Carter says digital strategy is even more important due to credit crunch

Claims have been made that due to the global financial crisis the importance of securing the future of technology industries and Britain’s media have now increased drastically.

These claims were made by Stephen Carter, the new minister in charge of making vital decisions with regards to these issues. His appointment was made earlier this month to the newly created position of minister for communication, technology and broadcasting and he reports to both the business secretary, Peter Mandelson, and the culture secretary, Andy Burnham. In his new role Carter has vowed decision-making in several key areas will be acelerated.

In his first interview since accepting the position, Carter said “Whatever is going to happen to the macro-economy, we can all agree that, in the short- and possibly medium-term, the financial services sector is going to take some time to restructure. So, from a UK plc perspective, this is an important sector and it becomes relatively an even more important sector.”

Carter, who has spent a difficult 10 month as the chief of strategy and principle adviser to Gordon Brown, and was previously the CEO of Ofcom, the media regulator, will be taking the existing areas of the government and combining them and has made the promise to bring a number of important issues to a quick conclusion. Amongst the issues he is working on are the next generation of broadband access and the question raise regarding this, the funding of public-service broadcasting in the future, and digital radios future.

He will be releasing a report called Digital Britain that will consider the issues that are developing around the digital divide and look at whether broadband access for everyone should universally guaranteed. A promise that a set of recommendations will be made available by January has been made by Carter.

He said that to be able to set the direction of the technology, broadcasting and communications industries over the next five years was a “unique opportunity”.
“While we have a converged regulator, the machinery of government is still separated. That was the rationale behind having a ministerial responsibility across the brief, and having someone who knows something about it.” Carter said.