£1 billion stimulus plan needed to make IT green

Environmental group Global Action Plan has called on the Government to create a  £1 billion 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, the organisation is pursuing the objective in association with a consortium of diverse and influential groups.

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; and
• Support projects that are locally conceived and delivered.

Trewin Restorick, CEO of Global Action Plan, warned 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,” Restorick said. “Bizarrely, this comes with a climate change strategy which is world-leading.”

He continued, “There’s a legally binding commitment to reduce carbon emissions by 80 per cent 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. The cash-neutral law will penalise those lower down the table of polluters, and reward those higher up, according to Global Action Plan.

“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 per cent last year, and IT was a major part of this increase,” Restorick said.

Local government, on the other hand, has huge opportunities through sharing services and collaboration, according to Global Action Plan. The proposed stimulus package would address one barrier to this — a lack of capital — but other issues remain, 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 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,” Miller said. “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.”

Ewen Anderson, managing director of the IT consultancy Centralis, responded, “IT strategy, like government policy, only really works when it is joined up. Investment in IT which fails to take advantage of the opportunity offered by virtualisation, standardisation and shared services to deliver both operational and environmental benefits is neither strategic nor green. An effective strategy considers energy use and resulting carbon emission as part of an overall strategy to reduce costs and increase efficiency.”

Anderson continued, “While the climate change agenda is too important to be seen as just a side benefit, it has to take its place alongside commitments to deliver flexible working, business continuity in the face of global threats such as swine flu and ever more emphasis on compliance regulation and cost savings.”