Liam Maxwell: The State must give us back our data

Liam Maxwell is a Councillor and the Lead Member for Policy and Performance at the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead. He is the author of It's ours - why we, not government, must own our data, which is published today by the Centre for Policy Studies.

Since 1997 the Government must have got through at least £140 billion on information systems in a naïve belief that if you spend enough the men in white coats can make government more efficient. At the moment the cash burn rate of IT is £16.7 billion a year, that is more than 1% of our entire GDP and much higher than any similar country. It is also, according to Andy Burnham no less, almost 50% more than we spend on drugs in the NHS.

A recent study showed that only 30% of commissioned systems work. Budgets get broken by ludicrous amounts.  We all know about the NHS supercomputer and the Offender Management System, but here’s a new one just out from the NAO: the Department for Work and Pensions want to get more people to use their online customer system.  More than half of their customer-base can use the internet and yet  after huge spending the take-up was  – to use the National Audit Office's words – “tiny”.

Out of the 142 million contacts with the public, only 340,000 (about 0.25%) used the online services. What a waste. Why do they get it so wrong?

Liam Maxwell: How the internet took Obama back to the 1950s

Liam Maxwell's paper on Barack Obama's internet campaign is published by the Centre for Policy Studies tomorrow (download a copy).  Liam Maxwell is a councillor in Windsor and Maidenhead.

On the eve of Bill Clinton's election in 1992, his campaign manager James Carville thanked his troops in the "War Room" saying "We changed the way campaigns were run …we took out the hierarchy….  you people showed you could be trusted".

Barack Obama's brilliantly eclectic combination of young talent halfway up a skyscraper in downtown Chicago is but the very tip of a huge campaign body of one and a half million committed volunteers that have changed the rules all over again. With 6 million e-mail addresses, 3 million donors, 1.5 million volunteers and at last count 800 pages of Facebook friend requests every day the campaign towers over the McCain machine.

Compare the campaign's 43 offices in Indiana (which last voted blue in 1964) with McCain's one. Add to this the problems the GOP's talismanic Voter Vault  was rumoured to be having and it is no surprise that in states like Indiana and Iowa the Republican campaign is floundering.

When we met last week, Penny Pritzker, the architect of the Obama ground game in fundraising, explained how Obama had raised three times as much as McCain.

The requirement was simple – "we need a huge number of people on the ground, with a consistent message very quickly". Small contribution funding will follow if everyone has the feeling of involvement.