Britain to become ‘Digital by Default’
Britain is being encouraged to become a government of ‘digital by default’, offering savings in the tens of billions.
Independent think tank Policy Exchange has produced a report outlining how the British government could achieve three goals: To build the world’s most connected and digitally skilled society; to make Britain the most attractive place outside of Silicon Valley for technology entrepreneurs to start and grow a business; and to make the British government the ‘smartest’ in the world.
In addition, the report is thinking big, calling on the government to ‘save billions not millions’. James Petter, senior vie president and MD of EMC UK and Ireland (co-sponsors of the report) thinks there could be £24bn of IT savings by 2020, yet even that could be dwarfed by other savings:
‘For example real-time data analytics could almost eliminate tax fraud, which in itself is estimated by the HMRC to be in the tens of billions. And predictive analytics will easily facilitate early and rapid diagnosis of illnesses, a cost saving that is well beyond that of tax fraud’ he said.
The British government saved over £500m in 2013 by creating a single website – gov.uk – which replaced over 300 departmental and agency websites, and also launched G-Cloud, a cloud-based catalogue of services and procurement.
Policy Exchange’s Technology Manifesto is published in association with EMC and Google
About Graham Scott
Graham is an experienced editor and publisher and an award-winning writer. He has travelled extensively and is interested in world cultures.
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