A British Centrelink could deliver services to the whole community. Or, more modestly, it could start with people over 60, or focus on people of working age. If the new agency were empowered to deliver some local as well as national government services, it could ensure that an elderly person eligible for housing benefit (local government) and income support (Benefits Agency) but claiming only the former, in future received all their entitlements.Thirdly, we will need a serious investment in the next generation of information and communication technologies. Benefits Agency staff struggle with a combination of different systems that cannot talk to each other, let alone to the Employment Service, supplementing electronic records with piles of paper.With effective systems in place, however, the new agency could not only support accurate point-of-contact decision-making, but also offer electronic access to job vacancies, training opportunities, childcare information and benefits advice in any library or community centre where people need it.Finally, we will need to simplify the "what" as well as the "how" of government.
The creation of a single agency like Centrelink would help enormously. But Centrelink's senior staff have found themselves not simply interpreting government to citizens, but also representing citizens to government - for instance, pointing out contradictions and overlaps in the benefits or services that different departments offer.In Britain, the benefits system has become so impossibly unwieldy that radical surgery will be needed. But that is another story.Patricia Hewitt is Labour Member of Parliament for Leicester West and a Trustee of the Institute for Public Policy Research. She was previously director of research for Andersen Consulting..
Where in the World Wide Web do you go to find all the latest news about the fast-paced telecommunications industry? Chris Gill suggests three electronic publications you will want to bookmark Why don't we change the way we work? Well, I've recently been finding out. For a start, if you want BT to give you a proper demo of videoconferencing you have to travel to London - a nice irony, although one which will surely be lost on those trying to keep BT's profits in check by spending heavily on TV ads. But of course we will all change, eventually - it's just that we'll need more bandwidth than ISDN2 can offer So it pays to keep a close eye on the telecoms arena. On the Web I fully expected to find nothing but US magazines, but lo: two very worthwhile sites of British origin.Total Telecom, with the cute URL www.totaltele , is an EMAP publication with a clearly specialist flavour. "As well as providing users with access to current and past articles from Communications Week International and Communications International, Total Telecom hosts a range of unique information sources and interactive services for the busy telecoms professional."But TT does carry material of wider interest. When I looked in, the lead story was "Europe will use privacy and free trade laws to resist cryptography policies promoted internationally by the US." Down the page, below various stories about national telecoms companies, was the news that "Japan's personal handyphone system (PHS) will not take root in Europe, despite heavy lobbying by its originator, NTT, and phenomenal success in its home market." The interests already vested in DECT (digital European cordless telephony), Europe's homegrown answer to digital cordless, apparently leave PHS with little or no future here.The front page includes an abbreviated archive of recent news items and, if you're lucky, news items have links to other related stories, forming an excellent resource: from a story about Microsoft's WebTV Plus - a set- top box that will use the broadcast network to download "thousands" of Web pages overnight on to a built-in hard drive for viewing during the day - I was able to get to several other stories to put this one in context.But much more what I had in mind - and one of the most valuable technology- watching sites I have encountered - is d.Comm, an Economist group publication. At its launch two years ago d.Comm was the group's first electronic publication - and, what's more, one with no paper-based equivalent. Its subtitle is "For the converging worlds of communications and information technology" - a broader focus, which explains why it turns out to be accessible and valuable to the non-specialist like me.There are departments for News (one story a day), News Briefings (backgrounds to the news, apparently produced at roughly weekly intervals - eg, "Carving up CompuServe") and Features, with an archive going back to July 1995 containing a rich store of interesting stuff.The technically interesting part of d.Comm is that the site can provide a customised version of the news and features it carries.