As every major economy wrestles with the fallout from the credit crunch, it is worth casting an eye across the English Channel. The French Government has come up with a good idea. It has President Sarkozy's attention and support. The brainchild of Eric Besson, the French Minister for Communication, it is called France Numérique2012 and is a comprehensive plan to build the infrastructure, services and content of their digital economy.

Its premise is simple: as the global recession bites, we need to nurture those parts of the economy that can generate the growth potential and jobs that we have got used to from the financial services sector. If that premise holds in France, it is doubly true in Britain.

Numérique2012 covers everything from universal broadband, digital switchover and spectrum release for high-speed mobile broadband, intellectual property and the promotion of digital content, through to training, skills, digital public services and government procurement. It would be easy to pick on individual measures in isolation and ask, “What is so special?”. What makes it different is its ambition, scale and comprehensiveness.

A global recession is the time when the bold can help the innovations that will drive prosperity when the economic cycle turns, and where intelligent intervention from the Government can accelerate national competitive advantage.

Here in Britain we start with many advantages. We have a strong content and creative sector. British programme formats, electronic games and educational and advertising materials play out across the globe. We have a competitive communications market, with a number of world-leading companies headquartered here. Our market is open to new ideas and new investment.

We are already ahead of France in the reach and pervasiveness of our existing broadband network and the thinking — if not yet the full realisation — of a market in wireless spectrum. And we are above all an inventive nation: the father of the world wide web is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a Briton. It is to build on all these advantages that the Prime Minister commissioned the Digital Britain Report and created a converged ministerial position across both the Business and Enterprise and Culture departments to enable it to happen.

The Digital Britain steering board, consisting of a broad range of informed thinkers in this field, meets for the first time next week. Each member will bring their own ideas and experience, but collectively it will exercise peer review on the issues and policies emerging from the project. On the board will be some familiar names: Francesco Caio, Andrew Gowers, Barry Cox, Dr Tanya Byron and Robin Foster, and new blood from elsewhere in and around the sector. The intention is to converge the knowledge and advice we already have in one place, and then produce a plan for action based on that analysis and advice.

It is timely. Yesterday Britain started in earnest Digital Switchover, a universal terrestrial digital broadcasting infrastructure, playing catch-up with the market-led digital world of satellite, cable, mobile and broadband. But if our broadcast system is the mirror of the nation's conscience, our ambition should be for our broadband system to be the engine of the nation's mind, and we need similarly to consider embedding universal access to broadband.

As a country we will need to be both plumbers and poets. But we will need to be sure we can deliver the plumbing before celebrating or protecting the poetry.

That includes a fully digital television service, universally available; a universally available broadband system competitively priced at meaningful speeds; a digital radio network with true nationwide coverage; mobile and wireless services that can do for broadband and video what they have done for the spoken word.

If we can do that, we will have given the country the next generation of plumbing and given ourselves a comprehensive infrastructure for the digital age.

Then we can focus on the poetry: continued creativity in television, film, advertising and online. We can focus on rights, their value and where and how the rewards of creativity should be shared. We can focus on the continuing supply, only partially guaranteed today, of the flow of UK-originated content, and in particular news, nationally, regionally and locally, that works on and across all those platforms we will have built, providing competition for quality.

All this will pose hard-edged questions and challenges that will no longer sit in neat silos. The Digital Britain Report is a call for evidence and engagement, and I hope that companies and other stakeholders will want to respond constructively. It is in all of our interests that they do.

The timetable is brisk: a first report early in the new year setting direction and tackling immediate challenges; the full report next summer.

In a global recession, normal rules of engagement are suspended. The temptation is for a flight to caution and security. But difficult times call for far-reaching vision. I believe we can at least match and should aim to better France in terms of the comprehensiveness, boldness and scope of what we do.

— Lord Carter of Barnes is Minister for Communications, Technology and Broadcasting

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