Conservative technology commitments

The Conservative Party has published its manifesto for the 2010 UK general election – here are the main technology-related commitments.

Economy

Government procurement is a £200 billion a year market that can be used much better to stimulate enterprise and innovation. We will take steps to open up government procurement to small and innovative businesses by:

• publishing online all government tender documents for contracts worth over £10,000 via the Supply2Gov website.
• creating a level playing field for open source ICT in government procurement.
• opening up contracts to SME s by breaking up large ICT projects into smaller components.

We want Britain to become a European hub for hi-tech, digital and creative industries – but this can only happen if we have the right infrastructure in place. Establishing a superfast broadband network throughout the UK could generate 600,000 additional jobs and add £18 billion to Britain's GDP. We will scrap Labour's phone tax and instead require BT and other infrastructure providers to allow the use of their assets to deliver superfast broadband across the country. If necessary, we will consider using the part of the licence fee that is supporting the digital switchover to fund broadband in areas that the market alone will not reach.

Spending

Transparency is crucial to creating a value for money culture. We will publish all items of spending over £25,000 online, and the salaries of senior civil servants in central government will also be published.

Culture

We will:

• ban companies from using new peer-to-peer marketing techniques targeted at children, and tackle marketing on corporate websites targeted at children.
• establish a new online system that gives parents greater powers to take action against irresponsible commercial activities targeted at children.

Health

We will publish detailed data about the performance of healthcare providers online, so everyone will know who is providing a good service and who is falling behind.

Patients will be able to rate hospitals and doctors according to the quality of care they received.

Policing

We will oblige the police to publish detailed local crime data statistics every month, in an open and standardised format.

Parliament

We will introduce a new Public Reading Stage for Bills to give the public an opportunity to comment on proposed legislation online.

Public data

Drawing inspiration from administrations around the world which have shown that being transparent can transform the effectiveness of government, we will create a powerful new right to government data, enabling the public to request – and receive – government datasets in an open and standardised format. Independent estimates suggest this could provide a £6 billion boost to the UK economy.

We will open up Whitehall recruitment by publishing central government job vacancies online, saving costs and increasing transparency. A Conservative government will bring in new measures to enable the public to scrutinise the government's accounts to see whether it is providing value for money. All data will be published in an open and standardised format.

We will:

• require public bodies to publish online thejob titles of every member of staff and the salaries and expenses of senior officials paid more than the lowest salary permissible in Pay Band 1 of the Senior Civil Service pay scale, and organograms that include all positions in those bodies.
• require senior servants to publish online details of expense claims and meetings with lobbyists.
• apply these transparency principles to local government, with the threshold for publication of spending items and contracts set at £500, and for the publication of salaries the same as at the national level.

IT procurement

This government has a dreadful record of managing procurement, with billions of pounds wasted on mismanaged projects. We will tackle wasteful government procurement projects by:

• strengthening the role of the Chief Information Officer to get a grip on government ICT projects.
• introducing a series of changes to ICT procurement to deliver better value for money.
• publishing in full government contracts for goods and services worth over £25,000.
• increasing the accountability of EU spending by publishing details of every UK project that receives over £25,000 of EU funds.

Data protection and privacy

The database state is a poor substitute for the human judgement essential to the delivery of public services. Worse than that, it gives people false comfort that an infallible central state is looking after their best interests. But the many scandals of lost data, leaked documents and database failures have put millions at risk. It is time for a new approach to protecting our liberty.

We will scrap ID cards, the National Identity Register and the Contactpoint database.

Wherever possible, we believe that personal data should be controlled by individual citizens themselves. We will strengthen the powers of the Information Commissioner to penalise any public body found guilty of mismanaging data.

We will legislate to make sure that our DNA database is used primarily to store information about those who are guilty of committing crimes rather than those who are innocent. We will collect the DNA of all existing prisoners, those under state supervision who have been convicted of an offence, and anyone convicted of a serious recordable offence. We pushed the Government to end the permanent retention of innocent people's DNA , and we will change the guidance to give people on the database who have been wrongly accused of a minor crime an automatic right to have their DNA withdrawn.

Other steps include:

• requiring Privacy Impact Assessments of any proposal that involves data collection or sharing.
• ensuring proper Parliamentary scrutiny of any new powers of data-sharing.

Overseas aid

We will ensure British aid money is properly spent by publishing full details of British aid on the DFID website. This will include spending data on a project-by-project basis, published in an open and standardised format so that it can be used by third party websites.