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Labour reveals tech plans in election manifesto
ID cards and closing the digital divide high on the agenda

By Steve Ranger

Published: Wednesday 13 April 2005

Technology projects including ID cards and plans to close the digital divide feature prominently in the Labour Party's election manifesto, released today.

The manifesto reveals that if Labour wins the election it will deliver a "cross-government strategy for closing the digital divide and using ICT to further transform public services".

This will include support for every school to offer all pupils access to computers at home by 2006; a "digital challenge" to find a local authority to be a national and international pathfinder in universal digital service provision; and a new National Internet Safety Unit, which the party says will "make Britain the safest place in the world to access the internet".

Big IT projects include a new electronic borders system, to be introduced over the next five years, which will track visitors entering or leaving the UK, and plans to introduce ID cards, including biometric data such as fingerprints, backed up by a national register.

The manifesto said a Labour government will "continue" to deliver efficiency savings and improvements to local services through joint procurement, shared services and streamlining administrative structures, all of which are likely to require significant IT involvement.

Labour said it will free up £21bn for front line services by completing the implementation of Sir Peter Gershon’s public sector efficiency review - which recommends greater use of IT to cut costs.

A troubled IT project even gets a mention in the manifesto, with Labour saying it is "committed" to tackling the backlog of claims at the Child Support Agency.

The manifesto also said that because public procurement is a big opportunity for UK businesses and the source of many jobs, a future Labour government will promote a public procurement strategy "that safeguards UK jobs and skills, under EU rules, to ensure that British industry can compete fairly with the rest of Europe", a policy that could have implications for public sector technology projects.

It also said Labour will modernise copyright and other forms of protection of intellectual property rights "so that they are appropriate for the digital age".

In contrast, the slimline Conservative manifesto published earlier this week contains little detail on Tory IT policy. But last month the Conservative Technology Forum, a Conservative think-tank, published an action plan which included recommendations such as giving a senior government minister responsibility for all government IT projects in a future Tory government.