Digital Exclusion (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Thursday 8th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I enter the debate with some trepidation. I am not a member of the committee, but I think the report is very important. I bring to the debate that in 2007-08, when I was at the Cabinet Office, we had a look at digital exclusion. One of the big issues then was coverage: the fact that there was so little connectivity and internet access around the country.

Also, when I chaired the Public Services Committee in this House, it became very clear in many of our investigations just how important digital inclusion was, but also that we really could do things if people got working on it. For example, when we looked at access to public services and other things during Covid, we heard from some older people that they got support from Age Concern to do precisely what the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, talked about—access internet shopping—but they could not afford the minimum level of shopping they needed to commit to in order to order goods. We wrote to and engaged with those companies to get them to lower the rate for those people whom the local authority had identified as vulnerable. So we can do it; we did lots of those sorts of things during Covid that have now got lost. I really want the Government to think about that.

Since I first looked at this with my very good junior Minister, Pat McFadden, in 2007-08, we have seen change at an unprecedented rate in the use of digital internet opportunities across the board, in virtually every area of activity—and we know for certain now that that will change much more quickly in the future. If the Government do not have a strategy or a plan, or do not feel that they can keep up with what is happening, then we will leave a lot of people without the basics that will be necessary for everyday life in the future.

There are new and urgent demands for government action. It is clear that the development and improvement of public services can be made only with much more use of digital tools. On health, the Times Health Commission signalled this week that we need digital passports. Of course we do: folk get frustrated when they go from one bit of the health service to another and have to tell their story again and again, with nobody keeping the stuff together. The patient, if nobody else, should be able to keep all of that together.

There are other things, such as prevention of hospitalisation through contact with the relevant health worker for people with certain conditions. Those people need to be given a particular gizmo that will track their diabetes or their heart and give direct messages to somebody located in the primary care or community care workforce. These things are now automatic in other parts of Europe. We must make sure they are automatic here, but that means an absolute sea-change in how people access these things.

Other people will talk about education in more depth, but I have seen AI being used by a teacher to keep in contact with what on earth is going on in the different groupings in the classroom, so that they can keep up with who is falling behind and who has finished and is bored. We need to make use of the benefits of things like that. The north-east has the highest rates of digital exclusion. That inevitably correlates with us having among the highest rates of poverty and child poverty in the country.

With the right messaging and the right support, even without the VAT on social tariffs being changed, in one of the social tariffs, on water, we have been able to increase access up to 47%, when nationally it is 17%, because Northumbrian Water was persuaded by others that it had to take action to use the data it had on who was vulnerable to contact them and help them to get access to the tariff. There is still a lot further to go, but that is an example of where, by using the data you have effectively and by actually contacting people, you can increase their participation. If it can be done with a water tariff, it should be done for the broadband social tariff. The estimate at the moment of the unclaimed broadband tariff in the north-east is about £36 million per year—so there is something the Government can get on to straight away that will transform the lives of a lot of people in our region.

So the Government do have a role to play. The Government have a role to play themselves, but they also have a role to play with others in the marketplace. I give the Government the example of the Trussell Trust, which has identified that one in six people who attend food banks regularly has no access to the internet. They cannot afford wifi. I ask the Minister to think about what that meant for children in Covid when, even if they were given a laptop, they could not get access to what was needed, and it refers to lots of other things. The Trussell Trust has done a deal with Tesco where, by 2025, Tesco Mobile will connect 50,000 people facing hardship through the Trussell Trust network. That is the sort of thing the Government should be encouraging, that is the sort of thing we need in a plan and that is the sort of action that will make sure that everybody is able to live by the new era of digital inclusion.