Martha's Manifesto

The government's Digital Inclusion Unit "Manifesto for a Network Nation" has been released and it says that "home access to the Internet can make the difference between a child getting an 'A' and a 'C' at GCSE" which I'm sure will turn out to be true in our household, where no.1 son spent most of his last school year on Facebook instead of studying for his exams. The manifesto has a simple goal:

Our ambition to make the UK the first nation where everyone can use the web.[From Home | Race Online 2012]

Why we should want everyone to use the web, when a great many people would rather access the information that they need via mobile phones or digital television, isn't really clear to me. Surely the goal should be something meaningful in a context: all government transactions should be online and accessible via mobile phones and the web by 2012, or something like that. But lets put that to one side and see what vision the manifesto contains.

Consider, for example, education. The manifesto talks about the savings that might accrue from moving interaction between parents, children and schools online. Here's an example: last week my son attended the special school event that they have for the children who have represented the school at sports during the previous year. For him to do this, I had to fill out and sign a permission form (containing exactly the same information as on the 3,000 other permission forms I've signed for the same school over the years) and pay a fiver. The school doesn't take PayPal or debit cards, only cash or cheques, and we couldn't find either in the house, but luckily there were enough coins distributed across our clothes, cars and children to scrape together just enough to register him.

I think Intellect members should be concerned that not once in the manifesto's 59 pages does it once mention identity or authentication, nor does it mention how consumers might pay, either. There is no connection that I could see between the manifesto and, for example, the UK Payment Council's plan that was discussed at Intellect recently. So in 2015, parents will still be downloading forms and printing them out and sending them back with coins, because there's no mechanism for creating or verifying digital signatures and the school still won't be able to accept debit cards.

I think the manifesto vision is empty if it is just about consuming online content. Unless we move transactions online, what's the point? And there is nothing in manifesto that might be considered a goal or target around this. For example: Recommendation 4.2 is that the DWP should "introduce an expectation that people of working age should apply for benefits online and have the skills to look for, and apply for, work online". You'll notice first that this is not a target or even a goal. They can introduce as many "expectations" as they like. They can "expect" until the cows come home. But where is the specific target that says that by 2015 all dole registrations must be online?

There are two reasons why such a target could never be met: firstly, a substantial part of the population are functionally illiterate and if they can't read a bus timetable they'll never be able to navigate their way around the interweb to a DWP form; and secondly, because once they do navigate to the DWP form, they have no means to prove who they are to get services, or pay for the services they need. The government has scrapped the ID card scheme and has yet to put anything in its place. If unemployed school leavers in Middlesborough are to be required to sign on online, then I'm sure they'll be able to use their X-Boxes and iPhone to connect. But what then? When the middle classes log on to do their taxes, they go through an annual ritual of phoning to the Revenue to have their 47 digit username and 23 letter password resent to them in the post, and then typing it in. Will the X-Box generation bother to do this, or will they just give up and go down the Jobcentre? Incidentally, I'm reliably informed that if you go down to the Jobcentre and want to use one of the PCs there to apply for a job with Britain's largest employer, the NHS, you can't, because the Jobcentre PCs aren't connected to the Internet, so I don't know what the proposed digital champions in Jobcentres are actually going to do.

Doesn't "Digital Britain" deserve something better, something technologically-informed, something with genuine vision for an online society?

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1. At 17 Jul 2010 05:00, Anonymous wrote:

One of the schools my twins go to has just mastered sending a text when they are going to miss the bus home e.g. playing netball, in detention etc. The fact that the text may not arrive for several hours due to the impoverished nature of our rural mobile network means you have often called the police about a missing child before it arrives. But, it's a start. And it sort of makes up for the fact that they have taken the sprogs' phones off them because 'mobiles are not allowed in school' even though said sprog could have sent a text at lunchtime (when she found she was in a netball match some 20 miles away during the afternoon, and not 3.45pm (after the bus left) which is when the school system finally decides it might be relevant to a parent.

We need to be looking at adopting applications such as echosign for the digital signature thing. But I can't see schools or anyone else in public sector adopting what the rest of us do on a daily basis in a hurry. The big problem is teaching these guys that this type of applications exist. Apparently those of us on the ground looking to run our businesses as efficiently and effectively as possible in the Internet age know nowt!!

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