MPs slam government over digital divide plans
By Jane Wakefield
Tue, 27 Mar 2001 12:23:40 GMT
URL: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2001/12/ns-21881.html
MPs accuse the e-envoy of empire building and describe attempts to combat
the digital divide as "woefully inadequate"
The government's UK online plans to close the digital divide have been
severely criticised in a select committee report.
The report, from the same Trade and Industry select committee which last
week attacked (http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2001/11/ns-21737.html) the
government's attempts to open up BT's network, is hugely critical of the
work being done to prevent a digital divide in Britain and is sceptical
of how much recently-appointed e-envoy Andrew Pinder is helping the
cause. It will come as a blow to a government determined to prevent a
digital divide in Britain and promote e-business as the best in Europe.
The report accuses government of having no coherent strategy to combat
the digital divide and describes various projects intended to give equal
access to the Internet as "futile gestures".
"The initiative centres and development programmes do not amount to a
strategy to overcome the digital divide between old and young, rich and
poor, urban and rural," the report concludes. "In the context of the
scale of the digital divide, they look like woefully inadequate gestures.
Millions of people are excluded, not the thousands reached so far by
these initiatives."
The MPs are equally damning of the job being done by e-envoy Andrew
Pinder, who is charged with promoting e-business, combatting the digital
divide and getting all government services online by 2005. Instead,
Pinder has become embroiled in red tape, the report finds. "The e-envoy
has been absorbed into the machinery of Whitehall and is now an adjunct
of the e-Minister," the report concludes. "We are concerned at this
mini-empire growing up in the shadow of the e-envoy. We greatly fear that
the original concept of the e-envoy has been captured, tamed and
bureaucratised into an e-official planted in an e-office, no doubt full
of activity but caught between being an agency of implementation and
powerhouse of ideas."
The criticisms will be hugely embarrassing for the government in the run
up to the general election. It is not the first time its digital divide
strategy has been questioned. A Department of Culture, Media and Sport
select committee earlier this month accused
(http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2001/10/ns-21627.html) the government of
developing broadband plans in isolation from citizen's needs. Critics
have long questioned how much impact government projects will have on
preventing (http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2001/11/ns-21678.html) a society
of information haves and havenots.
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