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Cameron retains Lane Fox as beefed-up Digital Champion
Posted by admin on Fri, 18/06/2010 - 15:24
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Gordon Brown's 'Digital Champion' Martha Lane Fox will continue in her role under the Coalition Government with an expanded brief. Lane Fox, the co-founder of LastMinute.com. was appointed by Brown to work on getting the 10 million Britons who have never used the internet online.
Under the coalition administration, she will continue to explore how to bridge the so-called “digital divide”, but will also also working with the Cabinet Office to establish how new technologies might be used to encourage efficiencies across government.
Her role will also be to “advise and challenge” the current ways of working. "The government could save millions each year simply by doing transactions online rather than on paper or over the phone,” said Lane Fox. "Whilst helping to bridge the digital divide is hugely important in its own right, there are also compelling economic reasons why we need to get everyone online.
“There are more than 10 million adults in this country who have never used the Internet and it is my mission to get as many of them online as possible. At the moment they are missing out on the massive advantages of being online which the rest of us take for granted, including average consumer savings of over 560 pounds a year and the ability to access vital public services."
Confirming Lane Fox’s appointment, David Cameron said: “Getting online can help people save money, find a job, access services in a way that works for them, and make connections with each other and with their community. It will also help us all to drive down the cost of delivering public services”.
Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude added that: “Making sure everyone can reap the benefits of online services has never been more important. This work is about reducing the cost of government and will help get people more involved with their local neighbourhoods.”
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Comments
need access first...
Martha has a tough job on her hands, as a lot of the people currently not online can't get online. The plethora of confusing ISPs with old fashioned modems/routers to configure. The long line lengths which mean many can't even get a meg. The thousands in notstpots with no access to adsl and sometimes no mobile signal either.
Until government do something to break up the copper cabal and get a decent connection to the final third I fear it will reflect badly and is also holding back digitalbritain. Once we all have access to a fibre connection and get rid of the victorian copper we will have true Next Generation Access for the next generation. If we don't do it we will be left behind and the digital economy will wither in a similar way to our industrial economy. Other countries without the benefit of a great phone system like ours are storming ahead laying fibre. Not for them the bottlenecks, throttling and capping of an obsolete copper network. They will rule the digital waves like Britannia used to rule the world... Time to move on or become a bystander.