25th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

Lord Puttnam Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Puttnam (Lab)]

My Lords, we are all indebted to the noble Baroness for the opportunity to discuss and debate this subject. I declare an interest as I am a very pale imitation of the noble Baroness and I struggle to match her achievements: I am the national digital champion of the Republic of Ireland. Through the Open University, Promethean and the Times Educational Supplement, I have been able to engage with education transformation right across the piece.

I start with some amazingly good news. Ten days ago, on 6 January, 1 million teachers shared lesson plans and ideas with each other across the web on this one day at the beginning of term. Not only did that possibility not exist at all in 2008, but that degree of co-operation would have been unimaginable during the six years that I worked with the Department of Education not that long ago. Quite extraordinary things are taking place but, as has been said, the digital world is both a creator and, potentially, a destroyer of jobs, even of lives. I do not believe that that is fully understood by government or business. In their own ways, both the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, are right: there are extraordinary opportunities and great dangers. Jaron Lanier’s book, Who Owns the Future?, unblinkingly sets out these challenges. He, like Sir Tim Berners-Lee, seeks what he describes as a very humanistic economy enabled by the world wide web. The noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, suggested that we should seek the web that we want and I agree with her.

In the couple of moments left to me, I want to make a suggestion, which I hope does not sound too Utopian because it is not intended to be so. Governments always tend to be behind the curve on this type of thing but here is a suggestion that I suspect the noble Lord, Lord Bates, in responding, will like very much indeed. Almost 20 years ago, I had the pleasure of serving under the noble Lord, Lord Chadlington, in the early days of the National Lottery, looking at ways in which that extraordinary creation of Sir John Major was able genuinely to transform opportunities for arts and other organisations in the UK. Similarly, an amazing statistic—I rely here entirely on the Email Statistics Report published in Palo Alto last year—is that 183 billion e-mails are sent every day. At the outset, had we had the wit to place a 1p levy on each e-mail—these are unaudited figures—that would generate today £730 billion worldwide. That figure is 29 times the total amount spent by the United Nations and all its agencies each year. It is more than the global aspiration for development and climate change mitigation recommended by the UN. Last year, the need of UNICEF, of which I was UK president, was £1.7 billion, of which only 46% is currently funded. This tiny 1p levy could totally change the landscape of aid and the opportunities for multinational support worldwide.

I realise that it is rather late in the day to suggest this, but there is another advantage. If there were such a levy, it might allow people to pause momentarily before hitting that quite dreadful “Reply to All” button.