for the opportunity to be here. Apologies that I couldn't be here at the start. I was elected to Parliament in 1994, after sixteen years in the IT industry - eight years with Logica, a background I have in common with Sally, and then another eight years with a smaller consultancy, Ovum. In twelve years as a Minister I was deeply interested in policy on telecommunications and computing, and in the potential for IT to improve public services. I want to focus this evening on the vast new IT system, or rather systems, required for Universal Credit from next October. But the title 'Good Data for Good Government' raises a broader issue, and let me just start with that. Open Data As a Minister before the last election, I launched the data.gov.uk website, and the initiative to put as much Government data as possible into the public domain. That initiative has been maintained and extended, with leadership from Francis Maude at the Cabinet Office. The case for it was well set out in the Open Public Services white paper published in July last year. The Prime Minister, in his foreword to the White Paper, condemns - I quote: "those who resist reform, put the producer interest before the citizens' needs, and object to publishing information about how services perform" and go on to argue that: "it is only by publishing data on how public services do their jobs that we can wrest power out of the hands of highly paid