An investigation by Future Intelligence into the UK’s mushrooming digital divide has discovered a shameful pattern of Government incompetence.
The investigation by Future Intelligence’s PassW0rd radio programme, has found the Government has presided over a shocking history of digital exclusion according to experts who said some 20% of the country were in digital poverty.
In a series of interviews with some of the world’s leading experts on the new phenomenon and industry commentators PassW0rd found a shocking picture of Government inaction on the core connectivity and digital skills essential to the UK’s claims to be a digital super-power.
The PassW0rd ‘No connection: Britain’s dangerous digital divide‘ investigation, confirmed the findings of a recent damning House of Lords report castigating the Government for ‘political lethargy’ in combatting ‘digital exclusion’.
According to Dan Ilett, founder of the internet service provider Gigabit, attempts by some of the more innovative internet companies to solve digital exclusion have fallen on deaf ears.
“I’m from the Midlands and the great hope was that as well as building a kind of next generation Internet company that would deliver fast speeds, we wanted do something about the digital divide because it’s bad all the way up and down the country. But in the Midlands, there are a lot of areas of poverty and we wanted to do something about that.
“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,” says Ilett.
No internet, no device, no skills, no future
A lethargy that has condemned many of the poorest in society to a 20th century existence with many without any broadband access at all or the skills or proper equipment to use the internet if they are online.
“Doing something with the Internet does not make you included. We are talking more like 20% of households are either fully digitally excluded or suffering some aspects of digital exclusion.”
According to Liverpool University’s Professor Simeon Yates, who leads the research project the “Minimum Digital Living Standard” and was one of the first researchers into ‘digital exclusion’: “You start to suffer some consequence of being digitally excluded if your children do not have adequate access to kit for their education. You may not be as safe online. You may not still be able to access services like the NHS just because you are online. Rather than say you’re digitally excluded because you don’t have a laptop, actually you’re digitally excluded, if you can’t live a basic life you value in a digital society because you’re missing the equipment or the skills.
21st century life is online
“That’s a much bigger group of the UK population than the Office of National Statistics suggests when it states 95% plus of the British population has done something with the Internet in the last six months. Doing something with the Internet does not make you included. We are talking more like 20% of households are either fully digitally excluded or suffering some aspects of digital exclusion,” says Professor Yates.
A bleak picture of digital poverty the House of Lords Report added more definition to with its findings at the beginning of this month.
“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.”
A skills gap the pressure group FutureDotNow identified as crippling to UK industry in its ‘UK Workforce Digital Skills Gap’ report released on the 12th of July, 2023.
“Today, almost 60% of the UK’s workforce (23.4 million people) is unable to do all 20 digital tasks industry and government have defined as essential for work. There are huge capability gaps hidden in plain sight, with many struggling to use the internet safely, access personal data such as payslips, and complete tasks that boost productivity, such as sharing files online.
“Current data estimates ‘essential digital skills’ gaps are costing the UK economy around £12.8 billion a year and the UK risks losing £145 billion in cumulative GDP growth between 2018-2028 due to inadequate digital skills. In addition, workers are missing out on around £5.69 billion in additional earnings,” the report stated.
Urgent call to cut VAT on internet superhighway
Many of those interviewed by the PassW0rd programme called for immediate action to solve the crisis with measures such as the cutting of VAT on broadband from 20 to 5% as a minimum first requirement. Others called for free access to the internet for UK citizens.
“It’s perfectly proper to treat it as an essential, and therefore we can have 5%, for the ordinary member of the public, but use the remaining 15% from those who can afford it to create a social inclusion fund,” said Liberal Democrat peer Lord Clement-Jones, chair of the AI Select Committee adding that he had raised the idea of universal free internet access at the Local Government Association conference in Bournemouth earlier this month.
Currently many of the internet companies do offer social tariffs for those on low incomes to help them stay on the web. But researchers say only around 5% of those eligible have signed up for the deals, with many such as the internet comparison group Broadband Genie, accusing the internet service providers of hiding the option due to cost fears.
Something Broadband Genie say could be banished with the changes to VAT raised by Lord Clement Jones and others.
“Providers are going to struggle to keep the social tariffs deals alive. They’re probably running at a loss. They have called on the government to drop the VAT on these from 20% to 5% to help make these more sustainable,” said Broadband Genie’s internet expert Alex Tofts.
Government pledge action
Belatedly the Government appear to have suddenly woken up to the extent of the problem. The Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is pushing UK pensions funds to invest £75bn in a new high-tech future and the newly created Department of Science Innovation and Technology said digital exclusion was now a priority.
“We are committed to ensuring that no one is left behind in the digital age. Steps we are taking include putting essential digital skills on an equal footing in the adult education system alongside English and maths.
“To boost access, we have worked closely with Ofcom and the industry to make a range of social tariffs, available across 99% of the UK starting from as low as £10 per month, and our £5 billion Project Gigabit has already resulted in 76% of the UK being covered by gigabit broadband, up from just 6% at the start of 2019,” said a Government spokesperson.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Future Intelligence is committed to beating digital exclusion and we have been highlighting the issue for a number of years. With this in mind PassW0rd and Future intelligence are launching ‘Mind the Gap’, a campaign on digital exclusion, the main aim of which is to push for universal broadband, because we think as all of those we interviewed do, that to be in the 21st century you have to be online.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
To find out more on this modern-day malaise Future Intelligence has assembled a list of organisations which have been compiling comprehensive data on the issue.
Me and my data – Liverpool University
