Tories pledge to open procurement to SMEs

Opening up: The Conservatives plan to publish details of central and local government and Quango spending

The Conservatives have unveiled plans to get more SMEs and open source specialists involved in government IT provision by dividing large projects into smaller chunks.

The Tories published their Technology Manifesto yesterday and outlined plans to publish online details of all items of central government and Quango spending exceeding £25,000. The Right to Government Data initiative also plans to publish local government outlays of more than £500, alongside other financial information.

The database will include full details of public contracts, as well as information on the salaries of senior civil servants and council officials. The Conservatives claim such openness is part of a bigger commitment to open up the public procurement process to smaller firms.

The party also asserted its desire to break big, overarching IT projects into smaller facets. This would facilitate the inclusion of more open source IT in the public sector, claimed the Tories. Overall, the Conservatives project the increased access to public data can be monetised by UK plc to the tune of £6bn.

Also featured in the manifesto were plans to give "most of the population" access to 100Mbit/s broadband, which the Tories claim is 50 times faster than Labour's plans.

The Conservatives also plan to introduce a so-called "government skunkworks" , a small in-house team devoted to technological innovation. The skunkworks would be tasked with developing applications and advising on procurement.

Shadow cabinet office minister Francis Maude said: "For too long we have endured a closed-shop government, which keeps information from the public, fails to stimulate innovative industries and wastes money on bloated, unnecessary and gold-plated IT projects."

Shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt explained that his party wanted to help foster UK tech firms that could outstrip big-name US counterparts.

"Our ambition is to ensure that the next generation of Googles, Microsofts and Facebooks are British companies," he said. "To achieve this we need to ensure we have a superfast broadband structure that gives the UK a competitive advantage over other countries. Our ambitious plans will make this happen."