation, or scientific research.
So we launched our Open Data Institute, to incubate new start-up companies that could use this data as a raw material.
The Open Data Institute, started in London by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt, is now operating here in Paris too. It’s a great example of how much we can do together. By operating across different countries, it can unlock the best supplies of data, generate demand and enhance our knowledge of its potential to address common issues.
We also set out our commitment to a ‘right to data’.
Our default presumption is that everything should be published as a matter of course – there must be a compelling reason to withhold it.
It’s easy to be open about things that don’t really matter. But what really counts is being open about the things that do matter and releasing the information that people and organisations want to have so it can cultivate new enterprises and new jobs.
Through the Open Data User Group, individuals and businesses can request data to be released as open data. And many government departments now have dedicated transparency sector boards of their own, which challenge them to publish more data.
I know that France too is setting an example to other nations when it comes to making public sector data available.
The French government’s new open data platform, launched in December, represents a radical – and to date unique – direction for government data portals. It has been designed to publish submissions and contributions from anyone, not just from central government but from corporations, citizens and non-profit organisations too. This is a real rallying cry in terms of citizen engagement and encouraging others to enhance their efforts. It’s innovative, it’s exciting and I look forward to following its progress.
Last year, the governments of the then G8 came together under the UK Presidency to agree a landmark Open Data Charter – once again, the role of France in the development of this was crucial and your eagerness to stretch the ambition of this work enabled us to set strong principles for the release and re-use of data and for its accessibility. These principles on openness are a critical element in encouraging growth and ensuring consistency, helping governments and businesses to operate more closely together. I hope to see this adopted across the world and know many of you here share that ambition.
Conclusion
So, in conclusion, openness is not a soft option. It takes governments out of their normal comfort zone and requires tough decisions.
Countries like the UK and France have made a meaningful commitment to transparency through the Open Government Partnership.
It doesn’t mean following a set of absolute standards. Transparency means different things to different countries and each must find its own path.
It’s a trajectory – it’s about demonstrable progress toward greater openness, and, ultimately, better government and greater prosperity. And once you start on that path, it becomes an unstoppable and irreversible journey.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: transparency is an idea whose time has come.
Below is the text of the speech made by Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office Minister, to the Oakeshott Memorial Lecture on 25th March 2014.
Introduction
It’s a great privilege and a pleasure to be invited to deliver this lecture today and to be a guest of the Employee Ownership Association and really a genuine honour to deliver the 2014 Robert Oakeshott Memorial Lecture.
It’s great to see representatives from John Lewis, Arup, Gripple, and some of the other amazing private sector success stories here today.
It’s also a pleasure to be at the ICAEW, itself a mutual albeit a membership mutual rather than a staff one. But a great deal of symmetry.
Robert Oakeshott lived through one of the most polarised eras in political history, yet his own place in that order was never a fixed one. His party political affiliations were broadly with the centre-left but he wrote widely, and his writings found expression across the pages of the Spectator, the Economist and the Financial Times.
Independent-minded, he was a man of very strong beliefs. Today his name has become synonymous with this cause above all others – the cause of employee ownership.
Historically, employee ownership has never really had a fixed ideological abode: it was often shunned by the left because of their dogmatic commitment to state ownership; down-played by the right in favour of what some saw as classic red-blooded capitalism.
I was remembering just last week when reading Tony Benn’s obituaries how in the 1970s he tried to save three companies by turning them into workers’ cooperatives, notably the Triumph motorcycle works at Meriden. It was an experiment really in syndicalist industrial reorganisation; and the failure of those ventures I think set back the cause of employee ownership and cooperatives by some years.
Public sector productivity
So how does all of this bear on the reform of public services? In 2010 when the coalition government was formed we faced a public service crisis. We faced the biggest budget deficit in the developed world; we faced rising public expectations relating to the quality of services; and we faced a stagnant economy.
Between 1997 and 2010, according to the Office for National Statistics, productivity in the public sector flat-lined. Yet in the private services sector – the nearest equivalent – over the same period productivity rose by nearly 30%. Even a back of the envelope analysis suggests that if productivity had risen by the same amount in the public sector, the annual deficit could have been at least a quarter smaller – probably much more – a cut of around £50 billion; or the economy larger by a minimum of £2,000 for every household. However you calculate it, the absolutely inescapable conclusion is that our economic and fiscal position would have been radically different.
So how do we drive up productivity in the public sector? There have been plenty over the years who didn’t believe you could. As a Treasury Minister in the early 1990s, I was charged with developing the Citizen’s Charter, an early programme concerned with the systematic improvement of public services. I faced what felt like a tacit conspiracy of defeatism. The Treasury struggled with the idea that services could be improved without departments constantly demanding more money. And departments themselves, faced with demands for better quality, entirely predictably confirmed the Treasury’s gloomy prognosis by – yes – demanding more money.
Absent from both sides was any recognition that productivity could be improved; that more could be achieved for the same amount; that the same could be achieved for less money; least of all the proposition that we are now amply proving on a monthly basis: that you can deliver more for less. This was the defeatist consensus that has held back public services for too long.
That approach reached its nadir in the last decade. The NHS budget more than doubled, but productivity if anything deteriorated. The apparent age of plenty seemed to have relieved the public sector of the need to be creative. And then suddenly one morning there was no money. As sir Ernest Rutherford famously is alleged to have said: “We’ve run out of money. Now we must think”.
Public service reform – 5 principles
Our thinking led us to propose public service reform which has followed 5 principles.
The first of those principles is openness, because transparency sharpens accountability, improves choice for the public, and it raises standards. So first, openness.
Second, digital by default. If a service can be delivered online, then it should only be delivered online because as well as being an order of magnitude cheaper – 30 times less than by post and 50 times less expensive than face to face – services delivered online can be faster, simpler and more convenient for the public to use. So second principle is digital by default.
Third, a properly innovative culture, so public servants have permission to try sensible new ideas, moving away from the risk aversion that has tended to hold back progress.
Fourth, tight control from the centre over common activities – like property, IT and procurement – because it reduces costs and encourages collaborative working. These tight central controls account for two thirds of the £10 billion we saved for the taxpayer just last year in central government spending alone.
The fifth principle is loose control over operations, which is where employee ownership steps in. The people who know best how to deliver public services best aren’t the politicians in Westminster or the bureaucrats in Whitehall and in town halls, but the professionals working on the frontline. Tight control over the centre must be matched by much looser control over operations.
Opening up public services
For too long, delivery of public services has been shackled by a top-down, Whitehall-knows-best attitude. Public sector workers were left feeling alienated: dispossessed from effective control over their ability to shape the services they had responsibility for delivering.
Too often there seemed to be a binary choice: either the public sector as a bureaucratic in-house monopoly provider; or on the other hand, full-blown red-blooded commercial privatisation or outsourcing.
Happily, that’s changed and there are now alternatives. Social enterprises. Joint ventures. Voluntary and charitable organisations. And, of course, public service mutuals.
And it’s this last – public service mutuals – that is the fastest growing alternative, which is arousing most interest among governments abroad and which will I believe will increasingly be the way of the future.
Creating a new sector
Why? Because creating a mutual releases creative energy and entrepreneurialism. And that’s the problem many critics have with this programme. They either don’t believe entrepreneurs exist in the public sector. That it’s solely the domain of stuffy bureaucrats. Or they don’t think entrepreneurialism should be allowed to mix with the public service ethos, lest it contaminates the purity of this ethos. Both I believe are wrong. There are loads of latent entrepreneurs in the public sector. They may not think of themselves as entrepreneurs, but they have all of that spirit of enterprise, the willingness to back their ideas, and invest their energy and creativity to make things happen.
It doesn’t mean they all want to be Branson-type millionaires and billionaires. In most spinouts the staff themselves have chosen that the entity should be a not-for-profit company or organisation. They didn’t need to make that choice – they would have had the opportunity to make it a for-profit organisation – but for the most part that’s the choice they made.
Yes you can get improved productivity through conventional outsourcing. That will often be the right option to take. But rarely in my experience does it deliver the almost overnight improvement that mutualisation can stimulate.
The last government started down the path of mutualisation. But their approach was in my view and that of others, too top-down, too prescriptive and bureaucratic; and resulted in no more than a handful of new mutuals.
I decided against this approach. And I want to do something at this stage that ministers too rarely do which is to pay a tribute to the civil servants who worked with me on this programme during this period led by Rannia Leontaridi. This is a team of officials who have been creative, dedicated, incredibly hard working, incredibly effective in making things happen. So I’d like to say a very big thank you to you Rannia and all of your team who have supported me during this programme. So we decided against the top-down approach. So there was no White Paper; no all-encompassing strategy; no big bang media launch. It was what I know think of as the JFDI school of government – the just do it school of government. We didn’t start with the theory and move on to the practice. We did it the other way round. We decided we’d find a hundred flowers and build a hothouse around them so they can bloom and grow.
So the first thing was to identify groups of workers who wanted to spin out from the public sector. As Pathfinders, we gave intensive support to these organisations, who in return shared their experiences with us and with others. Many of these Pathfinders are now among the country’s best performing mutuals.
Next, we made £10 million available through our Mutual Support Programme. It’s not a lot of money – I know that. But we’ve made it go a really long way. The funding isn’t allocated directly. Instead it’s used to build the capability of these new businesses – as that’s what they are – through professional expertise and advice. That’s the way the government can negotiate the best deal and, over time, we’ve built up a valuable set of tools and templates which upcoming spinouts can access and draw upon for free.
And there’s no “one size fits all” approach, no one size fits all format. Some mutuals are conventional companies; some are companies limited by guarantee; some are community interest companies; some choose to be charities. Some have 100% employee ownership; but to qualify there must be no less than 25% employee ownership so that staff can exercise at least negative control over the entity. So there’s a whole spectrum of different models available, and each group must select the right course for their particular horse. Each spinout is a journey for and by its own staff. They’re the ones in the driving seat, leading the change.
Progress so far
And our approach is working.
4 years after the last general election, the number of mutuals has increased tenfold to nearly 100. Between them they employ over 35,000 people, delivering around £1.5 billion worth of services. They’re in sectors ranging from libraries and elderly social care to mental health services and school support. They range in size from a handful of staff to upwards of 2000 staff.
Neither is this confined to any one region – it’s certainly not a London niche – it’s a national success story. The map of mutuals shows them spread across Britain. The results are spectacular. Waste and costs down. Staff satisfaction up. Absenteeism – a key test or morale and productivity – is falling and falling sharply. Business growing.
Staff engagement surveys bear out the simple truth that service improves and productivity rises when the staff have a stake; when they feel they belong; and that their individual voice and actions count.
Our latest data shows that after an organisation spins out as a mutual absenteeism falls by 20%; staff turnover falls by 16%. Take City Healthcare Partnership based in Hull as an example. 91% of staff said they now feel trusted to do their jobs – and this level of empowerment has had a knock-on effect in the quality of care they give. Since they left the NHS in 2010, there has been a 14% increase in patients who’ve rated their care and support as excellent, and 92% say they would recommend the service to family and friends.
No wonder City Healthcare came 46th in the Times 2014 Top 100 Not for Profit Companies to work for.
At SEQOL in Swindon, a groundbreaking mutual formed by integrating in one entity intermediate healthcare activities from the PCT with some social care activity from the council, staff proudly showed me the stockroom, where a nurse had painstakingly attached stickers with the unit price of each item. “Why did you do that?” I asked the nurse showing me round. “To make us more aware of the cost so we could save money”, was the response. “But why?” I persisted. “You’re a not for profit organisation and none of you will benefit financially from the savings you make”. “No. But every pound we save makes us more competitive. And it’s a pound we can put straight back into better patient care”.
And that’s the point. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with better financial reward for public servants. But it’s not the biggest driver of better productivity. It’s the satisfaction people get from putting their ideas into action, and seeing swift results. It’s the sense of pride that it’s their organisation that is delivering the service. That they can make improvements quickly, taking responsibility for making things happen, without new ideas getting bogged down in bureaucratic treacle. Just looking at the Baxendale Awards for Employee Owned Businesses this year, you can see the spinouts dominating the innovation category. So in a mutual, public servants can give effect to their public service ethos with immediate and gratifying speed.
Whenever I visit a mutual – which I do a lot, it’s a drug, it’s addictive – I always ask the same question of staff: “Would you go back to work for the council/health authority/ministry?”
The answer is always “No”. “Why not?” “Because in a mutual we can do things”.
That’s the essence of it. People can see how things can be done better and do it. They can give effect and take responsibility and pride for making things happen. People typically say they are working harder than they were but they are enjoying it more, it’s more rewarding, more fulfilling. That’s why I think the public service mutual is the way of the future.
Growth
Of course, the public service ethos remains front and centre. But it doesn’t have to be at the expense of strong commercial instinct.
Spinouts are winning new business – and winning new business fast. A study from Boston Consulting Group projects an average increase in revenues of 10% this year.
MyCSP, which is responsible for administering the Civil Service Pension Scheme, was the first mutual joint venture to spin out from central government. Under its contract the cost of the service to the taxpayer will halve over eight years. The private sector partner has taken on the transformation and IT costs that would otherwise have fallen to the Exchequer. Under its innovative equity structure, the Government retains a 35% stake. The staff, with a 25% stake, all received a first year dividend of nearly £700. And in its first year of operation it gained 47 new clients. This is a growth business.
Social AdVentures in Salford saw a growth in revenues last year of no less than 262%.
3BM in London increased their business by over 25% in their first year as a mutual.
Since spinning out in July 2011 – in the middle of the economic downturn – Allied Health Professionals in Suffolk has increased its number of staff from 63 to around 100; its turnover from just over £2 million to £3 million – all on the back of winning new contracts.
And in Norfolk, East Coast Community Healthcare’s first year profit was 40% ahead of plans.
The point is that each of these new mutuals represents a new and dynamic enterprise in the market economy. They are all incentivised one way or another to improve and grow. They all strengthen the market for their services and they make the market deeper, wider and more competitive. And as we have seen all too clearly in the last year, public service commissioners had become too dependent in too many areas on too limited a range of suppliers. Every new mutual helps to remedy that deficiency to improve the depth and dynamism of the market.
Argument
So – cutting costs; improving quality; supporting economic growth and jobs: what’s not to like about all that?
I had a really interesting experience recently when successfully negotiating in the European Parliament some much needed changes to EU public procurement rules. We wanted to have a provision that would shield future new public service mutuals from the immediate full panoply of EU regulations while they established themselves as businesses. We had brilliant support from British Conservative and Liberal MEPs. But beyond them? Well, the Socialists thought that it was promoting privatisation by the back door. And some on the centre-right thought it was a scandalous erosion of the pure milk of the competitive free market.
Well let’s examine both contentions. Is mutualisation equivalent to privatisation? Technically yes. Mutuals are spinouts from the public sector into the private or social sectors so they get classified as non-public sector. It’s certainly not privatisation by the back door though. It’s as open a process as you could want.
On the other hand does mutualisation by negotiation frustrate competition? Well actually not at all. It promotes it. It opens it up a broader hybrid economy with a wider range of suppliers – there’s a place for mutual spinouts, joint ventures and charities and voluntary organisations, alongside private companies and the public sector. So it’s just worth asking ourselves why is such a small proportion of public service delivered by suppliers outside the public sector? Because I think part of it is conventional outsourcing and privatisation is fraught with political and industrial relations risk. It can look ideological and dogmatic, and can arouse the hostility of the staff. It makes managers anxious because of the fear that the contract will be overpriced leading to excess profits and uncomfortable hearings at the Public Accounts Committee.
But mutualisation can square all these circles. If it is driven by the staff and is a not-for-profit then where’s the problem? And if it’s for profit then why not keep a stake for the state? Then the taxpayer benefits along with the staff and managers. And often the alternative to a mutual joint venture is a straight outsourcing. And I don’t come across many public servants who, if their operation is going to move out of the public sector, wouldn’t prefer themselves to have a stake and some control over the new entity.
So for the staff it can feel like a lower risk alternative to straight privatisation and for managers a way of harvesting productivity gains without the downside of immediate competition. Because in nearly all situations, a negotiated spinout into a mutual or mutual joint venture must be followed after a few years by an unfettered competition, where the mutual will have the advantage of a track record and incumbent advantage but will staff to go up against the competition.
Next steps
But while we have come a long way since 2010, we’ve only reached the end of the introductory chapter of this story. For many years to come the state is going to be facing, here and across the world, the same combination of tight budgets, rising expectations and challenging economic circumstances.
We’re going to continue to be expected to deliver more for less; so the transformation can never cease – spreading deeper and wider, further and faster. Public service mutuals should be front and centre of that transformation. So we now need to move on the next chapter in this story.
First, I want to remove the blocks that obstruct motivated staff from spinning out from public sector control.
I can announce today plans to establish a peer review scheme to support staff and local authorities interested and involved in developing mutuals. Working with the Local Government Association, we’re looking to establish a voluntary programme that will offer best practice advice and examine perceived barriers to spinning out.
And our new Commissioning Academy will continue to build among commissioners across the public sector knowledge and confidence in how to support and negotiate new spinouts.
Second, I want to encourage even more spinouts in those areas where significant numbers of mutuals have already been created, such as healthcare.
Next month, following his review of staff engagement in the NHS, Chris Ham will provide a set of recommendations to government. Chris’ review has looked at how to give staff a stronger role in their organisations, including through mutual models. This included looking at Circle’s incredibly successful strategy for empowering and engaging staff at Hinchingbrooke NHS Trust and supporting frontline staff in delivering service change.
And we’re also working with the Department of Health to explore options for increasing staff control across the NHS, including expanding the Right to Provide.
Third, we’re going to focus our efforts on sectors with the greatest potential. I have spoken about the potential in youth services and adult social care where there are huge opportunities for mutualisation. We are also working to expand the offer in children’s services and in acute trusts. I have ensured that the current probation reforms have mutuals as a serious delivery option. We’ve even had expressions of interest from fire brigades about mutualising fire services in 1 or 2 areas. Fourth, because what we’re seeing here is the creation of a whole new sector of organisations, I want to ensure that their progress and successes are recorded and underpinned by quality data which is freely available.
So far we’ve done much of the research in-house, in keeping with the kind of start-up nature of this programme. But as with any successful policy, maturity is marked by the state taking a step back.
I am pleased to announce that Cabinet Office we’re working with the Employee Ownership Association to set up a networked centre that brings together all the data on spinouts into one place, allowing everyone to see how they’re performing and what they’re achieving. That’s the next chapter in this story.
Beyond the public sector
The potential for growth is echoed in the private sector experience too. The employee owned sector has been one of the quiet success stories of the British economy in the last 20 years. Companies which are employee owned, or which have large and significant employee ownership stakes, now account for over £25 billion in total annual turnover. And they’re helping to lead the economic recovery, by growing at a rate 50% higher than the economy at large.
So support for employee ownership across both sectors has been and will remain a priority for this government and a core part of our long-term economic plan, a point reinforced by the Chancellor in last week’s Budget, which confirmed 3 new tax reliefs to encourage and promote employee ownership; I’m sure you all look forward to seeing more detail on these in the Finance Bill being published I think later this week. This had a nostalgic resonance for me. I recall as Financial Secretary to the Treasury working on the tax measures to support employee ownership that appeared in the 1991 Budget! This will always, I suspect, be a work in progress.
Conclusion
So, to conclude, 35 years on from Robert Oakeshott creating the Employee Ownership Association, now is the time to put employee ownership right at the heart of our public services.
Shifting power away from the centre and diversifying the range of public service providers is a historic opportunity to redesign how public services are delivered – not just to reduce costs, but to improve service, increase staff morale and stimulate growth.
Below is the text of the speech made by Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office Minister, on 13th March 2014.
Introduction
Thank you very much Judy [Baker, Chair of the Cyber Security Challenge].
It’s a great privilege to be asked to open the final of this year’s Cyber Security Challenge Masterclass.
It’s in its fourth year, as you said, and congratulations to you for kicking it off Judy. It’s got 75 sponsors from across government, business and academia – working closely together toward a shared aim, which is incredibly important, of a safe and secure internet.
So thank you to Stephanie [Daman, CEO] and the entire board for the work you’ve done to make this possible.
And it’s a particular pleasure to see your patron, Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones, here in the room tonight.
Pauline recently stepped down as the Prime Minister’s Special Representative to Business on Cyber Security and in both this and her previous role as Minister for Security she’s helped advance the cause of cyber security immeasurably, particularly in raising awareness among senior business figures. And I think I can say if it hadn’t been for your passion and commitment to this Pauline, I think it’s much less likely that the government would have done this extraordinary thing which was – at a time of falling budgets overall and deep financial constraint – actually to commit a significant additional sum to this whole project and the programme and you deserve huge credit for that – so thank you from all of us.
We can never be complacent and there’s much work still to do – and there always will be, this will always be a work in progress – but over the past few years cyber security has rapidly moved up the agenda of company boards. UK businesses are now far better placed to manage the risks that exists.
The fact that so many leading companies are enthusiastically involved with this challenge is testament to this. Just look at the range of sponsors here tonight – BT, Juniper, CGHQ, National Crime Agency, Lockheed Martin and Bank of England. This kind of cooperation is precisely why we as a government are supporting the Cyber Security Challenge financially through our National Cyber Security Programme.
Cyber Security Challenge Masterclass final
Sometimes, when we talk about cyber security it’s all about the dark side – the threat. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that this is a threat because of the existence of something marvellous and how appropriate that in these few days when we’re celebrating 25 years of the World Wide Web, we should reflect on the transformation of all of our lives that the internet has brought; what a force for good it is in our lives, for the economy, for our ability to connect with each other and to organise our lives differently and better. It’s the biggest social and technological change in my lifetime.
And I think one of the strengths of the Cyber Security Challenge is that – in the middle of the sober and menacing nature of the cyber threat – it seeks to respond in a very positive way, by identifying and nurturing some of the exceptional talent that can be found in schools and universities and, of course, in offices and homes around the country.
So let me start by congratulating our participants. You’ve been put through a series of challenging scenarios and you’ve had to flex your intellectual muscles to get here tonight, so well done.
I’m told that there are 42 of you who have made it through to this face-to-face stage. Well, 42 as we know is a very auspicious number. According to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 42 is the answer to The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Don’t worry – we’re not looking for anything quite as profound over the next couple of days.
Quite simply, we’re looking for raw talent.
There’s a gap between the increasing opportunities to work in cyber security and the availability of people with the right skills. And for the good of national security, commercial interests and the wellbeing of everybody, it’s a gap we need to close. And I’m increasingly confident we can. We haven’t yet, but we can.
Computer programmers and software engineers; logicians and statisticians; code breakers and code makers – as a nation, we’ve produced some of the greats. We have in the UK a fantastically rich heritage, from the Babbage Difference Engine to Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web.
We have some of the best universities in the world for science and technology too.
But the kinds of people we’re looking for won’t always come with a double first from Cambridge. Or even from Oxford, which I’m told is much easier…
We know that aptitude can be found in all sorts of places.
Take Tommy Flowers for instance – the man who developed Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic digital computer. He worked as an electrical engineer for the General Post Office – the forerunner of BT, which makes tonight’s venue perhaps an especially fitting one. During the Second World War, the government’s code and cypher school at Bletchley Park was sceptical about his invention, so – poor fellow – he had to build it in his spare time using his own money.
But it worked and went on to play an instrumental role in the planning for D-Day, 70 years ago.
Bletchley Park was full of people from all kinds of different backgrounds.
Dillwyn Knox, a renowned expert in Egyptian papyrus.
Pioneering women like the zoologist Miriam Rothschild and the linguist Mavis Batey who, not content with cracking Enigma codes, went on to become a noted garden historian after the war.
And I noticed when I was at Cheltenham in GCHQ recently at the little museum they have of Bletchley memorabilia, a list of the names of people who had been recruited to Bletchley from universities during the last war. Next to J. R. R. Tolkien – the connection between Norse mythology and breaking cyphers is obvious – I noticed 2 names from my old Cambridge college, who were fellows there when I was there, who’d been recruited. And were they computer scientists or mathematicians? No, they were ancient historians. One of them produced a classic work on ancient Rome. What was needed was brainpower: sheer, intellectual brainpower. The ability to process difficult things and make sense of things that didn’t seem to make sense. Intellectually formidable, all of these people served their country, even though they probably didn’t recognise at the time the significance of what they were doing.
When Churchill went to visit Bletchley, he is reported to have said: “When I told you to leave no stone unturned recruiting for this place, I didn’t expect you to take me literally.”
Well, tomorrow you’re going to be I’m told in the Churchill War Rooms – and we’ll be looking for the kinds of people with the skills to be the next Tommy Flowers or Mavis Batey.
And we all know they’re out there, but they’re not always obvious.
On a visit a year or so ago, I remember meeting a young apprentice at a small cyber company in Malvern where, rather improbably, there is this cluster of cyber security related businesses. Not where you’d expect to find it – but great. And this young man who was 16, starting his apprenticeship, he’d been thrown out of school. He wasn’t succeeding academically, it wasn’t his thing. He was disruptive at school and they’d bunged him out. But he loved computers, he loved doing this stuff and was brilliant at it – and he’s found his niche. And I remember asking him how many like you were there in your school – and he replied about half the class. That’s quite a rich talent pool to draw from and are we getting as good as we need to be at spotting that raw talent and using it? Helping people find their niche, the thing they’re brilliant at. And in this country, which is such a rich source of talent, ingenuity and creativity, we must be finding more of them, more quickly, earlier and getting them to work.
So that young man has found his niche and I’m sure he will go on to do amazing things. Some of the brightest and best are self-taught. We want to find people who might not have trodden the usual conventionally career path.
So that’s why we have been supporting the Cyber Security Challenge, through the National Cyber Security Programme, to demonstrate the excitement of this profession to as wide an audience as possible.
That includes young people, making their first tentative steps into the workplace.
But it also includes people already in the world of work, who have the skills, the aptitude or the ability, but haven’t previously considered this as a career – they might not think they have the right technical qualifications or because they’ve already started on a different career trajectory.
So one of the things we want to do is to make it easier for sideways entry mid-career.
A case in point is the winner of the first Cyber Security Challenge – Dan Summers – who was working as a postman. He still works for Royal Mail – but now in vulnerability management.
I can tell you today, that almost 1 in 3 people who have previously reached the final face-to-face stage of this competition go on to find work in the field of cyber security.
So for a third of the contestants here tonight, the next 2 days could be the first step on this new career path.
And even those who choose not to pursue it as a career will leave this contest with an increased awareness, which they will take with them into other careers and workplaces.
Another previous masterclass winner, Jonathan Millican, will be speaking later and I look forward to hearing about his challenge.
Schools Challenge
But it’s by no means a case of “mission accomplished” and never will be. This will always be a work in progress. The internet is defined by its openness and its speed. It’s organic, self-sustaining and self-propelling. It doesn’t have a rewind button. You can’t pause it. It’s going to go on growing – and our training and education has to keep pace.
So to avoid a gap in our cyber defences in 10 or 20 years’ time, we need to look not just to the needs of the current workforce, but over the horizon, to those still in school.
562 schools no less have already registered for the Cyber Security Challenge Schools Programme, with an additional 170 still to be contacted for the next round. Potentially that’s almost 22,000 pupils who have gone from having little or no knowledge of cyber security to now recognising it as an exciting and realistic career opportunity.
So we’ve made a further grant of £100,000 to the Cyber Security Challenge to expand the pilot regionally and nationally, so it can run twice yearly, and can link participating schools to local universities.
I’m pleased to see some of the schools here tonight – and the final of the schools competition takes place next week.
Cyber Security Strategy
Our support for the Cyber Security Challenge is an important part of our Cyber Security Strategy.
We’ve backed the strategy with £650 million over 4 years – to which we added another £210 million last year, to take us through to 2015 to 2016.
In a time of austerity, most areas of government have had to contend with a squeeze on their budgets – so the fact we are increasing spending on cyber security demonstrates how high it rates in our priorities.
But spending, by itself, is not enough. Better skills underpin the government’s whole Cyber Security Strategy. We simply won’t achieve all the other objectives without it.
Earlier today, the Department for Business announced a range of measures we are taking to help increase our capability.
We’ve now developed cyber security content for each stage of education, including teaching materials and e-learning courses to promote cyber security learning in schools. And we’ve funded initiatives for graduates and post-graduate students, as well as internships and apprenticeships, because we want to strengthen the skills of new entrants.
But closing the gap between demand and availability of skills doesn’t just require a focus on education – we also need to ensure cyber security presents an attractive and appealing career choice.
So the task for industry and business and government is to work together to turn cyber security from a little understood role performed by a small number of technical experts, to a mainstream profession – one that’s respected and valued, with proper opportunities for development and progression, so it can attract and retain the best talent.
CESG, the Information Security Arm of GCHQ at Cheltenham, now has a scheme to certify cyber security professionals in the UK. It helps government and business to recruit people with the right skills – at the right level – to the right jobs.
Together with the development of National Skills Standards and learning pathways, developed in conjunction with e-skills UK, it’s helping to define a career path because through regular opportunities for re-assessment it enables individuals to progress as their skills and experience grows.
Next week, the Department for Business is hosting a Cyber Security Skills Showcase to raise awareness about what government is doing and how industry can get involved – and I’m pleased that the Cyber Security Challenge will be represented there.
Finally, because of the relentless and ever-changing nature of cyber threats, we also need to be on the front foot to develop new skills and capabilities in the future.
Cyber security research
4 years ago, our understanding of cyber security was relatively low and there wasn’t really the means of expanding that knowledge in a sustained way, which is why we are also investing in research.
Today we have 11 new Academic Centres of Excellence in Cyber Security Research; there are 3 new Research Institutes and 2 centres for doctoral training. They’ll help us appreciate and predict cyber risks and identify gaps in our defences – because, as the old adage goes, to be forewarned is to be forearmed.
Conclusion
So, in conclusion, over the next 2 days, you’re going to battle it out face-to-face until one of you emerges as “Top Gun”. But actually, this is a competition from which everyone stands to gain.
Our workforce will be more skilled.
The UK will be a more secure place to do business.
People will be safer online.
Ultimately, better cyber security shouldn’t be viewed as a necessary evil – it should be seen as a massive opportunity. For many, including some of those in this competition, it’s an opportunity for a satisfying and rewarding career. It’s also one of the businesses of the future that can help the UK achieve strong lasting growth. And it will help us all reap maximum benefit from the limitless potential of the information age.
So very good luck to you all – thank you very much.
Below is the text of the speech made by Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office Minister, in Dubai on 10th February 2014.
Introduction
It’s a pleasure to be back in the Gulf among friends.
I was here in Dubai in October last year for the GITEX conference to discuss the digital revolution – from the opportunities of big data to the challenges of cyber security.
This time around we’re talking about the future of government services – digital technology is an absolutely crucial part of this, although there are many other ingredients too.
In the UK, public sector reform has been an immediate response to the urgent need to reduce the national deficit. But there is a greater prize at stake – the opportunity to create 21st century services: cost-effective and sustainable for the future, but also faster and more responsive to people’s needs.
Of course no 2 countries have exactly the same experience. But around the world governments are facing similar challenges: squeezed budgets, rising expectations, low growth. So we need a new paradigm for government services. One that delivers better services focused on user need, at much lower cost, in a way that supports economic growth.
It gives governments a clear choice. Indiscriminate salami-sliced cuts to front line services; the soft option path of least resistance. Simpler for the bureaucrat, who doesn’t have to face the political consequences of service cuts. But the second – the high road – of cutting government’s own costs and driving innovation and change – is the way to go.
That’s what we did in the UK. It’s tough. It’s means unrelenting hard practical work. But it can bring about lasting change.
All round the world I’ve seen governments wrestling with the same problems.
I’ve seen how Singapore’s Public Service 21 programme encourages staff to question assumptions and seek new ways of doing things. I visited India too, and saw how they recognised the importance of improving their civil service through training.
And I’ve seen how countries like Estonia and South Korea are leading the way in digital.
I was particularly taken with the Korean phrase “Bali-bali”, meaning “quick! quick!” – surely a phrase that’s stamped across the heart of anyone in politics? Certainly one that my own long-suffering staff have had to learn to live with!
The UK has a long history of cooperation, friendship and open dialogue with our Gulf partners. And while there is no single formula for success – especially in a region with distinct cultures and differing political systems – there is still much we can learn from each other about the future of government.
So today I’m going to speak about 5 principles that characterise the UK’s approach to public service reform since the coalition government was formed in 2010.
I stress that we did not start with these principles. We started not with the theory but with the practice of making changes to test what worked and what didn’t. These principles are distilled from that practice and that experience. They’re pragmatic, not ideological. I think they can be of widespread application, for governments of all origins, whether right, centre or left. We all face the same challenges and we can all learn from each other’s experiences.
Open government
The first principle of public service reform is openness.
Using transparency and open data to bring about continuous improvement can help governments to address rising public demands and the challenges of austerity.
This won’t always be comfortable. In fact transparency can be extremely uncomfortable – open data exposes waste and taxpayers are able to see exactly how their money is spent.
But this sharpens accountability and informs choice over public services. And combined with ever increasing technological capability, it will ultimately create more accountable, efficient and effective governments.
Open data is also a raw material for economic growth – supporting the creation of new markets, businesses and jobs.
In the UK we have committed to enhance the scope, breadth and usability of published contractual data which will help stimulate greater diversity in government suppliers.
And last year, G8 governments came together under the UK Presidency to agree a landmark Open Data Charter. This sets principles for the release and re-use of data and for its accessibility. Having these principles on openness is a critical element in encouraging growth and ensuring consistency, helping governments and businesses to operate more closely together.
Transparency is an idea whose time has come. And it is the friend of the reformer. Governments that work with it, and go with the grain, will be stronger for it.
Tight centralised control
My second principle is that tight control from the centre over common activities – like property, IT, procurement, management information, and oversight of major projects – reduces costs and encourages collaborative working.
Back in 2010, when the coalition government was formed, the UK was spending £4 for every £3 it raised in taxes. Billions of pounds got frittered away on wasteful consultancy, superfluous advertising and disastrous projects. And no effort was made to get to grips with the millions lost every year to fraud, error and debt.
Many of the fundamental components of efficient management and effective oversight had been conspicuous by their absence.
So within days of coming to office we introduced tough spending controls on discretionary spend in central departments.
Immediately we started renegotiating contracts with our biggest suppliers – dealing with them as a single customer instead of letting them play one part of government off against another.
We have also reduced the size of the civil service by more than 15% which allowed us to cut the cost of the government estate by vacating buildings that were no longer needed.
And we created something that had been lacking in government for too long – a strong corporate centre. Known as the Efficiency and Reform Group it works across artificial departmental boundaries to implement cross government solutions to cross government problems.
It’s about making government work more like the best-run businesses; ensuring every penny of taxpayers money is used to maximum effect.
And as a result of this tough-minded approach, in our first year we saved £3.75 billion, in our second £5.5 billion, £10 billion in our third year.
And in the first half of the current financial year we saved £5.4 billion – 73% more than we had saved at the same point last year.
Loose control
But we need to do much more to balance the books – we need to find new and better ways of working.
So my third principle is that tight control over the centre must be matched by looser control over operations.
Spin-outs and services commissioned outside the public sector should become the norm.
Public service mutuals, joint ventures and charitable enterprise are attractive alternatives to the old binary choice between delivering services in-house or full red-blooded privatisation.
That was a stagnant, rigid and unimaginative model which stifled innovation.
So in the UK we are breaking the public sector monopoly over service provision. We already have around 80 live and trading staff owned mutuals, up from just 9 in 2010, with responsibility for well over £1 billion worth of services – everything from libraries to elderly social care.
They foster a sense of ownership and empowerment. Everyone understands their role. Everyone has an incentive to make it work.
And it frees public sector workers to do their job as they know best – because the people who know best are not politicians or bureaucrats, but those who deliver frontline services day-in, day-out.
When this public service ethos is married to entrepreneurialism it can be an incredibly powerful force.
It’s part of a mindset which elevates the service that the public receives above the structure that delivers it.
Digital
My fourth principle is about digital.
If a service can be delivered online, then it should be delivered only online.
This is the approach which is guiding the transformation of 25 of the largest transactional government services in the UK so they are simpler, clearer, faster and – most importantly – designed around the needs of the user.
Every superfluous page, every unnecessary question, is another dead end for an angry, frustrated and confused user.
So by digital by default, we mean creating digital services that are so straightforward that all those who can use them will choose to do so, and those who can’t are given the support they need.
It’s an iterative process – building and testing in small chunks and working quickly to make improvements along the way. The feedback continues – so do the refinements – and over time the services will evolve to keep pace with new demands.
And we can achieve huge cost savings by doing it this way.
In the past, governments seldom – if ever – consulted people about the services they were using. It was a “Big Bang” approach which sent money and expectations hurtling down a black hole.
The first the public would see of a service was when it went live, by which time it would be too late to make any changes if it didn’t work.
But that’s completely the wrong way.
Only when you find out what people want, how they want it delivered and how they intend to use it do you even begin to think about designing the service or building the technology.
And digital public services can also stimulate a generation of world-beating software and service businesses.
By committing to open standards and open source software, governments can create a more open market for IT suppliers, increasing competition, lowering licensing costs and advancing innovation.
Innovation
I’ve talked about new ways of doing things – new models of delivery, new digital services and a new attitude toward openness and growth.
All this requires the right the skills and culture within the public service, so my fifth principle is innovation.
Public servants must be given the flexibility to try sensible and innovative ideas, rejecting those which don’t work and adopting those that do.
Risk and recklessness are not the same thing – risk, if managed properly, can be pioneering, original and transformative.
And the real error isn’t making a single mistake – new ones are forgivable, repeated ones less so. The real error is never to try anything new in the first place – or to continue doing something that isn’t working.
So we need a culture that is more open and less bureaucratic, focused on the delivery of outcomes rather than the process or the structures.
Where people feel able to challenge – so the status quo receives the same scrutiny as a new idea.
And where public servants are afforded the training and skills they need with the responsibility to do their jobs and to be accountable for what they achieve.
And what sort of skills do I mean?
I’m talking about the commercial skills necessary for public servants to feel confident commissioning services from the private and voluntary sectors.
The digital skills needed to design online services based around user needs.
And the leadership skills necessary to embrace the changes needed to deliver government priorities and projects on time and on budget.
All institutions must keep pace with changing circumstances – the best organisations continually seek to improve themselves.
And in the public sector, success must be measured not in staff numbers or hours worked, or in spreadsheets and emails, but by the answer to the question: “How has my work today helped people?”
Conclusion
Open, tight, loose, digital, innovative.
These are what I believe should be the characteristics of productive, effective and successful governments, now and in future.
But this is a race with no finishing line – we will never be able to say “mission accomplished” or “job done”.
The work of making government more efficient never ends.
Because organisations are either getting better or getting worse. There is no in between, no steady state. If you think you’re staying the same, you are getting worse.
So where the UK has expertise we want to share it – and where we need to improve, we are ready and eager to learn.
Below is the text of the speech made by Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office Minister, on Sprint 14 on 29th January 2014.
It’s a pleasure to welcome you here today.
I remember how many of us struggled through the snow this time last year to Sprint 13 at the QEII Centre.
Then we set out a bold ambition to make 25 major public services fully digital.
We gave ourselves just 400 working days to deliver this transformation. One year on – 200 working days in – we can reveal some of those digital services for the first time.
This time we’re at the London Film Museum…so perhaps I should subtitle this speech “Close Encounters of the Digital Kind”…or “Honey I Shrunk the Costs.”
In fairness, no one will ever – probably – make a Hollywood film about our work.
People don’t choose to work for government to be famous or rich. They want to make a difference and to contribute to the future of their country.
But actually increasingly our digital agenda is bringing the “wow” factor to how the UK government is viewed especially abroad. We’re showing that it’s possible for government to be at the forefront of innovation.
And we’re showing that it’s possible to make public services better while saving taxpayers’ money – perhaps the holy grail of efficiency.
Today is designed to give you a glimpse of how and why.
Transformation
When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone he spoke of the icons being so bright and clear that people would want to “lick them right off the screen.”
Well, we didn’t exactly have that in mind when the guys designed the government’s new website, GOV.UK, but the look and feel certainly mattered.
It’s clear, consistent and uncluttered.
That’s why we’re proud it beat off the Shard and the Olympic cauldron to win the coveted – and unsought – Design Museum Award – eat your heart out Thomas Heatherwick.
But design is about more than appearance.
Sir Jonathan Ive, Apple’s British born designer, put it best when he said:
‘The word design is everything and nothing. We think of design as not just the product’s appearance: it’s what the product is and how it works. The design and the product are inseparable.’
So what does that mean for government?
It means putting users at the heart of public services.
Only when you know what people need, how they want it delivered and how they’ll use it do you even begin to think about building the technology.
It’s a theme that runs through this government – whether ensuring the primacy of patients’ needs in the NHS; or designing education services around the requirements of children and parents.
It’s obvious really – but too easily forgotten when bureaucracies become too large, too powerful or too remote.
So digital by default isn’t about swapping paper or telephone based services for digital ones as an end in itself.
Digital-by-default is a change to the whole way we design and deliver services.
A chance to revolutionise public services in the way that eBay and Amazon have revolutionised the marketplace.
And to renew the relationship between citizens and the state…just as Skype has brought people closer together and Facebook keeps people connected.
Exemplars
That’s not to say previous governments haven’t tried.
Back in 1999, the Modernising Government White Paper proposed that half of government services should be delivered electronically by 2005 and all of them by 2008.
But progress was piecemeal to say the least. The old online – in inverted commas – student loan application process ended by printing out a 30 page form to sign and send off by post.
There’s no good reason for government transactions to be that complex. The airline industry contends with numerous complex regulations. Yet you can cut through them all to book a flight with a few clicks.
So how is it different this time?
It’s about delivery.
We’re changing things by doing them, not by talking about them. We’re the JFDI school of government.
We’ve started with a first wave of 25 exemplars. Our objective is to create digital services that are so good, people choose to use them.
Of course, they’re not going to be perfect first time – nor will they ever be. It’s an iterative process. It doesn’t end when the service goes live. It will evolve. The feedback will continue – and so will the refinements.
And the proof of success is whether people use them or not.
Take the Carer’s Allowance for example.
Already 45% of applicants are using our online beta.
This isn’t the result of an expensive marketing campaign to force people to shift.
The service is good enough that people have chosen to use it – voting with their fingers and mice…
We are here today to show, not to tell.
Ministers and senior officials from several government departments are going to demonstrate 5 of our new digital services.
– registering to vote
– applying for a visa
– Pay-As-You Earn services for employees
– viewing your driving record
– booking prison visits
These are bread-and-butter transactions that people want to be quick and hassle free, at a time of their convenience, not when it’s convenient for the government.
If we get it right – and we are, as you will see in a few minutes – we will make life better for citizens and businesses. And we will change the way people think about how government works.
Our efforts to rationalise the number of government websites is a case in point.
Previously, departments didn’t keep records. No one had a grip on this. Costs were duplicated and government looked and was fragmented.
But the public shouldn’t need to understand where the role of one department ends and another starts to find the information they need. Which is why every ministerial department has been brought together online under GOV.UK.
Now started transitioning the agency and arm’s length body sites.
And yet closing government websites sometimes feels like a nightmarish game of splat-the-rat. As soon as you knock one website on the head, another pops out somewhere else.
The number keeps going on up as fast and we close them!
Later this week, we will publish our latest quarterly update. Although 19 websites have closed and a further 18 sites have transitioned to GOV.UK since the last update in October, the total number of open central government websites that we’re aware of has risen to 455 – 15 more than the previous report!
There’s absolutely no reason for every single bit of government to have its own unique web presence. So we’re going to press on.
Nearly 300 government websites will migrate to GOV.UK over the coming year. Over a third (111) of these have already moved, but we must finish the remainder, bringing together government information and services in one place, with lower costs and consistent standards and simplicity for the user.
Deficit reduction
Many of you here today have been working to deliver these kinds of transformations.
And there is an adrenaline that comes from doing things differently. So you can take real encouragement and motivation from being part of this.
We can also be proud that digital is one of the major contributions to reducing the deficit and encouraging growth in the British economy.
As the Chancellor highlighted recently, every part of the public sector will continue to need to face up to the challenge of reduced budgets for some time to come.
And we know much more money can be saved – staggering savings potentially – while actually improving quality online.
Last year we saved the taxpayer over £500 million by stopping projects not aligned to our IT spending controls. Digitalising public services could save citizens, the Exchequer and businesses £1.2 billion over the course of this parliament, rising to an estimated £1.7 billion each year after 2015.
The cost of digital transactions is lower for a start – not just a little bit lower, but a lot.
– 20 times lower than over the phone
– 30 times lower than by post
– and 50 times lower than face-to-face
But we’re also changing our whole approach to procuring and running IT.
Previously, the UK government spent more on IT than any other country in Europe except Switzerland, although I think that included the cost of CERN. They were looking for the God Particle – but over here, we were left with an ungodly mess.
In the old world, we were procuring programmes before they had been designed – or over such a long period of time that the technology was out of date before it was delivered.
To re-visit the film metaphor: we were promised “It’s a Wonderful Life”, charged a “Fist Full of Dollars” – and then a “Few Dollars More” – but we were left with “Titanic”.
For too long, big IT and big failures have stalked government. Now we want to see a new world, a start-up world, where what you can do matters most and where value includes both cost and quality.
At the time of the last General Election just 6% of central government procurement spend was with SMEs and government did not even monitor who its suppliers were.
We’ve stripped out unnecessary bureaucracy and paperwork and ensured a level-playing field for all businesses. Now direct spend with SMEs is up above 10% and we are spending a further 9% indirectly. That’s good news for SMEs across Britain but we want to see these numbers grow further.
I am pleased to see Stephen Allott here in the audience today, the Crown Representative for SMEs – he’s done fantastic work in driving the government’s SME agenda forward.
We know the best technology and digital ideas often come from small businesses, but too often in the past they were excluded from government work. There was a sense that if you hired a big multi-national, which everyone knew the name of, you’d never be fired.
We weren’t just missing out on innovation, we were paying top dollar for yesterday’s technology.
One great example of the potential from small businesses was when we retendered a hosting contract. The incumbent big supplier bid £4 million; a UK-based small business offered to do it for £60,000. We saved taxpayers 98.5%.
I don’t think we can make savings of that scale everywhere but hard-working people expect us to try as hard as we possibly can. We’ve published our IT red lines which I will be unashamedly militant about enforcing:
– no IT contracts will be allowed to exceed £100 million without a powerful reason
– hosting contracts will not last for more than 2 years –the cost of hosting halves every 18 months, why commit to a longer contract?
– there will be no automatic contract extensions without a compelling case
– and companies with a contract for service provision will not be allowed to provide system integration in the same part of government; there is a conflict of interest here, and contracts are too opaque
The whole point is for Whitehall to look beyond the oligopoly IT suppliers – the legacy technology giants.
We want the right technology at the right price for taxpayers – whether that’s from an innovative big supplier which gets the new ways of working with us, or a start-up.
And don’t think British start-ups are all in Tech City. We are seeing clusters springing up right across the country from Northern Ireland to Manchester and Liverpool and Newcastle – this is the future of Britain.
To harness the power of these innovative new companies we’ve created the CloudStore – a whole new concept in IT buying.
An open market where public sector organisations can purchase IT off the shelf. For both government and the companies listed, this means less bureaucracy and less hassle.
The public sector as a whole has already spent more than £78 million through CloudStore. And over half of this – 53% – is going to small and medium-sized firms.
Central government is spending even more with SMEs – two thirds of its purchases on CloudStore, 66%, are going to SMEs.
If we saw as much money going through CloudStore every month as we did this November, the annual spend would be £120 million. That’s a lot of money going through channels specifically designed to be accessible to all businesses, whatever their size.
But we’re not stopping there.
That’s why I’m pleased to set out my ambition today that through the CloudStore and digital services framework we will spend a further £100 million with small businesses offering IT services and technology to government by the next General Election.
SMEs are engines of growth in our economy and this is a massive vote of confidence in the role they are playing to help Britain compete and win in the global race.
Open standards for document formats
Over the past few years we’ve moved away from a small oligopoly of IT suppliers to create a more open market. And yet the software we use in government is still supplied by just a few large companies.
I want to see a greater range of software used, so people have access to the information they need and can get their work done without having to buy a particular propriety brand. In the first instance, this should help departments to do something as simple as sharing documents with each other more easily.
So we have been talking to users about the problems they face when they read or work with our documents – and we have been inviting ideas on how to solve these challenges.
Today I can announce that we’ve set out the document formats that we propose should be adopted across government – and we’re asking you to tell us what you think about them.
It’s not about banning any one product or imposing an arbitrary list of standards. Our plan, as you would expect, is about going back to the user needs, setting down our preferences and making sure we can choose the software that meets our requirements best.
Technical standards for document formats may not set the pulse racing – it may not sound like the first shot in a revolution. But be in no doubt: the adoption of open standards in government threatens the power of lock-in to propriety vendors yet it will give departments the power to choose what is right for them and the citizens who use their services.
So a combination of open standards and a fairer procurement process can be a winning combination for Britain’s small businesses.
Conclusion
In the last 18 months, numerous foreign delegations – from as far afield as South Korea, Kazakhstan, and the Netherlands – have visited the Government Digital Service in Holborn, keen to learn from their experience.
The New Zealand government is using our open code to build its own version of GOV.UK.
And in October, when the so-called Obamacare website ran into problems, US commentators pointed – in a way that must have been really annoying for them – to the UK’s approach as a better alternative.
Praise for government IT projects is an unfamiliar spectre.
We all live with the experience of the Lasting Power of Attorney Team who had to add a positive feedback button because of the number of comments they were getting.
But I think the closer people look at what we’re doing, the more they will see something special.
So you should feel rightly proud of what you have achieved. We’ve set the bar high – and I have every confidence that you will deliver what you have set out to over the next 200 days.
I’m proud of what all of you have done to set us on this course.
But that’s not the end of it. There are risks.
We can’t slow down. And we can’t have even a glimmer of complacency.
Lots still to do.
The work goes on. Not just to deliver digital-by-default, but more broadly, because making government more efficient and delivering simpler, clearer, faster services is a task that should never end.
Below is the text of the speech made by the Cabinet Office Minister, Francis Maude, at Admiralty House on 2nd December 2013.
Introduction
You can tell a lot about a government’s priorities by looking at its buildings.
To think of totalitarian regimes of the past conjures up images of large monotone concrete office blocks. Faceless, uninspiring, conformist – they reflected the bureaucracy of the all-powerful state; political systems that claimed to serve the people, but left little time for individuals.
In the UK, the earliest government buildings were an extension of the Royal Court. It’s no coincidence that the only surviving parts of the original Palace of Whitehall are the Banqueting House and the remains of King Henry VIII’s tennis courts.
It’s said that Henry would rent his tennis courts out to the public when he wasn’t using them – so someone who knew how to maximise the value of government property – and in some ways perhaps a man after my own heart.
Later buildings reflected more of an international outlook as Britain found its place in the world – the India Office down the road, and Admiralty House, where we are now, are cases in point.
Today, the public rightly has little time for excessive grandeur. They expect government buildings to be efficient, effective and to serve the interests of those on the outside as much as those on the inside. So I’m going to talk about our property strategy and I’ll demonstrate the priorities at the heart of this government.
Because through the management of our estate, you can see the kind of government that we are:
– an efficient government – determined to spend the taxpayer’s money with the same care and consideration as we would our own
– a government that’s committed to economic growth – making sure every penny we spend boosts Britain’s competitiveness
– and a reforming government – seeking new and better ways of delivering public services
Let me explain how.
Efficiency
The government is the UK’s largest landowner and the public sector estate is valued at £370 billion – with running costs of £25 billion a year.
So when it came to saving money by making government more efficient, we naturally turned our sights to property management. Departments and their arms-length bodies have traditionally owned and managed their own property. So we found a system that was inconsistent, disjointed and inefficient – duplicated functions where there could have been shared services; fragmentation where there should have been coordination.
Successive governments had taken out expensive new leases, even though freehold space was available and unused. And the taxpayer was picking up the tab for outmoded or vacant buildings.
We established the Government Property Unit (GPU) to be a catalyst for change, with a mission to create an efficient, effective estate that represents value for money.
GPU’s role is certainly about collaboration. But coordinating assets owned by 24 ministerial departments and hundreds of other government organisations is no easy task. So it’s also about providing direction. And that meant equipping them with the necessary tools to steer through change when collaboration alone is insufficient.
Chief among these tools were the tough controls we introduced to stop unnecessary expenditure – and we’re unashamedly militant about enforcing these. Approval is needed for any spend over £100,000 – be it the renewal of lease or exercising a lease break option, a new acquisition or a new build development. These tools worked – enabling rapid downsizing as we withdraw from leasehold properties and concentrate staff in the buildings we actually own.
Just look at the results: we’ve exited 1.81 million square metres of property since May 2010, disposing of 770 freehold assets and raising over £1 billion in capital receipts.
But estate rationalisation is one part of a much wider efficiency programme.
We’ve also been reducing the size of the civil service workforce – it’s fallen by 15% since 2010 – and this saved £2.2 billion on pay and pensions in the last year alone. A smaller workforce has naturally allowed us to make further property reductions. In fact, it becomes a virtuous cycle: 1 department moving creates opportunities for others to do the same.
The building at 1 Horseguards Row – just by St James’s Park – is an impressive example of how departments can share office space. Originally home to HM Treasury and HM Revenue and Customs, it now also houses staff from 5 other ministerial departments and several smaller public bodies – all happily existing side-by-side.
New shared property in Bloomsbury
And today, I’m pleased to announce that the Cabinet Office and Government Property Unit will deliver a new shared property by spring 2014, which will produce savings of £60 million over 10 years.
The 8,000 square metre building in Bloomsbury, vacant since the Insolvency Service moved out in 2010, will now be home to 7 different government agencies – ranging from the Arts Council England to the Immigration Service Commissioner. Although the different organisations have varied roles, all the facilities that can be shared, will be shared – from reception areas and conference suites to cycle stores and first aid.
This kind of project – coordinated, innovative, cost effective – is one of the reasons why GPU’s London Estates Rationalisation Team was presented with the 2013 Award for Excellence in Property Management by the UK Association of Chief Estates Surveyors. In London alone, the GPU has helped reduce the amount of government floor space by around 22% in fewer than 4 years. Overall, space efficiency on the government estate is now less than 12 square metres per full-time employee – down from 13 square metres in 2011.
But there is more to do – much more.
With the support of GPU colleagues, departments are on track to deliver a workplace standard of below 10 square metres per full time equivalent by 2015.
Admittedly some eyebrows were raised when we decided this space standard while sitting in my tennis court sized office. However, we know that similar efficiencies exist in the public sector at large. That’s why GPU has worked with local government authorities to establish 12 local authority pilot areas to seek out the same kinds of efficiencies as we’ve found in central government.
UK growth
But in addition to delivering efficiencies, our other consideration in managing our estate has been to help support businesses and stimulate growth. An iconic scene in the most recent James Bond film ‘Skyfall’ is a perfect example of this. After a tense penultimate scene 007 stands on the rooftop of DECC and pensively takes in the view of Whitehall with its fluttering flags encapsulating the patriotism upon which this string of films is established.
It’s not often that government efficiency leaves you shaken and stirred but this was a great advertisement for the UK film industry and for the ability of the GPU to back British brands. This was a great way to bring in revenue from the government estate – and to support the UK film industry. That’s admittedly one of the more eye-catching examples.
But, quite simply, we want to ensure that every penny of government spending boosts, rather than undermines, Britain’s economy.
Another good example is Admiralty Arch. Once the home to the First Sea Lord, it’s a beautiful building – indeed a landmark. Inside, however, the story was rather different – a series of tired and tatty compartmentalised offices, joined by a rat run of doors and stairs. No longer suited to modern government, it cost £900,000 a year to run and was in urgent need of modernisation.
We could have spent millions bringing it back up to scratch. But we came up with a better solution – a new life as a hotel.
The building will be restored to its former glory; the public will enjoy greater access and the taxpayer gains £60 million through the sale of the leasehold.
And, crucially, in its new guise we’re helping to create jobs in construction and tourism too.
The whole London property market has been a major beneficiary of our approach.
You only have to walk down Victoria Street to see the blaze of redevelopment that’s been made possible by rationalising the government estate – outmoded 1960s-era buildings are being knocked down or refurbished to make way for a range of new commercial and residential uses. The benefits reverberate throughout the supply chain, supporting architects, planning practices, construction firms, suppliers and hauliers alike.
So it’s not surprising that when property consultants Knight Frank examined the impact of government exiting 16 buildings in London, they estimated that local economy received a £3.5 billion boost. Land and property owned by government is a hugely valuable commodity – and particularly important for local communities, keen to unlock the potential for redevelopment.
The GPU is now conducting a Strategic Land Review to identify at least £5 billion of government land and property to be sold between 2015 and 2020.
In particular, we want to help increase the supply of land available for affordable housing.
To date we have released land with capacity for 58,000 homes – and our ambition is to release land to support 100,000 homes by 2015.
But the role played by government doesn’t end at the point of disposal.
We’ve made it a priority to reform how construction is done in the public sector. Yes, to build the schools, hospitals, and roads this country needs – at a good price for the taxpayer – but also to produce a stronger, more competitive construction industry.
The government’s Facilities Management Strategy will be a significant contributor to future efficiency savings.
Similarly, Government Soft Landings, which you will be discussing later this week, will better align the design and construction of government assets with the needs of those who operate and use them.
And Building Information Modelling will be mandated for all central government projects in 2016.
One of the first projects to benefit from this technique was Cookham Wood Prison, where £800,000 was saved by giving the governor, staff and contractors a walkthrough of the 3D model at the design stage so they could suggest changes to suit their needs.
Reform
So our policies are delivering savings and supporting growth right here, right now. But what of the future?
Winston Churchill worked from this building when he was First Lord of the Admiralty – during the First World War and again at the start of the Second World War.
Churchill once said “We shape our buildings; thereafter our buildings shape us.”
He was right. And it’s something that has influenced our thinking.
The Government Digital Service (GDS) is a case in point. We created GDS with a mission in mind: to build a digital government for the future – providing faster, simpler, better services for the public, at less cost to the taxpayer. From the outset we had a clear idea of the kind of culture that would bring about this transformation: it had to be creative, it had to be innovative and it had to be agile. I’d seen this kind of environment before when I visited IT companies in Silicon Valley.
So we built GDS in their image – deliberately situating it halfway between Whitehall, the traditional heart of government, and Shoreditch, the so-called ‘Digital Roundabout’, home to London’s hi-tech digital and creative firms. And inside, every spare area of surface is covered with post-it notes and charts that staff use to share design ideas and track progress. We want this to be the norm for government workplaces – environments that empower staff to find new and creative ways of delivering public services.
Speaking to civil servants, it’s clear they clamour for better workplaces. That’s why as part of our Civil Service Reform Plan we have launched a programme called ‘The Way We Work’. Property is part of this. But it’s a wider culture change.
Last year, the UK government adopted alternative working patterns to ease the pressure on the London transport system during the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. We established 500 new alternative work spaces outside London, including an office hub in Croydon. These arrangements were specific to the Games, but we learnt important lessons.
Effective working doesn’t require employees to be at the same desk at the same time every day. It means thinking about the tasks to be achieved and choosing the most appropriate location from which to accompany them, freeing people to work in the most productive way.
Flexible working can bring significant savings by reducing the cost of overtime and extending service hours. But it needs to be managed better, remembering that the needs of the business should always be the first consideration. Decisions must be taken based on the outcome for the organisation rather than just the individual; accommodating employees is great – but it’s actually about unlocking their full potential.
And that requires a culture change, whereby performance is measured not on the basis of how long people are at their desks, but by the quality of their work. So we will be setting out new guidelines on flexible working for civil servants, together with support and training, to ensure it works to the benefit of employees and organisations alike.
And exploiting new technologies will help us carry out more work from alternative locations. So I’m determined to break down the barriers that make cooperation harder and frustrate hard-working, dedicated civil servants wanting to do their best. Top of the list is IT.
All too often, IT at work is worse – and more expensive – than the IT we use at home, when it should be the other way around. It needs to keep employees connected; and it needs to be invisible – you should be able to get on with your work without noticing it. Take it from someone who has experienced more than his fair share of frustration in front of a computer screen – no single workplace reform will improve morale more than better IT.
Another problem is overly-restrictive security arrangements. It’s why we are introducing a new single pass for government buildings. It will reduce time wasted having to escort visiting colleagues and it will help foster a sense of unity – civil servants shouldn’t feel like strangers in government buildings. These are the basic ingredients of better workplaces.
But we know we are behind the curve. Many of our country’s most successful businesses have already ditched their out-dated ways of working. Over the past 3 years Vodafone UK have been implementing their own reforms and the Government Property Unit has been learning from their experience. I was able to see it myself when I visited their Newbury Campus earlier this year – and W4 delegates will be visiting later this week. The evidence is enormously impressive. Vodafone have seen:
– a 30% reduction in their office portfolio
– a 200% increase in occupancy
– and a 20% productivity gain
I’m pleased that 2 UK government departments – the Department for Transport and the Department for Business – are piloting new kinds of workspaces based on the Vodafone model. Transforming the way we work in government has the potential to unlock multiple benefits: efficiency, productivity, cost-effectiveness, better staff morale and better recruitment.
And as work becomes something people do – instead of a place they go – new opportunities will be created to release savings from the public estate. Savings that can be better spent on front line services. And this can’t come soon enough.
Conclusion
In the UK government, we’re proud of what we’ve done so far – but we know we have much further to go. Indeed, the task of making ourselves more efficient is one that never ends. There are always new and better ways of doing things.
So it’s a great pleasure to be hosting this conference. You are the leaders and rising stars of public sector property. I’m sure you have many examples and innovations of your own to share. We are listening – we want to learn – and we look forward to hearing your own national perspectives during the week.
Below is the text of the speech made by the Cabinet Office Minister, Francis Maude, in New Delhi on 12th September 2013.
Delighted to be in India, and here at the Observer Research Foundation. I have a high regard for Think Tanks, I set one up in the UK that has just celebrated its 10th birthday. And ORF is impressive and vibrant, particularly in its use of evidence in Policy Development.
When David Cameron visited India earlier this year, he spoke passionately of his desire to forge a new special relationship between our countries, and for the UK to become your partner of choice.
So I’m particularly pleased to be speaking here in New Delhi about the UK-India digital partnership, where we are both leading in this field.
Cyber security can sound dark and menacing, but the internet has brought many benefits in terms of social and economic growth. The internet has brought us closer together.
Software developers in Bangalore can sell their products to small businesses in Manchester at the click of a button.
A family in Mumbai can keep in touch with their son or daughter studying at university in Edinburgh through Skype, Facebook and the wonders of social media.
And a cricket fan in Delhi can stream coverage of India batting at Lord’s across the internet – providing the rain holds off.
In vibrant democracies like ours, we can see that an open and stable internet has the power to drive economic and social development.
Our approach has been to maximise the potential for growth, efficiency and creativity, while minimising the threats to people’s security and prosperity.
But because the internet is defined by openness, strong partnerships are essential to this strategy – and we particularly value our relationship with India. You are a country of students, entrepreneurs and innovators, with a growing economy and a strong innovative technology sector. And before long, India will have the largest online populations in the world.
So I’m here today to tell you that where there are opportunities, the UK is open for business.
Where we have expertise, we want to share it.
And where we need to improve our capability, we are ready to learn.
Digital Growth
We want to make the UK one of the easiest and most secure places in the world to do business. So I’m delighted that Indian inward investment in the UK is increasing. Together, we’re building on existing strengths in areas like aerospace, ICT and life sciences. Bangalore-based companies like Infosys and Wipro are major employers. Rolta, Mindtree Consulting, Microland, Sasken, ITC Infotech and Symphony Services are in the UK too – the list could go on and on. And I look forward to visiting many during this visit. And UK firms continue to invest in India-based outsourcing or Indian produced software.
With our economies so tightly connected, we have a strong shared interest in supporting further cooperation in this field. Already the jointly funded UK-India research collaboration has invested £125 million in the last five years, leaving the UK well positioned to be India’s partner of choice in science and research.
And because we know the power of the internet to take a single brilliant idea and propel it into a global phenomenon, our Technology Strategy Board is investing over £1 billion in high-technology sectors. Money which will help commercialise new and emerging technologies, from high value manufacturing and cell therapy, to satellite applications and networked transport systems.
Places like Cambridge and London’s Tech City are already becoming incubators for innovative and creative start-up companies. They thrive because of the high level of government support, availability of quality infrastructure, excellent internet and broadband connectivity. With our background, the UK is well placed to work with government and organisations that are keen to build similar hubs here.
Digital Government
But the internet’s potential extends far beyond economic growth.
It has the power to improve the relationship between citizens and the state, and to change government for the better.
At first glance India and the UK’s demographics are very different: you have a young population; ours is an aging one. But the challenges are the same: increased pressure on infrastructure, rising demand on public services, massive financial constraint. Like you, we’ve had to look for new ways of doing things.
We established an Efficiency and Reform Group to focus government departments on achieving significant savings without impacting frontline services – delivering more for less.
Last financial year this approach contributed to £10bn in efficiency savings, through re-negotiating contracts, cutting projects, procurement reform. Whilst not damaging, and often improving public services.
But to meet our aspiration to save £20bn a year by 2015, we needed to embed this mindset in the DNA of the public sector.
So in parallel, our Civil Service Reform Plan is developing the in-house ability in digital skills, project management and commercial awareness that has too often been lacking in the past.
To support these aims we have made it a priority to bring the workings of the UK government in to the 21st century.
The development of the internet owes much to its private sector pioneers: the innovators and entrepreneurs who acted with speed and weren’t afraid to take risks.
Government, on the other hand, has generally been something a latecomer. And even then, the approach was too rarely dynamic.
For instance, the UK government has over 650 different transactional services, delivering over a billion transactions each year to businesses and citizens.
And yet half of them didn’t offer a digital option at all. And those that did tended to be designed around the needs of the provider, rather than the user.
So the UK Government Digital Strategy sets out a plan for making us digital by default in everything we do.
Just like in Karnataka, where there are now 20 million computerised land ownership records. Or in Andhra Pradesh, where citizens can now complete tax returns and register for passport applications online.
We have started with 25 of the 650 transactions as exemplars, but by 2018 we expect all government services handling over 100,000 transactions a year to be offered in this way: online.
We also launched the award-winning GOV.UK, which swept away a plethora of government websites, replacing them with a new, single domain for all government information and services.
It is simpler, clearer and faster for users – and saves 70% per year in the process.
We are not just building digital components of government – we are building a digital government based on user needs.
And, at the very root of our changes is a commitment to Open Standards – a commitment we share with India.
Both our governments recognise that digital public services can stimulate a generation of world-beating software and service businesses.
Open standards level the playing field for open source and propriety software in government IT, thereby increasing competition, lowering licencing costs and advancing innovation.
In order to get the best deal for the taxpayer, we are also changing the way we buy and run the technology.
In the past, the public sector would embark on large, complex IT projects: consistently delivered late and over budget.
We were procuring programmes before they had been designed – or over such a long period of time that the technology was out of date before it was delivered.
Worse, it would rely on a small pool of large IT suppliers – often locked into impenetrable contracts for years at a time – in a market where the cost of hosting halves every eighteen months.
We priced out the tech SMEs and digital start-ups that were growing up around us, unwittingly excluding the very companies whose innovation could help us get better value for the taxpayer.
We needed an open market, and one way of helping to achieve this was creating the Government CloudStore.
Almost an “eBay for government”, it enables public sector organisations to purchase IT services off the shelf, on a pay-as-you-go basis rather than having to develop their own costly, bespoke systems.
Our CloudFirst policy expects all future hosting to be through the Cloudstore – unless clear exemption criteria are met.
To date there have been over £37 million in sales of IT services through the CloudStore – and 60% of this has been through small and medium sized enterprises.
It’s just one example of how innovation inside the public sector, can be used to support growth in the private sector.
Data is the raw material of the 21st Century, as coal and iron were during the Industrial revolution/ The government has the power to stimulate the IT sector simply through being more transparent.
We’re publishing vast amounts of government information – more than 10,000 datasets to be precise – so they can be used by businesses and other organisations for social and commercial purposes.
And we’ve found the benefits of transparency to be numerous.
Empowering patients to access their medical records online drives up standards in public services.
Publishing annual pay rates for the most senior civil servants helps strengthen institutions and drives accountability.
Quite simply, transparency makes for better government. This is why we are committed to helping other countries enhance and share the benefits of transparency, through our chairmanship of the Open Government Partnership, a multi-national partnership between governments and civil society organisations.
A global effort to make governments better, more effective and more accountable.
Eighteen months on from its launch, the Open Government Partnership has grown to include 60 countries.
India has also made huge strides in open government and – as the world’s largest democracy – there is much we could learn from your experience.
I hope there will be an opportunity to do so during this visit.
Cyber Security
But for people to have confidence in government services, they need to be sure their data is safe. And for the internet to drive economic growth, consumers need to know their money is secure. The UK’s National Audit Office estimates that security breaches now cost the UK economy in the order of £18 to 27bn.
That’s a price we – or any other country for that matter – cannot afford to continue to pay.
India’s losses through cybercrime are currently lower, but be in no doubt that they will increase as your economy continues to grow and to embrace technology and innovation.
In the UK, we are establishing a new National Computer Emergency Response Team – CERT-UK – to improve national co-ordination of cyber incidents and act as a focal point for international sharing of technical information on cyber security.
We have been behind India on this, but look forward to working with CERT-India once our CERT is fully operational. After all, it’s a global problem that requires a global response. Take the London Olympic & Paralympic Games. It faced many threats to its digital infrastructure – but the games organisers, business and the security services worked in unison to defend our networks.
Part of the reason for our success was that we learnt lessons from other global events: from the 2008 Beijing Olympics and from the Commonwealth Games, held here in New Delhi in 2010.
And in turn, officials from the London Games are now advising their counterparts in Brazil to help ensure Rio is equally successful – and equally secure.
This is the pattern for cooperation: lessons shared, expertise pooled, skills and capabilities developed in partnership.
The UK was proud to be the first country to sign a joint communiqué on cyber with India when Foreign Secretary William Hague was here last year. This outlines a basis for cooperation built around a shared vision that places at its heart fundamental freedoms, privacy and the free flow of information in a secure and reliable manner.
We’ve been working hard to make that a reality, but I believe we can become closer still.
Research Councils UK and the Indian Government are working to enable collaborations in areas like cloud security and cryptography, between the best UK and Indian academic researchers.
And today I’m pleased to announce the new Chevening TCS Cyber Policy Scholarship, which is being generously sponsored by Tata Consultancy Services.
This will allow Indian mid-career professionals to take an intensive course at the elite Cranfield University – part of the Defence Academy of the UK – covering cyber security and all related areas of public policy. The UK is home to four universities in the world’s top ten, six in the top 20. A UK education is an investment in long-term employability, which helps explain why 40,000 Indian students are currently studying in the UK.
Many of our universities already have excellent links with their counterparts in India. I believe that building links through education in this way is one of the most effective ways in which our two nations can come together for mutual benefit.
Global Governance
As cyberspace continues to emerge as a new front in international conflicts, we need to find ways to agree principles for moderating state behaviour.
The 2011 London Conference on Cyberspace marked the beginning of a conversation – one we’re proud to have started, but is far from over. London was followed-up last year in Budapest, and the dialogue will continue in Seoul next month. But the centrality of international cooperation to the UK’s approach extends beyond security, to the whole question of how we shape the future of the internet.
The global Internet Governance Forum, born out of the UN World Summit on the Information Society in 2005, recognised the pivotal role that the private sector played in the development of the internet.It has ensured that wherever decisions are made the interests of everyone – government, business, civil society – have been taken into account.
A working group under the UN’s Commission on Science and Technology for Development is now examining the mandate agreed at the World Summit on enhanced cooperation to enable governments to carry out their roles and responsibilities in international public policy issues pertaining to the internet.
We supported the proposal to set up the working group to map and review the extent to which such cooperation takes place. The important thing is to ensure that we do not dilute the characteristics that have made the internet successful so far. We don’t favour a leading role for governments in managing the internet, because – being a government – we know that they work slowly, whereas the internet is changing constantly and quickly. The internet was developed despite government, and not because of it. We don’t want to hold it back.
We continue to support the multi-stakeholder model of internet governance endorsed by the World Summit. The approach must continue to be open, inclusive and interactive.
Conclusion
The UK-India partnership is firmly based on a shared belief that an open internet is the only way to support security and prosperity for all.
Together, we are co-operating through business-to-business tie-ups:
Through public service partnerships.
Through academic collaboration.
And through government-to-government partnership on cyber security.
The internet is only going to get bigger – the threats and opportunities with it. Thankfully, ours is a partnership built to last.
