Global Action Plan calls for £1bn green IT stimulus package: June 2009

Green IT

On Thursday 25 June Global Action Plan held an event at the House of Commons calling on Central Government for a £1bn IT stimulus package to create smarter, more environmentally efficient, higher quality public services.

Through its partnership with the Society for Information Technology Management (Socitm) and Logicalis UK, Global Action Plan is pursuing the objective in association with a consortium of diverse and influential organisations.

The event included a keynote speech by Andrew Miller MP, chairman of the Parliamentary Information Technology Committee (Pitcom) and a panel debate setting out why the stimulus is needed and how it could benefit organisations.

A report entitled: A Shared Vision for Smarter Services was also launched at the event. The report includes a case study of how the London Borough of Hillingdon has reduced its IT operating costs by investing in efficient IT.

The proposed stimulus package could fund IT projects that deliver financial efficiency, carbon reduction, public service improvement or expansion, as well as to:

Stimulate public bodies to think differently and creatively, including looking at opportunities for collaboration and shared services.
Support attainment of the UK government's international environmental commitments.
Prioritise projects that can demonstrate highest return on the three key objectives.
Support projects that are locally conceived and delivered.

Trewin Restorick, CEO, Global Action Plan, warned that the Government's response to the current financial crisis will leave the public sector with less money, at the same time as a commitment to reduce global warming will require major changes:

"Future generations will have less money to deliver services. Bizarrely, this comes with a climate change strategy which is world-leading."

"There's a legally binding commitment to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050. Under these two pressures, financial and carbon, business as usual is not an option."

From 2010, companies and public sector organisations will feel the pinch directly, from the government's carbon reduction legislation. This cash-neutral law will penalise those lower down the table of polluters, and reward those higher up.

"Central Government has been failing in its efforts to reduce carbon emissions, with the Sustainable Development Commission reporting that its emissions actually went up by three percent last year, and IT was a major part of this increase."

Addressing the barriers

Local government, on the other hand, has huge opportunities through sharing services and collaboration. The proposed stimulus package would address one barrier to this - a lack of capital - but the debate raised other issues, including the difficulty of accessing IT knowledge to design projects without breaking EC rules on procurement, and the privacy issues involved in sharing data between departments.

Andrew Miller MP said that said IT-based efficiency moves such as remote working or teleworking would require big changes, but must happen locally:

"It's about big issues that stretch across the world, and about things you can do locally. You can think that the problem is too big, but everyone can do something and every one of us should."

"The cost of every local authority is going up and up. The productivity gains that we can produce by improving sharing of services are massive," he said.