Parliament appoints digital director

Parliament has appointed its first director of a newly-created digital service, filling the 110,000 vacancy with Royal Opera House CTO Rob Greig.

He will lead the Parliamentary Digital Service (PDS) from April next year, commanding a 6 million budget specifically to invest in updating the establishment's technology.

The PDS will also have 300 staff and a 24 million general budget to deliver a digital strategy for both the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

Greig has worked for five years at the Royal Opera House as CTO, where he was tasked with digital development and overseeing technology.

The strategy he and his team create at the PDS will serve both houses, replacing two separate initiatives, Parliamentary ICT (PICT) and the Web and Intranet Service (WIS).

The creation of the PDS was recommended back in March this year in mySociety's review of Parliament's IT that found that the separation of PICT and WIS was an outdated and inefficient way of working.

The report read: "Visit any major website today and you will find that both entirely public and entirely private information is all served from the same technology platform.

"Parliament's website and intranet should, over time, follow this model, and the formal separation between website and intranet should be collapsed. This would save on doubled­up effort, prevent content from getting out of sync, and it would bring higher design and content­authoring standards to the intranet."