IT holds key to East London regeneration

Everywhere you go in an office, regulators want to control your life.

In Docklands, the University of East London (UEL) holds an excellent conference around the 2012 Olympics. Sports minister Richard Caborn underlines how the Department of Culture, Media and Sport will work with the London boroughs of Newham, Tower Hamlets and Hackney to mix the £2.4bn Olympics into a wider programme of economic regeneration for the neglected east bit of the UK’s otherwise booming South East.

Everyone hopes that the Games will mesh with the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s Thames Gateway project, which, starting with an investment of £850m by 2008, aims to build 120,000 homes by 2016, from the Olympic boroughs on its western edge, on to Southend in Essex and Sheerness in Kent. But will the Gateway, the largest single housing development in the EU, ever wield impressive IT as a tool for regeneration? Don’t hold your breath.

The Games will be a media and IT-intensive affair. But as UEL professors Phil Cohen and Gavin Poynter note, the Games alone cannot provide dynamic regeneration. Their cultural impact looks unlikely to solve social deprivation in East London and beyond; and while jobs may accrue around the Olympic sites, only homes will multiply to the east of these, despite the poor transport links.

What is needed in the Gateway, Poynter’s report concludes, is “not only houses but new industries and employment opportunities”.

This has to be right. Yet the government appears to have no plans for balancing residential growth east of London with any growth in either investment by IT companies, or investment in IT infrastructure. IT appears simply not to occur to departments run by Tessa Jowell and John Prescott.

Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise me, but it does. Perhaps I have missed what could have been some extensive and public discussions between the government, Gateway housebuilders and general telecoms providers about how broadband and teleworking could, figuratively speaking, help drag Rainham up from the marshes. Perhaps I have missed some plea by Gordon Brown that teleworkers, ensconced in their new homes in the Gateway, could give India a run for its money in back-office work to serve the City.

But perhaps I have missed very little, and joined-up, e-enabled government is a chimera. Of course, Gordon Brown is a great fan of IT and its transformative effect on UK productivity in the face of international competition, but does he know anything about IT, or what it could do for East London and Kent? It appears not.

Yes, government IT projects are usually incompetently handled. Yes, government schemes generally put intrusion ahead of efficiency. But to downplay or ignore what IT could do for London and Kent is nonsensical.

They know better in China. From Renmin university in the People’s Republic, professor Jin Yuanpu sends a paper outlining how technology and IT combined with humanism and environmentalism, form one of the three central themes of the 2008 Beijing Games. Those festivities will be the first to use high-definition TV broadcasting, and will make a feature of what Yuanpu calls “colour mobile phone transmission”.

That’s the spirit. When will we have it here?