Making the UK a location of choice for ICT businesses
The manifesto sets out a number of priorities for promoting the UK's competitiveness, including:
- Transparency and certainty with regard to corporate and personal taxes.
- Facilities, incentives and rewards for individuals and business to acquire and maintain skills.
- Regulatory and investment regimes which encourage and reward investment in developing and exploiting innovative ideas and content (from scientific research to entertainment).
- Proposals for new legislation and regulation affecting business to be rigorously assessed to ensure they will achieve intended benefits at affordable cost.
- Ensuring that the City of London (including its many support functions across the rest of the UK) remains a globally trusted centre for international commerce, including the resolution of disputes, under whatever legal framework and in whatever language customers and suppliers wish to operate.
Particular priorities in these areas include reform of capital allowances for risk investment in plant and infrastructure, clarity and simplicity in taxation, legislation and regulation, improvement of patent and copyright regimes to ensure that innovators are protected and rewarded.
Joined-up government
To enable citizens to deal with government via a single identity and point of contact, the sharing of information between government agencies and departments needs to be simplified, and confusion over current laws (such as the Data Protection Act) cleared up. The manifesto makes a number of specific recommendations for streamlining and reform of legislation.
Comment
EURIM acknowledges that it would be unrealistic to expect all MPs to afford each of these issues a high priority. Indeed, with public and media attention currently focused on wider issues such as immigration, policing and health it is difficult to see any of EURIM's manifesto points making the headlines over the next two weeks. With crime and policing high on both the Labour and Conservative agendas, neither of these parties' manifestos make specific mention of the Internet although the Government has addressed many of these issues in its recently-released digital agenda. It is to be hoped that once the dust settles after 5 May the new government — whatever its political complexion — will take on board the industry's wish list.
Talkback
Joined up E-government - don't make me laugh.
I was fined last year when I filed online; this was only rescinded when I sent them a paper copy of a screenshot showing that I had completed it.
And I have just had an email notifying me that I have received a secure email. This took 3 months to reach me, although various help desks think that they might just have put the wrong date on their emails.
And the helpdesk also told me I should use a particular link, not the one in the email.
So far, I have not a single experience of anything working properly on an E-government site, although in the last year, the personal tax filing has actually worked (in previous years I found errors in the calculations)