The challenge of delivery

It is slightly unusual for a junior government minister to be so closely associated with a major government strategy, but over the past eight months we have seen hundreds of references to ‘Stephen Carter’s Digital Britain Report’. With his departure, we’re seeing a new focus on how the report’s recommendations will be implemented, including some speculation about cross-party approaches.

Writing and agreeing a strategy can be very hard work, but the real challenge comes after that. Getting the government machine into gear to deliver  on announcements, particularly where big sums of money are involved, can take time and determination, and we’re now into that phase. And we will be doing it without the man most closely associated with the project. There should in the near future be an announcement about ministerial responsibilities, but in the meantime officials remain hard at work.

I’m not sure what the reaction among those who have followed the project from outside government is likely to be – do you expect much to change in the post-Carter era? What is his successor’s No. 1 priority?

Have your say on Digital Britain

This discussion site has been created by the Secretariat for the Digital Britain Steering Board, to provide a space for you to engage with us directly in an online debate about Digital Britain. See the about page for more background.

We’re delighted at the extent of discussion taking place already via the Writetoreply site, on Twitter and across the blogosphere, and we’re monitoring it as closely as we can. We’ve created a dashboard to aggregate all the comments and content posted elsewhere, and intend to post links on this site to items of particular interest.

We really want feedback, good and bad, on the proposals we have put forward, so please put your thoughts in via comments on this site or elsewhere using the tag ‘digitalbritain’. We will feed your comments through to the Digital Britain Steering Board and will be introducing more topics from the Steering Board members over the coming weeks.

To start this off, Stephen Carter is inviting general feedback on the interim report and the issues you think are most important. Please let us have your views by posting a comment below.