A scathing report from the House of Lords has castigated the UK Government for creating a divided society of digital have and have nots while boasting of ambitions for technology super power status.
The report from the Lords’ Communications and Digital Committee accuses the Government of letting millions of UK citizens fall behind in basic digital access at a time of unprecedented advances in Artificial Intelligence and Quantum computing.
“The Government aspires to global digital leadership. But it does not have a credible strategy to tackle digital exclusion. This matters. Everything from housing and healthcare resources to banking and benefit systems is shifting online at an unprecedented rate. By failing to take decisive action the Government is allowing millions of citizens to fall behind,” said the report.
It goes on to draw a damning picture of digital inequality that effectively has consigned a number of the poorest in society to the 20th century denying them the job opportunities and services of the 21st century. The figures the Lords’ report quotes are bleak. Fully 1.7 million households have no mobile or broadband internet at home. Up to a million people have cut back or cancelled internet packages in the past year as cost-of-living challenges bite. Around 2.4 million people are unable to complete a single basic task to get online, such as opening an internet browser. Over 5 million employed adults cannot complete essential digital work tasks. Basic digital skills are set to become the UK’s largest skills gap by 2030.
“Political lethargy”
A situation the Lords’ report states will have a profound impact on the future of UK citizens and the economic aspirations of the country. The report also underlines that digital exclusion has been allowed to occur due to Government inaction.
“This all has profound consequences for individual wellbeing and multi-billion pound implications for UK productivity, economic growth, public health, levelling up, education and net-zero objectives.
“The root causes of digital exclusion reflect longstanding social, economic and regional disparities which are not easily solved. But the current scale of the challenge is a direct consequence of political lethargy. The Government has major ambitions to make the UK a science and technology “superpower”, boost economic productivity and digitise public services. It must pay more attention to the basics which underpin the long-term viability of such aims.”
In a profound embarrassment to the Government, it finds itself lagging considerably behind states that have adopted a considerably more enlightened grasp of 21st century technology priorities.
In Kazakstan for example broadband internet access is available in 118 cities and 4,500 villages, which in total have a population of 18.2 million people or 97.2 percent of the total population of Kazakhstan, according to the Kazakh Bureau of National Statistics.
Many warnings
Government inactivity on the issue of digital exclusion has been pointed out by a number of charities and other bodies over many years. In ‘The Digital Divide’, a PassW0rd radio programme made by Future Intelligence in May 2021, PassW0rd cited work from Nesta, Age UK, and the Ada Lovelace Institute all pointing to the urgent need to address the problem.
In the programme Liverpool University’s Professor of Digital Culture, Simeon Yates, a leading expert in digital exclusion, describes an online world that is rapidly beginning to mirror the inequalities of the real world, and quoted Government statistics at the time that found that over 11 percent of families either do not have a computer or an internet connection.
The charities point out that children are not alone in this and that the elderly, ethnic minorities, migrants and the poor have all been identified as victims of the digital divide.
Meaning that often issues such as not knowing how to use technology were compounded during the pandemic by other factors according to Abigail Wood, CEO of Age UK London.
Lack of digital skills enhance isolation
“Social isolation is a massive factor, it’s very hard to learn skills remotely like knowing what you do with a particular device. Over the past year, there’s also been the added strain of being in a pressured situation with people feeling that suddenly their lives have changed a lot,” said Wood adding that those pressures were compounded by fear of the internet due to stories of online scammers and hackers.
“It’s a huge amount of pressure to deal with without face to face to support.”
Wood’s point about social isolation was underlined by educational technologist Professor Sugata Mitra in an interview for ‘The Digital Divide’ Professor Mitra stresses the need for support to learn how to use computers and the internet.
“I did a set of experiments in Manchester in a care home and found that groups of people can do things individuals cannot. One lady said: ‘I simply don’t know how to look up email. When you put about three or four together and say “now try”.’ They invariably can. At the end of it, the same lady said, ‘well, it wasn’t that difficult’, but she still did not want to try it on her own because of lack of confidence. But she now knew it was not as difficult as she had once thought.”
A lack of confidence that has led to another more dangerous form of data poverty during the Covid crisis, either missing out on information or going missing from information. A point highlighted in a study by the doctor’s publication ‘The Lancet’ during Covid. It found that many of the elderly and those from ethnic minority and migrant populations were unaware of Government initiatives on the disease or whose susceptibility to the coronavirus or its impact on them had gone unnoticed because they had not been involved in online polls.
Appalling internet
In interviews with a number of internet companies to ask about their response to the Lords’ Report who were unwilling to be named many pointed out the UK’s appalling record on internet connectivity and inaction.
“We tried to get an initiative together to try to sort some of this out no-one was interested. It was terribly frustrating because all of the fibre optic cables are laid outside social housing. It would have been very easy to light up 100s of thousands of families but no-one was interested. We even tried for a number of years to get a group of businesses together but we met with a blank from officials.
“What makes this even worse is the internet we have. In the UK we pay more per megabit than any other country yet we have the second slowest internet speeds in Europe. Faster internet makes for better economies but no-one here seems to care about that.”
