Meet the new Ecommerce Minister

There's a new face behind the drive to get the UK wired. Ben King went down to Victoria Street to meet him...

When Tony Blair appointed Stephen Timms the new Ecommerce Minister in May, he created something unusual - a minister with qualifications and experience in technology.

Timms worked in the industry for 15 years, at Logica and Ovum, before entering Parliament in 1994.

His personal style is correspondingly unministerial. In contrast to his ultra-slick predecessor, Timms is, in the nicest possible way, slightly geeky - like a very tall but surprisingly articulate physics teacher.

He took office at a good time for the broadband industry, shortly after BT's DSL price cut sent DSL adoption rates soaring. So the issue that his predecessor was routinely grilled over - that DSL was too expensive and no one could afford it - had ceased to apply.

So the first half of the government's oft-quoted target of making the UK the "most competitive and extensive broadband market in the G7" by 2005 appears to be, if not achievable, then something that we may not miss too badly. So what remains for an Ecommerce Minister to do?

There is always the competition side of the equation. His full title is Minister of State for Ecommerce and Competitiveness, so it would be a worthy object of his attention. With BT Wholesale now targeting a 50 per cent share of the broadband market, and no one seeming likely to be able to stop it, how will the UK manage to be a competitive broadband market too?

Says Timms: "If you compare the position here with some of the other European countries the market is much more competitive. And I think that is the reason why prices are going down in the UK and in other countries they are going up. So I feel pretty confident on the competitiveness point."

Forty per cent of the market has a choice between DSL and cable, he says, and other technologies, such as fixed wireless, satellite, digital terrestrial television and even 3G mobile will eventually give customers a range of options for wireless access.

"I think we have a regulatory approach and a competitive requirement which augurs well for this. Obviously Oftel [and its successor Ofcom] will need to keep a close eye on this, but I think for now the outlook is pretty hopeful."

One problem the government has always had with broadband policy is that it lacks levers to genuinely influence what happens on the ground. Subsidies are just not New Labour's style and other than that there's not a lot that government can do.

One of the more sensible plans put forward by government is to get public sector bodies in areas where broadband infrastructure is not yet available to club together to create a single contract which a telecoms company can bid for.

The main aim of this public sector demand aggregation is to make it viable to supply areas where broadband is not yet available. So why not use the same instrument to make it worthwhile for a second entrant to supply a market which is currently only supplied by only one provider?

Timms wouldn't commit to this. The services will be supplied competitively, he said, and: "The focus will be on getting the best value for customers." But as for actually building the development of competition into the remit of the newly appointed advisors helping to boost public sector demand aggregation Timms wouldn't commit. He may not seem like a typical politician but he can evade a question like the best of them.

Much of his effort going forward will focus on developing new content initiatives. Timms said: "Next month Gordon Brown will announce for the next financial year. At that point we will know how much is going to be invested in public services through the next four years.

"Now there is no doubt at all there will, as part of that settlement, be very significant sums going into broadband.

"We know already from what the health service has already said and we know because they were in the budget and they have made it clear they are going to be putting a high priority on networking.

"And we will be seeing something along those lines for the other public services, for schools for example and amongst local authorities. So there are going to be substantial sums invested in that."

Following BT's price cut it seems the emphasis of government policy is shifting from infrastructure to content. Some projects, such as NHS Direct, are already focusing on this. Whether the government can find enough sensible projects in this area remains to be seen.

Some of that money could be spent on proposals put forward in the broadband content pilots study, sponsored by the Digital Content Forum and the DTI, published today.

There are a range of proposals including a Broadband Channel run by the government as a publicly funded attempt to prime the pump for broadband, as well as a broadband tourism portal. We await the DTI's response to these proposals with interest.

As I leave his DTI office, Timms digs out an old report on broadband, co-authored by a certain Stephen Timms of Ovum. It's from the early 1980s but the Ovum logo looks as if it dates from a decade before, from an era of progressive rock.

Timms flicks through to the page where his predictions for the number of broadband connections appear. Back in the eighties he reckoned that 200,000 customers would be connected by the year 2000.

Oftel's figure is 60,000 for the end of 2000 - the 200,000 mark was passed some time in 2001, so he's less than a year out, which isn't bad for a prediction made a decade earlier. We hope his predictions for the future of the industry prove as accurate.