A New Statesman round-table discussion
Introduction On 29 October, the New Statesman hosted a round-table discussion on the role of Hull as a digital laboratory. Since the city opted for its own telephone company in the early 20th century, it has been a pioneering force in communications and, more recently, broadband technology. Through interactive TV and harnessing relationships with the BBC, among others, Hull has revolutionised education and entertainment. The purpose of this event was to ask: How do we take this further? How can public services benefit? Can these ideas be rolled out across the country? And what can Hull do to encourage people to work together to maximise the city's lead in this field and bring about real, positive changes in the community?
Participants
Kevin Beaton, Headteacher, Kingswood High School
Nigel Brain, Chairman and managing director, KTL
Ed Brown, Chief executive, North-east Adit
Nic Dakin, Labour leader, North Lincolnshire Council
William Davies, Senior research fellow, Digital Society, IPPR
Malcolm Fallen, Chief executive, Kingston Communications (seconded by Huw Saunders)
Steve Fleming, Group manager, Knowledge Economy Hull City Council
Archie Galbraith, Head of global healthcare, Accenture
Bill Haworth, Acting director, External Relations, Ofcom
Richard Heseltine, Director of academic services, University of Hull
Blair Jacobs (chair), Presenter of current affairs, BBC
Alan Johnson, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions
Stephen Lucey, Executive director for infrastructure, Becta
Elaine McMahon, Principal, Hull College
Spencer Neal, Publisher, New Statesman
John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister
Geoffrey Robinson, Chairman, New Statesman
Marie Taylor, Government affairs, Microsoft
Helen Thomas, Head of regional and local programmes, BBC East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire
Gerard Toplass, Managing director, Chisholms Computers, Citydigital
Adam Wasserman, Chief executive, Citybuild
Nick Watson, UK head of enterprise and public sector, Cisco
Blair Jacobs Welcome to "Hull: the digital laboratory". Today is very important because we're talking not just about how far Hull has come, but about how far Hull can go and how it can take the rest of the country with it. And it's particularly good to see the Deputy Prime Minister here. When I came to Hull, I had a typical southerner's narrow-minded view of what this part of the world was like. Within a week, that had been totally transformed. I've been in this city for eight years and it has changed almost beyond recognition. More companies than ever have come into the city, and more money from public and private hands. The question now is how we build on that success and the communications Hull has to offer; and, more importantly, how we can empower young people who live in Hull to continue what has been started. Education, health, information and entertainment are, I think, the four principal areas we'll be looking at today. It's now my great pleasure to ask the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, to say a few words.
John Prescott I'm here really as a student, learning more and feeling a bit guilty, as a member of parliament representing this city, that I should know more. Greg Dyke once told me that Hull was five years ahead of everyone else in terms of communications. Geoffrey Robinson told me what an exciting project it was. But the main question for me is whether we are moving as fast with this potential as we should, and whether the government is able to do more. It's quite clear we're talking about broadband and, as I've admitted, my office doesn't allow me to get near the mouse, never mind broadband - something to do with my temperament, they say. Nevertheless, everyone is agreed that Hull has a five-year start on some great technology. It's an advantage we must exploit to the full.
Developments such as the BBC's digital interactive system involve the whole community, and that is very exciting. Education is another important aspect. In the past, I've had the feeling that schools were separate from the community. They were to teach children about new things and not be influenced by the community outside. But Kevin Beaton's school - Kingswood in Hull, which you will hear more about today - shifts those boundaries, and that's something we can learn from.
Sustainability and developing communities are what we really need to think about, and I've got a £30bn programme to do just that. It's not only about housing estates; communities aren't just bricks and mortar. Making a sustainable community is about bringing issues such as education, transport, jobs, safety and the environment together so that people are proud of the area they live in.
What I haven't really thought through is the communications network. I've been advised that the government is already doing something on UK Online, which is apparently going to come to an end. This emphasises yet again that each government department is doing its own bit and this work really doesn't come together.
In such circumstances, how do we create sustainable communities? We have begun to plan communities, almost around the school, and that's a big step forward, but we can do more using broadband and using the example of Hull. What can government do to develop pilots? Government likes pilots, because they don't cost as much as a universal programme. We should use that to our advantage.
The idea of the Northern Way, a concept I developed for the three northern regions to come together, is to stop moaning about how the south is richer than the north, and instead look at the north's assets and how we can build on them. I was interested to hear that you already have a communications network among the universities, transport and hospitals. That this communication emanates from Hull outwards is very exciting and needs to be developed. We need to look at how to keep up the momentum of Hull's five-year advantage by bringing in government with its huge programmes, which could be geared in a much more co-ordinated way.
Blair Jacobs Thank you. Let's hear from Kevin Beaton, who joined Kingswood High School in 1999. Since then, amazing things have happened at the school - not least, attendance has improved by 20 per cent.
Kevin Beaton I want to talk about revolutionising teaching and learning. If someone from the 1800s came to our school today, they would not recognise the teaching. We are using a lot of visual digital material, which has mostly come from the BBC. This makes learning more fun, and that's critical, because it improves attendance. We've also found that the students are more able to make use of that new media, so they're making better use of their potential; they're becoming better learners, which has led to more success. Last year, we were in the top 100 of most-improved schools in the country.
We also now have teachers who think that teaching is fun. We have teachers who have been teaching for 20 years, and they're now doing things in a totally different way. Our staff absence rate is about half that of other schools in the city, and yet ours is seen as one of the tough schools. Pupil attendance has shot up dramatically and we're very close to 92 per cent, which means that Ofsted says we are satisfactory. When we first opened, we had a GCSE pass rate of 2.7 per cent, the worst in the country, but this year we achieved 28 per cent, and we're fairly confident we'll get 35 per cent next year.
We also have something called KBTV - Kingswood Broadband TV - and a lot of our youngsters are involved in helping to make films for that. They are helping to make the lessons, which is great because, if the students have made the lessons, they can't possibly complain about them. Hull Council has just given the project £2.4m, which will allow it to expand into three more clusters of schools. If we can achieve the same sort of success there, it will be an important move forward for Hull and, eventually, other areas in the country.
Blair Jacobs How can we use these experiences through the rest of the city and the rest of the country? How realistic is that concept?
Malcolm Fallen In terms of taking it nationwide, the challenge is getting a ubiquitous network. There isn't one, because you have BT nationally and Kingston Communications (KC) locally. I think it is possible, but empirical evidence is needed to demonstrate that it should go nationwide, and that's the point of today for me. Kingswood school is a microcosm of the evidence we need. We will miss the opportunity if we're not really focused and pragmatic. This is one for the policy-makers at a national level, because BT owns the infrastructure nationally. The commitment of KC is to help this city. We can't influence the national agenda, but let's provide the evidence in Hull and help the likes of John Prescott to develop a case for a national roll-out.
Blair Jacobs How do you go about rolling out into the city, so that staff in all its schools are able to communicate with and learn from staff at Kingswood?
Elaine McMahon Already, schools, colleges and the community in Hull are working together. For us as a college, it is about learning from the staff of Kevin's school and others about how they are using the technology. It's about sharing the opportunities and the potential of the equipment not just for young people, but for adults as well, so that the benefits do not stop when people leave school. What's really exciting is how it is feeding into the home. Young people are educating their families.
How do we make sure that we have the resources to encourage staff in schools, colleges and the community to work together and be trained at the same pace, and also to understand the potential of these resources?
Richard Heseltine The University of Hull is working with its partners in the city to provide training and development of programmes. Technology is one area where the universities could make a huge contribution. The eight universities in this region have probably the most pervasive and highest-capacity network in Yorkshire. There is huge potential for us to take that network and link it up with other higher and further education bodies, possibly providing a means of fulfilling aspirations for a broadband Northern Way.
Look at some of the ways in which we could create that, such as taking fibre up the canals: 18th-century canals being used for 21st-century technology is a fantastic image. You could link us to our equivalent in the north-west through the Leeds-Liverpool canal. It passes through all the brownfield sites where we want to see development; it goes past hospitals. There's huge potential, and universities have a central role to play.
Geoffrey Robinson Kevin, you said that lessons are using material from the BBC. How much do you add to that? What exactly does the BBC give you? Is it a basic concept, a structure around which you build? I have one other question. I think what you've done at Kingswood is tremendous, but is it ready for roll-out? You're improving, but national standards are moving as well, and you're still a bit behind. Do you really think you've got something that could be taken outside Hull at this stage?
Kevin Beaton The BBC supplies us with video clips and our staff fit them into their lessons. Our experience is that in one day a teacher can prepare 20 to 25 lessons using BBC material. That's quite a good return, because that material can then be used by anybody in the school. Standards have been driven up because people are no longer preparing a lesson just for themselves, but for everybody else in the school and, potentially, for everybody else in the city and even the country. So people are ensuring that the material they produce is good quality.
Certainly we are looking to roll it out into three other secondary schools and their clusters in Hull. We've set up a structure within the school that can handle it. What we've done is about technology, but it's also been about changing the way people look at teaching and learning in schools.
Geoffrey Robinson Where did all the training and know-how come from to apply this new technology?
Kevin Beaton The BBC has given us a lot of specialist training in terms of film-making and film-editing, but we now have staff who are capable of passing that information on to people. We've worked with KC, Sun Systems and many others to develop the infrastructure.
Helen Thomas The BBC has huge archives of learning material, and a big question over the past few years has been what to do with it all. Part of the trial in which we've been involved in Hull is to see what happens when we make learning videos available to schools. Does it make a difference, or does it confuse, irritate or make learning more complicated?
We've found that when content is available, it can be used in imaginative ways by teachers. We want to serve as a catalyst - to provide the raw material and allow teachers and schools to use their creativity to bring learning alive in the classroom. The technology in Hull has allowed us to extend the pilot to take learning into the home. Learning used to stop when the school closed and everybody went home. That's no longer the case, as KBTV in the home proves. Young people are using that platform to do their homework and they are showing their parents what they're doing. It's the accessibility of that content that has captured our imagination.
Blair Jacobs But isn't there a danger that the BBC is seen to be putting in the content that it wants broadcast?
Helen Thomas We had an interesting debate about that with partners in the early days. The BBC has a rather unfortunate reputation for telling people what they need. But I think, with Project Hull, we have moved away from that, and we have tried our best to work in partnership and to listen to teachers. Headteachers can be very direct. They tell us what they need and we try to provide it.
Blair Jacobs Let's move on from educating students to educating teachers. Is this used for teacher training?
Kevin Beaton At Kings-wood, we use it for some staff training. For example, there is a video clip showing how a student got an A* in art. It works for the students, but we also use it with staff. New staff can very quickly get an idea of what an A* piece of work is.
Blair Jacobs Gerard Top-lass, where do you feel it takes us in terms of changing people's mindsets so they move away from pen and paper and on to the keyboard and screen?
Gerard Toplass The content is very engaging, and if you can attract the kids' attention, then you will get a lot more from them. Combining that with some of the things the government is doing, such as putting whiteboard projectors into schools and the laptops for teachers scheme, is really driving up educational opportunities. I'm really interested in seeing this project rolled out across the UK, but in bite-size chunks.
Blair Jacobs Marie Taylor, there's probably no one in this room - except John, perhaps - who hasn't used Microsoft at some point in their life. How do you go about making a company such as Microsoft a household name? How would you suggest we make sure that as many people as possible know what is going on in Hull?
Marie Taylor I think there's a forgotten link here, and that's a cultural acceptance of this new technology. What we have been involved in, certainly in schools, is giving teachers the ability to deliver that. Because no matter what kit you put in, if people don't know how to use it, it'll gather dust. People get embarrassed - they don't like to say: "I don't know how to do this". You have to take a much more holistic approach to it, and technology is only one element of what's needed.
I don't think what is being done in Hull should be rolled out straight away. There's a tremendous amount to be done to bring people together in an understanding way and, if the Northern Way is a success, that is quite an achievement in itself. That's what will bring other people in: success breeds success.
Richard Heseltine I agree that there is lots to do in Hull, and we need to make sure we achieve it. However, if we want people to look at Hull as a leader in this area, then it's important to demonstrate that we can deliver outside of the area. Yorkshire would be a good first step.
Malcolm Fallen Everything Marie said resonated with me. You need to try things to understand what works and what doesn't. That's the concern I've always had about national roll-outs. If you just throw heaps of money at these things, they will fail. You need a controlled environment, such as Hull, to test what works. Richard's point about rolling it out to somewhere close to Hull makes sense, but you must build this thing first. This is evolution, not revolution, and long-term visions will not materialise if you don't put down some building blocks.
John Prescott I agree with what Marie said, because I felt that was one of the problems with comprehensive education. Politicians came in with ideas, but we didn't do anything about training teachers to a new system of education. I don't think it's a cultural problem; it's about confidence. Lots of people fear showing ignorance. My second point is to do with sustainable communities and the Northern Way. How do you get people to work together? The architects think one way, the planners another. People never interact to find the best result. We are starting to do that with the Northern Way project. We have a wonderful thing going here and great momentum - we just need to deepen and strengthen it.
I'm going to China next week and I'm going to visit a school that has a relationship with Hull. The Chinese use technology in the way we've been talking about in their schools, universities and health system; they are more conversant with modern techniques. I'd like to connect them with a school that's thinking like this here. It would be great to have an international connection through which to share experiences.
Blair Jacobs Kevin, did you have many problems with teachers saying, "I'm sorry - I just don't understand"?
Kevin Beaton At Kingswood, we have focused on developing the staff. Everybody who gets an interactive whiteboard also gets four training sessions, and everybody who takes part will have done some basic work on film-making and film editing, so we're not putting them into an unknown situation. In lots of areas, the students will learn ahead of the staff, but the staff and the community are also learning. It's not a case of the teacher always knowing best; to an extent, it's about changing the mindset of teachers so that they facilitate learning.
I think it is important that we have the long-term vision that says this can go outside of Hull, because it's no good having something that works only in Hull.
Stephen Lucey One of the things we are hearing here is recognition of the holistic approach. There are the firm foundations of the technology - without that, you get nowhere. We've heard about the content, in terms of having the resources available to build and be flexible. Equally, we've heard about the importance of practice, and this is not purely about using the technology; it's about pedagogic skills, and embedding it within the teaching and learning process.
Steve Fleming We've talked a lot about having a technological lead over other areas. I think what we're constructing is like the model foundation and, as a council, that's where we're investing. Education is the pathfinder programme, but it also relates to health, governance and public service modernisation. What we've found is that you can easily have the technology foundations, but unless people understand it, it won't necessarily have an effect. We're working with Nigel Brain to create a digital home showcase to demonstrate exactly what this technology will do; what value it generates for the individual, the community, the suppliers of public services and business. That knowledge and understanding have to be a key part of the foundations. One of the opportunities of the Northern Way is to work with people that we know already in the north-west and the north of England who are going down this road.
Spencer Neal People keep talking about changing mindsets. Something that came up when we carried out research for this event was that very few of the parents whose children are starting to do better at school, and who don't have any qualifications, have gone into any form of education since leaving school - only about 6 per cent of the 18-19 per cent of Hull's adults who have no qualifications, which is far less than in other parts of the country. Is there any emphasis on trying to get those adults in touch with this new technology?
Kevin Beaton We are running some courses for the parents and there's been quite a positive response. Without the parents looking to raise their own aspirations, I don't think we would have had the same impact on students.
John Prescott It's all about bringing the school back into the community. Over the past few years, I've visited a number of schools that provide for adult learning. Mothers can take their children to nursery and study for NVQs at the same time. Sometimes, they go on to be teaching assistants there. Suddenly, mothers who didn't think they had a chance of getting education have opportunities. That school then becomes part of the community. New technology could certainly assist with this. A big problem for Hull is that working-class people don't see education as part of their lives.
Just telling people about technology is not going to work. We have to create opportunities for people to work at their own pace and help them get over feeling ignorant, and instead feel that learning is fun. Children are the bridge between technology and their parents. The kids say, "This is not bad, I can do this", and that sparks interest in their parents.
Elaine McMahon It is all about connectivity, so that when a child asks his mum about something she doesn't know, she has somewhere she can go to find out. We need a connected approach to take the pilots forward.
Ed Brown About seven years ago, I did some work with the European Commission about the information society. There were five key elements: connectivity, access, content, people and institutions. We've talked about connectivity. With television and PCs, access becomes less of an issue. We've talked about the importance of content and skills, and the confidence to use those skills. What we haven't really talked about is institutions, and institutional barriers often get in the way of progress. I'm not here to knock BT, but clearly widespread roll-out would not necessarily be in its interests; it would cannibalise its other, more profitable markets. We also need to look at how the public sector, by more sensibly spending its existing revenues, can put high-speed broadband out so that businesses and citizens can access it. This is a policy role for government.
Gerard Toplass John talked about creating aspiration. I just hope we can be mindful of joining up the modernisation and the economic regeneration, because it would not be right for us to create aspiration in these kids, only for them to discover that there are no jobs and opportunities in this area.
Alan Johnson I arrived in Hull in 1997, as general secretary of the Communication Workers' Union. Before then, this city had been a no-go area not just for BT and the Post Office before it, but also for the CWU. I got off the train and was interviewed by KC's interactive TV company, and I thought: what is happening here in Hull? We were a bit resentful, to tell the truth - this place was streets ahead.
In the early 1900s, the decision was made to have a municipal telephone system. Hull was the only local authority to keep its own telephone company. Hull Telephones was the first to get an automatic exchange in the 1920s, and it had the first digital network in the 1980s. But it didn't mean anything particularly for the people of Hull; there was no great communications revolution. But at the end of the century, 51 per cent of KC shares were sold and suddenly Hull City Council was sitting on £262m. We then had the opportunity to use what had been done at the beginning of the 20th century to put Hull in the lead in the 21st century.
On broadband in particular, we were well ahead, and we are still in a position to make this advantage really count if we build on the biggest asset that Hull has: its partnerships. The BBC coming here was crucial, not least because it let the rest of the country know what was happening here. It's a shame that the people of Hull don't know more about it, and that's mainly down to resentment among the local media, which see it as competition and don't always report it as the breakthrough that it is.
So where will it take us? I think there are four real problem areas for Hull. One is education; another is health, for which we have some of the most dreadful statistics; the third is a low business birth-rate; and the fourth is reputation. There is huge regeneration of this city in terms of health. A large part of it is something called the Lift Project, through which every surgery is being refurbished. How new technology and partnerships can help very much depends on the Department of Health's approach.
Archie Galbraith In Britain, we are in the difficult position of trying to provide a public health service that retains the original concept of being free at the point of use, while overcoming the challenges of increasing cost and complexity, as well as delivery.
In Leeds, my organisation has 1,200 employees from 22 different countries, all working to support the NHS in terms of IT. As soon as they arrive, I try to explain to them why working in the NHS will not be the same as working in any other healthcare system. However, it is suffering from many of the same problems as other healthcare systems. And it's also enjoying some of the same developments, and I'll pin that down to one thing: we are getting better at treating patients.
Information is forcing significant change. A great deal of information is being released on the internet every day, though with a huge lack of control and direction. Healthcare is now less about your symptoms and more about your genes. It's about genomics, your socio-economic background, your family's health history, pharmaceuticals, health insurance companies and hospitals. All that information is coming together to underpin your healthcare. There is a possibility that somewhere like Hull can be a point of convergence. You may be in a position to retain your five-year advantage by bringing information from education, social services and healthcare to create the best possible resource to support your local citizens. Does anybody remember cottage hospitals? We've rediscovered them. The principle is to keep patients local, treat them local, keep them at home. People are not going into hospital nearly as often. The most sophisticated health analysts say we need to get over the idea that the number of beds equals the level of healthcare; it's actually the wellbeing of your citizens that equals the level of healthcare. What we're doing is moving healthcare into the community, into the GP practice, into the cottage hospital and, ultimately, into the home. Imagine a situation where digital TV allows access to health services in the home: diabetics, for example, would be able to manage their condition without going near a hospital. Much as I would like to claim all the credit, working as I do for a technology company, healthcare is never good at technology. It's always more about people supporting members of the community and maintaining their health.
Blair Jacobs Let's talk about how Hull can move forward on the subject of health. Huw Saunders, how far ahead of the game does KC think this city is - was it five years ahead, and is it still ahead now?
Huw Saunders In a global context, if you look purely at the technology, the answer is probably that five years has been rapidly eroded. But the technology itself is not, as Archie says, the most important issue. At the moment, we have an opportunity to use the technology that we've already got to maintain our lead in terms of delivering benefits to people. One of the concerns I have about healthcare in the UK is that it is very top-down, and there's a huge centralised programme, rightly, of investment in and implementation of new technologies. I find it difficult to understand how a regional, bottom-up approach can introduce new things and do it rapidly and optimise the benefits for the people of Hull.
Archie Galbraith It is a challenge to link national programmes to local activities. The history of information use in the NHS is islands of good practice and investment, pilots that stopped and progress that never joined up. So individual hospitals and individual GPs are doing fabulous work, using technology in a way that Kingswood High School does, but nobody sees it, and it doesn't become the predominant model. I must admit, my temptation would be to not ask for permission to do it, but to just do it. Don't ask the NHS; don't ask us. We have a responsibility to provide a service to the GPs, and that's it. How they use it, what benefit they get out of it, has to be expressed locally.
Huw Saunders It's only a minor point, but one of the concerns I have about engaging with the healthcare community on a local basis is that some aspects of the NHS structure may impede that. For example, we don't provide connectivity directly to the NHS any more. In the context of the new programme, called N3, we provide it to BT, and BT provides it to Accenture, as the local IT contractor, which then provides it, via the primary care trusts and so on, to the health sites in the area. That sort of arrangement is not necessarily a complete barrier, but it does cause concerns about how you capture localness. Next week, I've got to go to Birmingham to talk to BT about the provision of connectivity to GP surgeries in Hull. Is that local?
Archie Galbraith I would correct one part of the structure: the connectivity between hospitals is not Accenture's responsibility - it is BT's. It works that way because a single national contract means you deal with a single national contractor, but my suggestion was much less to do with talking about technology; it was more to do with talking to GPs and saying that Hull can do this. But it is a challenge, because islands of capability have always existed, and a single national approach necessarily puts you in a position where you need to understand how to link those islands together.
Blair Jacobs Let's talk about how this technology can help the most important factor in this, the patient. Archie, you mentioned the possibility of having healthcare at home - healthcare on the TV. Is there not a danger of patients becoming their own GP?
Archie Galbraith There is a generational divide here. My parents' generation had their own GPs. They did not call the GP out at night, or when they had flu, or when a child had the measles. My child sees the GP every time I'm worried about her. Our expectations have changed. As a result, the load that we put on the NHS has changed and the way in which we need to supply that demand is going to change.
Blair Jacobs Steve, how does the city council view these different ways in which patients are dealt with, the different ways they can access information?
Steve Fleming We want to look at how this links into other services such as social care and housing. We've talked to people in sheltered housing and to the professionals and support staff operating in the field. One of the lessons from this is that it's not just a health service solution. What we can do at the local level is to pull things together to deliver wider social returns.
On the generational point, my uncle was a carer for my grandma, aged 100. I told him we were going to put interactive TV in every home so that he could get all the services he needed down the phone line. Then I realised they'd never had a phone. This was a bit of a problem. But my uncle, who's in his mid-seventies, pulled out his mobile phone. "I've got this now," he said, "to make sure that social services, the nurses and everybody else don't turn up at the same time." So what we're trying to do is take that dynamic view and that real need in the community and put together a proposition that benefits the different areas.
Blair Jacobs That's all very well, but who pays for it? The NHS, the council?
Steve Fleming The council will pay for some of it, but we think others can contribute as well, because others will benefit: for example, departments concerned with housing. There's clearly money around, but often it is not joined up with a clear proposition. It's not a question of automating what we do; it's a question of fundamentally changing how things are done. That's a big lesson learnt from the Kingswood project in terms of education. The same can be done with health.
Archie Galbraith We should stop talking about the lack of resources and start talking about the willingness to do it. There's a lack of channelling, integration and collaboration, but not money.
Spencer Neal We have been very careful not to identify one of the great obstacles, which is bloody-minded reluctance. Of the 256 GPs in Hull, I would love to know how many have warmly embraced what technology can do for their surgeries. I suspect, very few, and likewise with social services, and so on.
Archie Galbraith Across Europe, our GPs are the highest users of technology to run their practice, learn new medicine and communicate with patients.
Gerard Toplass So let's support them. Let the council support them and all of the stakeholders support them, as people have done with Kevin in education.
William Davies The technology is not being presented to the public sector in the best way. There is too much talk of job cuts and efficiencies when what the technology enables is an enhancement of professional capabilities. It frees up professionals to do what they can do and what the computers can't.
Archie Galbraith In my experience, it is very difficult to tell doctors that they should change how they work. They tend to tell us how they work and expect us to build technology that's sympathetic to it.
Stephen Lucey We shouldn't underestimate peer power. Colleagues working together and seeing how a new system can be deployed, and how it delivers value, is much more powerful than governments or agencies saying this is a good thing and you should adopt it.
Geoffrey Robinson As a politician, I know people out there are expecting big improvements, and they are aware of the huge amount of money going into your area. But at the moment, there is significant doubt about how effective that's going to be in achieving what they all want, which is better hospitals and better doctors working together.
It seems to me there's a danger that all this information and capacity will run ahead of people's ability to use it and, more frankly, their need to use it all. Once you start talking about integrating everything, it gets very complex. If only we could just tackle simple things at the bottom, and here you have a real chance of doing that. You have huge investment coming in. The question is whether you use it properly.
Steve Fleming Spencer asked whether all the GPs in Hull had bought into this. Well, look at the Kingswood pilot. At first, that was isolated, but now all headteachers and schools want to buy into it because they can see the value. That's what will happen with GPs, too.
Blair Jacobs We've spoken about education and health. Let's now talk about how we connect locally.
Helen Thomas I'm going to tell you a bit about what we call Project Hull, which is a £25m investment programme by the BBC in Hull, the East Riding of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. The ambition of the project was very clear from the beginning: it was to connect locally. The BBC chose this part of the world because it wasn't doing very well here: people felt that the licence fee wasn't worth paying for, and that the BBC had very little relevance to their day-to-day lives. The BBC was also a little more enchanted by this area because of the technology that was available to trial content on demand.
There were five themes: to build a new television region; to build a new BBC building; to open the ground floor to the public, providing what we call an "open centre"; to get a BBC bus on the road to take learning and technology to what we think are difficult-to-reach areas and audiences; and our broadband television trial to see what would happen to content. We are now three years into this five-year project, and perhaps one of the most interesting parts of it has been LearnXpress, a partnership with local schools, the city council, City Learning, CityDigital, KC and Yorkshire Forward - the regional development agency - to name a few. The BBC is only part of the jigsaw in this city, and in our Building Public Value document it is clear that the corporation, at the very highest level, realises that working in partnership is the way forward.
Parts of the broadband trial really struck a chord with people around the country. When we first started, we put the learning content alongside very local content - for example, local news. We wanted to know how local we had go before people turned off. We found out that we couldn't get local enough. Now the BBC hopes to open 60 local TV outlets around the UK. Another finding was the appetite of our audiences to create content. The level of skill out there is quite terrifying, and it's a real rude awakening for us that our audiences are just as good, if not better, at creating content than professionals inside the organisation. Kevin is proof of that. The competition to my regional news programme is KBTV News. He played me an episode at a recent conference and I picked up some great stories that my teams had missed.
Nigel Brain The future of technology depends on many different types of organisations coming together. In Hull, you have the network operator, KC; you also have the city council with the vision and the will; and then you have technology specialists such as KTL, which is currently the leading broadband test laboratory in the world. Together, these organisations can make Hull the broadband capital of Britain.
Blair Jacobs Let's talk about regeneration.
Nic Dakin As someone who began his working life in Hull, teaching in a high school, I'm very fond of the city. Hull used to have an active passing seaborne trade. The new passing trade is digitally borne, and we need to capture it. IT doesn't recognise any boundaries at all, and that can be a threat to an area - it can be left behind - but it can also be a great opportunity. Yorkshire Forward is one of many agencies that provide opportunities to help areas on their way, by joining things together and ensuring that partnerships deliver.
Yorkshire Forward's overriding aim is to make the region of Yorkshire and the Humber a world-class region, and that chimes with the whole Northern Way agenda. To deliver that world-class region, Yorkshire Forward has three priorities. One is around key cluster developments - particularly commercial and industrial clusters - to make sure they play their role in delivering prosperity to the region. One of those clusters is digital media, so what we're discussing here ties directly into that agenda.
Then there's the agenda of renaissance. Humber strikes me as an area that isn't yet punching at its weight, let alone above its weight. The third priority is connecting with people. Technology on its own doesn't do that; it's about how you deliver the skills and challenge people's reluctance. There are lots of things happening in and around Hull. There's lots of money coming from different sources, but we need the imagination to join those sources to maximise the benefits.
Blair Jacobs I was interested to read that a Royal Mail survey suggested that Hull had the second-fastest rate of business start-ups in the UK in 2003. I've never seen so many new companies come to a city. How do we continue to attract start-ups to the city?
Adam Wasserman Citybuild was created with Yorkshire Forward, English Partnerships and the council to evolve the area's strategy, so there'll be more projects and we'll move them along. The idea is to slot in seamlessly with what Yorkshire Forward and the council are doing. We're trying to understand where this community wants to be economically ten or 20 years from now; what sort of industries will be unique to this region and why.
The buildings we build will be increasingly targeted towards certain user types. We're going to tell a story, and the marketing story of Cityimage and others will help communicate that Hull is more than just a great city with a waterfront. What are the exact reasons for that? How are the universities playing a very specific role? How are they making use of the technological infrastructure? There is a distinction between technology-creating firms and technology-using firms.
There's a lot of work still to be done to build on all the excellent projects where people are working together, but Hull is definitely a city where people want to be. And that's the objective. It's no good offering investors a nice building if the city is not somewhere where they want to set down roots.
Blair Jacobs Do people want all this technology? Has anyone asked people living in Hull?
Bill Haworth If Hull really is five years ahead of everyone else, then that's very encouraging, but I think other areas are catching up. We are looking at broadband availability; we are working with a lot of people, such as NTL and BT, to open up broadband in rural areas, particularly in the north of England, and it is part of our ongoing review of public service broadcasting. So yes, we think it is very important. We don't regulate the internet, but that doesn't mean we aren't interested in services that are provided through the internet, particularly with the onset of broadband. We want to open it up as far as possible, or at least do what we can to facilitate that.
Localness is another subject close to our hearts. In addition to ITV, we license things such as local TV stations, and we are looking at a whole raft of applications from local community radio as well. Regionality forms a fairly major plank of our review of public service broadcasting, Phase 2 of which we published a few weeks ago. One of the questions we always ask is "Are people interested in local services?", and the answer is always "yes", but when you ask if they watch them, you get a slightly different answer. I wonder whether the BBC had a similar response in its research.
Helen Thomas That's something we were interested to learn as well. It's all very well offering local content, but does anyone watch it? When we first launched, back in 2001, we had a national bulletin and a very local bulletin. I think most people in the BBC know I was very nervous about this, because the national bulletin was very sophisticated and the local bulletin, well, we didn't have a TV studio in Hull in those days. We had one of our radio staff sitting at a desk, reading from a piece of paper, and we measured what people watched. Many people watched local bulletins over a period of four weeks, but no one watched the national content. We were so staggered that we had to check that the tickers were working. In the broadband TV trial, we found that local content constantly outperformed national content.
Spencer Neal At the risk of being the devil's advocate, looking at the BBC's role as a public service broadcaster, the appeal of localism is not necessarily a good thing.
Helen Thomas Why?
Spencer Neal Because it can lead to parochialism and isolation; people possibly lose their sense of belonging to a broader, more diverse society.
Helen Thomas If, as a public service broadcaster, we offered only localness, we could be accused of that. If we offer localness alongside a broader range of content, we offer people a choice. I think that's exactly what we should be doing.
Geoffrey Robinson I would have thought the more worrying thing is that nobody watched the national news.
Helen Thomas The key is to offer people a choice of content. What we did do in year two of the trial - because my colleagues in London were not jumping for joy at this research - was look at what would happen if we mixed news content. We offered a range of content, all the time measuring what was watched, and again it was the local content.
William Davies I think what Helen has presented will, in the long run, turn out to be the most politically profound transformation that this technology enables. The reason I think that is because, before we had things such as broadband, technologies were more or less split between those that operated in the public sphere - books, television and film, for example - and those that operated in the private sphere - such as postcards, letters, and so on. In between, you had things like parish cir-culars and pamphlets, but the ability to shift between the two was limited.
The new technology enables extraordinary flexibility to move between very small and very large spheres of dialogue and interaction, and I think the great political opportunity is to link the local to the national and global. It's the ability to scale up spheres of political debate, which is what BBCi, I think, explicitly tries to do. It helps people connect around national issues at a local level, and they can then feed that local movement into the national debate.
However, this does create a lot of ambiguity around whether you're operating at a public and national level, or at a much more local and, potentially, private level. This is where media literacy comes in, on which Ofcom has developed a strategy. The confidence to use this technology is very unevenly spread, and the danger with a lot of participative forms of software and local portals is that they reinforce existing inequalities. For example, places such as Richmond, in south-west London, have wonderful community websites, but the confidence to use them is what makes them really work, and that varies across the classes.
There can also be uncertainty over when you're in the public sphere and the private sphere, so there's a danger that people abuse the technology. We see this with things such as weblogs, which look like journalism until suddenly someone starts talking about their cat or their private life. But what if somebody starts discussing someone else's sexual behaviour? Media literacy is all about helping people to distinguish what type of medium they are using.
Nigel Brain There are two things that everyone should consider, and they are the commercial attractiveness of Hull and the ability to provide services to local residents. Citybuild said it wants to build new opportunities to attract new investment in the city. First, it has to make its buildings broadband compatible. Second, it has to think of the ways in which the services that are being provided now are going to change in the future. What if somebody wants to watch the television, do their homework, log on to their local surgery and make a phone call at the same time? You can't do that with the broadband technology of today. What you need is the broadband technology of tomorrow.
Huw Saunders Technology always changes, and you always have to take a viewpoint about what is deployable and what isn't. I'm more interested in the way that the services enabled by technology are then taken up, and I think the issues that were raised by Helen and Will are critical to understanding what technologies are important in moving forward. At the end of the day we can deploy higher bandwidth services, but what is the driver for that and what are the consequences? Is there an economic and social model that we need to understand when we drive this forward?
Blair Jacobs There's surely an argument that it's more important to make sure that people want this technology before you start introducing them to it.
Huw Saunders Absolutely. Through the implementation of BBCi in Hull, the BBC has learnt that value can be created today without the need for investment in new technology. Yes, the new technology will help - it will make things more seamless; it might help provide multiple streams of content - but ultimately you can do everything with the current technology. So let's get on with it. Let's continue to use Hull as a digital laboratory in order to learn other lessons.
Gerard Toplass We've talked a lot about education, health, services and technology. We also need to talk about economics. It's not just schools and hospitals that can use this technology, but businesses too, and we aren't really talking about that. I'm very concerned that the public sector could use procurement as a real driver to create economic regeneration in the region and in the city, and small to medium-sized enterprises need to respond to that by embracing the technology.
Nick Watson Let me give you an observation as somebody coming to Hull for the first time today. I expect to have broadband wherever I go, and I need it to function because my business works that way. But the hotel I'm staying in doesn't have broadband or wireless. So I have a lot of work to catch up on when I head south again. I can see that you have a reason to be ahead - you have a proliferation of broadband services available and you're using them fantastically well for education. You have a huge opportunity sitting right in front of you, but you are not making the most of it.
Steve Fleming That's a very important issue. Leads last for so long, but people overtake you, and one of the things we are doing as a council is looking at what we will need in this city to have an impact. The issue, as Gerard mentioned, is Hull's economic basis. It will require a lot for the lessons of Kingswood to take off and be applied across all education in Hull at all levels. I take your point about things like wireless access. There is a new service you can text that tells you where the nearest public wireless access point is, which in this case is a hotel across the River Humber - not very handy. It has to be made easier. If you can't come and do what you want to do, then we're not getting it right.
Blair Jacobs We all would, I suggest, share two things: a love of Hull and the enthusiasm to make a difference. Hull has an awful lot of residents who don't work in the city, and I would suggest that it's also our responsibility to make their life as entertaining as possible, because someone said to me, not a million miles away from here: "If it ain't fun, why do it?" Thank you to the New Statesman for organising this - it's been a fascinating discussion.
Geoffrey Robinson Thank you all for coming. It's been a great opportunity to showcase Hull - perhaps, in a few years' time, we can see what's come of it.
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