Chi Onwurah MP, Labour’s Shadow Cabinet Office Minister, will today launch Labour’s Digital Government review - Digital Britain 2015 - and announce an independent Advisory Board of well-known and respected outside experts.

The review, which will culminate with a published update of relevant parts of Labour’s 2009 Digital Britain report, will be led by Chi Onwurah MP and Michael Dugher MP, the Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office. It will look at how digital technology can improve both the effectiveness and efficiency of people-powered public services and develop a framework for powering digital government and putting citizens in control of their relationship with Government, including their own data.

The review’s independent, non-partisan Advisory Board members will include:

- Peter Ingram, the Managing Director of Touchstone Consulting Limited and previously CTO of Ofcom and BT Retail
- Stephen King, a partner at Omidyar Network
- Piers Linney, Co-CEO of the Cloud Service Provider, Outsourcery plc (also known as a Dragon on the BBC’s ‘Dragon’s Den’)
- William Perrin, the founder of ‘Talk About Local’
- Cho Oliver, the Director of Liquid Steel and previously CIO of European Oil Trading at BP
- Vicki Shotbolt, the founder and CEO of The Parent Zone
- Jeni Tennison, the Technical Director of the Open Data Institute
- Graham Walker, the CEO of Go ON UK

Speaking at the launch of Digital Britain 2015 today, Chi Onwurah MP, will say:

“Labour’s Digital Government Review will set out clear goals for a digital agenda that will improve services and empower citizens whilst being efficient and cost effective.

“Under the guidance of our Advisory Board and with contributions from a wide range of stakeholders across the country, the review will deliver a framework for transforming digital government together with concrete policy proposals to make digital services work for the many.”

Detailed biographies of the independent Advisory Board:

Peter Ingram:
Peter Ingram is Managing Director of Touchstone Consulting Limited, his own company, established to provide strategic consulting in telecommunications, media and technology to a range of clients in the UK and around the world, including investors, operators, suppliers and governments/regulators. He also acts as Programme Director for the Suffolk Better Broadband Programme, and is a member of the UK Government’s Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) Framework Board. Until the end of 2009, Peter Ingram was Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Ofcom, which is the regulator and competition authority for the UK’s converged communications industry, where he played a leading role in Ofcom’s Strategic Review of Telecommunications (which led to the functional separation of BT Openreach), Ofcom’s strategy for Next Generation Access/Superfast Broadband, and Ofcom’s management of the radio spectrum.

Prior to joining Ofcom in 2004, Peter had been Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at BT Retail. Peter had a long and varied career at BT, including working on the strategy and technology developments related to broadband.


Stephen King:
As a partner at Omidyar Network, Stephen brings exceptional experience in applying media and technology to create positive social impact. Stephen leads the global Government Transparency initiative and a portfolio that includes a broad range of national and global organisations. Many are innovators in the use of technology to help make governments more responsive and aid citizens in holding their governments to account. The portfolio includes: Sunlight Foundation, Global Voices, Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente, mySociety, New Citizen, Janaagraha and Ushahidi, among others.

Prior to Omidyar Network, Stephen served as the chief executive of BBC Media Action, where he led a period of sustained growth that included building programs in more than 40 countries in the developing world. Stephen helped establish the organisation’s international reputation as one of the largest and most successful organisations using media and communications to improve the lives of the poor and promote better governance and transparency worldwide. Prior to the BBC, Stephen held executive positions at several non-profit organisations based in the United Kingdom and the developing world.


Piers Linney:
Piers Linney, Co-CEO of the world-leading Cloud Service Provider Outsourcery plc, is an entrepreneur with a blue-chip background in venture capital law, corporate finance and fund management.

Starting at just 13 years old, when he cut out his local newsagent by going direct to the wholesaler to start his own paper round, Piers’ career has spanned a range of businesses in the technology, media and communications sectors.

Outsourcery’s reseller partners include large telecommunications companies, systems integrators and value-added-resellers as well as many smaller IT and communications resellers with small and medium-sized business end-customers. Outsourcery was Microsoft’s worldwide Hosting Partner of the Year 2010, Microsoft’s worldwide Dynamics CRM Partner of the Year 2011, one of three finalists for the Microsoft worldwide Server Platform of the Year 2013 and recently winner of the UK Cloud Awards Collaboration Product of the Year 2014. Outsourcery provides cloud-based IT and communications solutions for commercial and public sector end-customers and has partnered with Microsoft and Dell to deploy the first Microsoft-validated IL3 accredited platform for the provision of services to central Government in line with its ‘cloud-first’ and SME procurement policies.

Piers featured on Channel 4’s The Secret Millionaire in 2011 and is currently one of the Dragons on the BBC’s Dragon’s Den.


Cho Oliver:
Cho Oliver co-founded and grew an innovative software consultancy to several hundred strong across offices in the UK, US and India. She has advised blue-chip clients across many industries, as well as some UK government departments, on how to realise their business strategies through leveraging emerging technologies and the internet.

Following the dot com crash, Cho became CIO for European Oil Trading at BP during a time of significant IT investment and change. Wider group roles followed with responsibility for IT methods and best practice.


William Perrin:
William has experience of deploying leading edge digital technologies in deprived and isolated communities and national digital strategy.

Local – founder of Talk About Local, working with people in their communities across the country to help them find a grass roots voice online that they own and run. TAL’s trainers worked in some of Britain’s most deprived and isolated communities to help modern digital technologies benefit people’s daily lives. In London’s Kings Cross, many years before regeneration, William realised that digital technologies could support and even augment traditional local community action and created http://kingscrossenvironment.com/ as an online voice and organising tool for local activists. This site was based on William’s real world experience of working with local people in a tough environment to improve a challenging neighbourhood. William was a founder member of the Local Public Data Panel working with local government, CLG and citizens to open up local government data.

National - William was a senior civil servant prior to founding Talk About Local with a 15 year career that frequently involved national digital issues. William was technology policy advisor to Prime Minister Blair 2001-2004 and through commissioning and delivering the 2007 Power of Information Review for Ministers was partly responsible for the modern interest in open data. William was instrumental in publishing the Communications White Paper in 2000 that created OFCOM. And in the 1990s did much work on enabling digital TV. While in the Cabinet Office working on transformational government, William was also chair of the OECD expert group on ‘e-government’. In 2009 William was appointed to the selection panel for the Independently Financed News Consortia and from 2012-2014 served on the Government Digital Service’s Digital Advisory Board. William is a non-executive director of The Tinder Foundation, which exists to make good things happen with digital technology, with a focus on digital inclusion.

International - William is a trustee of The Indigo Trust, a grant making foundation that supports people, largely in Sub-Saharan Africa to create or find the information they need to make their lives better



Vicki Shotbolt:
Vicki Shotbolt is the founder and CEO of The Parent Zone which she set up in 2005 with a simple aim: to work with the companies and organisations real parents engage with on a daily basis to create practical approaches to making parenting less stressful. Vicki first became involved in creating parent-friendly initiatives when she joined the Family and Parenting Institute in 1999 having spent several years working for children’s charities. Currently, Vicki serves on the board of Gingerbread, is the chair of FairFun and is on the executive board of the UK Council on Child Internet Safety. She is a regular commentator on a wide range of parenting issues.


Jeni Tennison:
Jeni Tennison is the Technical Director of the Open Data Institute. She originally trained as a psychologist and knowledge engineer, gaining a PhD in collaborative ontology development from the University of Nottingham. She went on to work as an independent consultant and practitioner, specialising in open data publishing and consumption, including XML, JSON and linked data APIs, before joining the Open Data Institute in 2012. She was awarded an OBE for services to technology and open data in the 2014 New Year Honours.

Before joining the ODI, Jeni was the technical architect and lead developer for legislation.gov.uk, which pioneered the use of open data APIs within the public sector, set a new standard in the publication of legislation on the web, and formed the basis of The National Archives’ strategy for bringing the UK’s legislation up to date as open, public data.

Within the wider UK public sector, Jeni worked on the early linked data work on data.gov.uk, helping to engineer new standards for the publication of statistics as linked data; building APIs for geographic, transport and education data; and supporting the publication of public sector organograms as open data. She continues her work within the UK’s public sector as a member of the UK Government Linked Data Group, the Open Data User Group, the Crime and Justice Transparency Sector Panel, the Education Data Transparency Group and the Open Standards Board.

Jeni has contributed to several international standards through the W3C, working on XSLT and XPath 2.0 within the XSL Working Group and on XProc within the XML Processing Working Group. She was appointed by Tim Berners-Lee to the W3C’s Technical Architecture Group in 2011 and has since chaired the W3C’s HTML Data Task Force. In 2014 she started to co-chair the W3C’s CSV on the Web Working Group.


Graham Walker:
As CEO of Go ON UK, Graham is responsible for leading the UK’s Digital Skills Alliance, which aims to make the UK the most digitally skilled nation in the world. He sits on the organisation’s board of Founder Partners, chaired by Martha Lane Fox, with the CEOs of Age UK, BBC, Big Lottery Fund, EE, E.ON, Lloyds Banking Group, Post Office and TalkTalk.

Graham previously held the post of Director for Digital Delivery at the Cabinet Office, where he headed up the Government’s policy and strategy work on digital delivery in the public sector. Graham was also a Director at Race Online 2012, supporting the policy and strategy work behind the office of the UK Digital Champion, working to deliver a 100% networked nation, and has previously been a Managing Partner at Gov3, as well as former Director of Strategy for the Office of e-Envoy at the Cabinet Office.