David Cameron: the outgoing UK Prime Minister’s relationship with tech and Tibus

With British Prime Minister David Cameron announcing that he will have left his post and been replaced by Home Secretary Theresa May by the end of Wednesday, we look at how our paths have crossed over the course of his premiership.

Posted on 11 July 2016 - Government
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With Conservative Party leadership contender Andrea Leadsom having pulled out of the contest, Prime Minister David Cameron has confirmed that he will hand power to Home Secretary Theresa May on Wednesday after conducting his final PM’s questions at the House of Commons.

Bloody Sunday Inquiry

That will bring to an end his six-year premiership, which started in May 2010. Just a month after taking office, one of the highest profile jobs of the early days of his time at the helm was overseeing the publication of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry. Here at Tibus, we handled the online publication of the inquiry report. 

After Cameron’s address to the House of Commons in response to the report on June 15, 2010, we were given final instruction to publish the report by the Northern Ireland Office at 3:41pm. Click here to learn more about that process.

G-Cloud

G-Cloud and the Digital Marketplace - the framework Tibus and other cloud providers use to sell services to government departments and other public sector organisations - came into being under Cameron’s coalition government of the last parliament.

The plans were outlined in 2011 and came into effect in 2012. They allow for easy, speedy IT buying by government bodies, which has cut the need for lengthy procurement processes. Click here to learn more about the services we offer via G-Cloud.

SSL

If G-Cloud was a good development for tech in government and the wider tech community, Cameron’s premiership has not been without the occasional tech misstep. A prime example of that is when he proposed a ban on SSL encryption. We felt obliged to speak out against the ill-judged policy idea. Click here to read what we had to say.

Queen’s Speech

Following his election win of just 14 months ago, Cameron’s government outlined a few tech policies in the Queen’s Speech. These included fairly vague references to reducing the threat from cyber attacks and empowering regulator Ofcom to take action against channels broadcasting extremist content. There was also a promise of new legislation to “modernise the law on communications data”.

This was seen by most commentators, including our blog post on the topic, as a revival of the so-called Snoopers’ Charter, which had been scrapped in 2012. Sure enough, the very similar Investigatory Powers Bill was soon on the seen. Interestingly, it is Cameron’s successor in waiting, Theresa May, who has been responsible for the legislation in her role at the Home Office.  We examined what the draft bill would mean for our customers in this blog post.