Digital Skills (Select Committee Report)

Baroness Janke Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Janke (LD)]

My Lords, I too did not take part in the Select Committee, but I will speak on some of the issues raised in the very comprehensive and excellent report, in particular developments in my city of Bristol. I have been told by key members of the digital community that the city council, through its Bristol Futures division, provided leadership, support and space for partnerships between business, the universities and the voluntary sector to make impressive progress on the digital agenda. This community has harnessed the energy and imagination of individuals’ enterprises to bring a creative and innovative culture to the city that has resulted in national and international recognition as the UK’s leading smart city alongside London.

Some time ago, the council had the foresight to acquire a 75-kilometre-long fibre and communications network from Rediffusion, a cable TV pioneer. This is known as the BNet. It is currently managed and maintained by a consortium and supports the council’s ICT requirements, including telephony, data, traffic-related network communications and CCTV. The consortium will use spare capacity to offer new superfast and ultrafast broadband services to Bristol’s businesses. This, of course, will generate revenues for council services. It is hoped that the consortium will also develop the additional 60 kilometres available to expand broadband and superfast broadband to more SMEs.

As I have said, Bristol, with London, is the UK’s leading smart city. The city has achieved this accolade through the use of the BNet, Bristol University’s £12 million computer, and a new city operating system that stores and analyses data. Bristol is sometimes described in publications as a giant laboratory for a range of innovative projects using big data, including how to solve problems such as traffic congestion, air pollution and assisted living for the elderly. These systems are also used to collect and analyse data from the city’s trial of self-driving cars.

In terms of regional clusters, Bristol-Bath is one of the UK’s leading centres for technology businesses, according to a Tech City and NESTA report published earlier this year. Bristol and Bath outperform London as the most productive cluster, producing £296,000 of sales per employee, as against London’s £205,000. It is important to many of us in cities in England, particularly, to point out just what can be achieved outside as well as in London. This progress has been achieved by very strong collaboration and close working relationships between the world-class universities, businesses, local councils and the local enterprise partnership. It is fair to refer to my noble friend Lord Foster’s plea about the BBC: it is no secret that the BBC in Bristol has also driven the digital agenda here and added to this culture of innovation.

However, this success is not evenly shared across all the neighbourhoods and communities of the city. Bristol City Council has developed a digital inclusion programme to improve access to skills, connectivity and equipment. A computer reuse scheme was launched in 2011, through which redundant council PCs are refurbished and made available to those most at risk of being digitally excluded. More than 3,000 PCs have been made available over the last five years. Training and software packages were provided by local firms, by which I mean firms within the deprived communities of the city. Between 2011 and 2015 the council ran a digital skills programme providing 10 hours of basic training to older people and disabled adults and their carers. Citizens Online and BT supported the programme and with the help of 66 volunteers more than 2,100 people were helped to get online. In addition there are a number of very innovative local projects, again run in the city’s most deprived communities, particularly through the Knowle West Media Centre.

The results of this work are now becoming visible. Official data from ONS show that in the first quarter of 2015 91.3% of Bristol adults—that is, 328,000 adults over 16— stated that they had used the internet in the last three months. The percentage of people who have ever used the internet has been rising faster in Bristol than nationally, and Bristol has the lowest percentage of people who have never used the internet of all the English core cities. So in terms of the objectives of the report there are practical trials and practical experience that need to be shared and I believe that collaboration and sharing, together with autonomy and freedom to innovate are key if we are to drive the digital agenda forward.

However, despite the need for basic digital skills—I hear the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, in her plea for these—there is also a need for increased access to tailored IT skills for different groups. Basic IT skills are vital for those who are not yet digitally included, but many young people, particularly those in deprived communities looking for work in digital, creative or IT, would benefit from access to affordable, accessible training in more advanced and marketable skills, such as data analytics and coding. These, however, can be very expensive and if they were available in local venues and priced attractively, this might increase the pipeline of young people entering the workforce from more deprived areas. I hope that the Minister will take on board some of the experiences from Bristol and that we will work on sharing some of these experiences.

I welcome the report’s recommendations, particularly the need to support existing successful university/business/LEP and local authority partnerships. I believe that there is the imagination, creativity, energy and enthusiasm in our cities and regions to achieve a step change in developing the digital economy at a pace that would enable us to catch up with international competitors. However, that needs support, encouragement, the sharing of good practice, space and autonomy without the dead weight of some of the conditions and restraints that are sometimes forthcoming from government, which usually inhibit creativity and slow momentum. As the report says, we are at a tipping point and the Government need to play their part in ensuring that the UK is not left behind.