WRITTEN ON May 20th, 2010 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Policies, Save Time and Money
As well as the good stuff on civil liberties noted below, the governing coalition’s Progamme for Government (pdf download) has this on government IT procurement:
We will take steps to open up government procurement and reduce costs; and we will publish government ICT contracts online.
We will create a level playing field for opensource software and will enable large ICT projects to be split into smaller components.
We will require full, online disclosure of all central government spending and contracts over £25,000.
We will create a new ‘right to data’ so that government-held datasets can be requested and used by the public, and then published on a regular basis.
We will require all councils to publish meeting minutes and local service and performance data.
We will require all councils to publish items of spending above £500, and to publish contracts and tender documents in full.
We will ensure that all data published by public bodies is published in an open and standardised format, so that it can be used easily and with minimal cost by third parties.
It’s an important read with some enlightened ideas in a realistic tone which acknowledges the real diffrences on important topics such as Trident.
It closes with the sobering reminder:
The deficit reduction programme takesprecedence over any of the other measures in this agreement, and the speed of implementation of any measures that have a cost to the public finances will depend on decisions to be made in the Comprehensive Spending Review.
Cheers Edgar.
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Cheers also to Ian for pointing out on FIPR Alerts:
Section 3 on civil liberties adds no new information.
S.7 on Culture/Media/Sport says nothing about Digital Economy Act. It does say: “We will introduce measures to ensure the rapid roll-out of superfast broadband across the country. We will ensure that BT and other infrastructure providers allow the use of their assets to deliver such broadband, and we will seek to introduce superfast broadband in remote areas at the same time as in more populated areas. If necessary, we will consider using the part of the TV licence fee that is supporting the digital switchover to fund broadband in areas that the market alone will not reach.”
S.13 on Europe: “We will approach forthcoming legislation in the area of criminal justice on a case-by-case basis, with a view to maximising our country’s security, protecting Britain’s civil liberties and preserving the integrity of our criminal justice system.”
S.14 on families and children: “We will review the criminal records and vetting and barring regime and scale it back to common sense levels.”
S.17 on immigration: “We support E-borders and will reintroduce exit checks.”
S.22 on NHS: “We will put patients in charge of making decisions about their care, including control of their health records.”
S.24 on political reform: “We will introduce a new ‘public reading stage’ for bills to give the public an opportunity to comment on proposed legislation online, and a dedicated ‘public reading day’ within a bill’s committee stage where those comments will be debated by the committee scrutinising the bill.”
S.30 on transport: “We will stop central government funding for new fixed speed cameras and switch to more effective ways of making our roads safer, including authorising ‘drugalyser’ technology.”