Thames Gateway: when IT really matters

If the communications of the government are to be believed, a large-scale residential community such as Thames Gateway can be sustainable, yet devoid of IT

Do you know what a sustainable community is? If the communications of the government are to be believed, a large-scale residential community such as Thames Gateway can be sustainable, yet devoid of IT.

Go to the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) website. There, in its treatment of sustainable communities and the Gateway, it discusses ‘Investment across Government’ – that is, investment going beyond that made in Gateway housing. The DCLG runs short items on the following extra investments that surround Gateway:

Education Environment Health Transport.

There is no item on IT. Thames Gateway, John Prescott’s office appears to believe, is not a development that needs investment in IT.

The scale of official neglect of IT

Perhaps this is just an oversight. But in the Cabinet Office’s Web discussion of e-Government, there is no agenda about housing, construction or cities.(1) If you lend money on property, the Cabinet Office’s www.govtalk.gov.uk – ‘setting standards for seamless electronic government – will tell you how to square your electronic documents with those of Her Majesty’s Land Registry.(2) To register for online government services, you are also directed to the Government Gateway website on www.gateway.gov.uk. But the Cabinet Office has opened no gateway to IT in the Thames Gateway.

We have here a dialogue of the deaf. Outside a few savvy architectural engineers – Arup, Buro Happold, Whitby Bird – not many construction specialists have a reputation for being expert in IT. On the other hand, few in IT have any interest in housing, construction, or a major large-scale community such as Gateway.

It’s the same story with the influential New Local Government Network (NLGN), a Blairite thinktank which talks up localism the more the Government destroys it. In Seeing the light? Next steps for city regions, NLGN board member and Queen Mary College historian Tristram Hunt discusses the international competitiveness of British cities whose ‘economic, cultural and demographic reach can extend beyond the political boundaries of the city itself’. He writes:

• 1 See www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/e-government/
• 2 See Land Registry, Interface specification electronic services, on www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemasstandard/schemalibrary_schema.asp?schemaid=236

‘To build pragmatic, powerful City Regions we need to develop a variable geometry of autonomous authorities across urban Britain. By following a model not dissimilar to Barcelona, we can try to construct for individual areas a coalition of local, regional and national authorities. These regional coalitions must enjoy a series of Parliament approved freedoms which provide for local tax distribution, regional planning, and powers over transport, skills and training. In turn, City Regions need to provide clear lines of leadership together with the active involvement of civil society. The needs of Bristol will be different to Glasgow will be different to Liverpool: but each would profit from a locally-tailored tool-kit of regional powers to help raise its global competitiveness.'(3)

Ah, variable geometry among local authorities! Ah, the Barcelona model! But IT is not a tool that can be found in the NLGN’s locally-tailored tool-kit of regional powers to help raise global competitiveness.

For Seeing the light?, competitiveness in a place like Gateway is a matter of governance, not IT. With this kind of bureaucratic approach providing New Labour with its ideas, we can expect little official thinking, until it’s too late, about what IT could do for the economy of the Gateway. Thus IT does not figure among the London Thames Gateway Development Corporation’s ‘engines for growth’ in the Lower Lea Valley and London Riverside.(4)

So much for the kind of productivity revolution Gordon Brown would like to bring about. And yet, and yet… it would not quite be true to say that the establishment ignores what IT might do for communities such as Gateway. For the NLGN, the progressive local authority of the future should ‘lead the development of mobile lifestyles’ for its community, and should use mobile IT to go about ‘forging’ what is termed ‘a new relationship with its citizens’.(5) This desire to use IT to include everyone in New Labour’s Big Tent is widespread. Even without mentioning IT, prime-minister-inwaiting David Miliband, currently in charge of communities, has set out a framework in which Gateway IT would be a lever of the therapeutic state. Miliband has called for – you guessed it – ‘neighbourhood institutions that forge a different relationship with citizens’.(6) There is a whole lot of forging going on.

To open and download the PDF of the FULL article, click on this Thames Gateway IT link.