Digital Exclusion (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Thursday 8th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the committee for its work on this important subject, although I must confess to raising my eyes to heaven when I saw that it was still necessary to do this work. I studied ancient history, so forgive me a minute, but my ancient history has a very deep connection with this important topic. In 2009, I was asked by the then Prime Minister to become digital inclusion champion for the United Kingdom, and I continued my work under the next Government as digital champion—it was perhaps telling that “inclusion” was taken out of my title at that point. I mention that because I feel such a failure in that work. So often, I have been presented with appalling and horrific facts, many of which noble Lords have talked about this afternoon. I would like to share three which perhaps present the complexity of this problem and show why it has not changed as much as it should have over time.

The first place I visited when I was appointed in 2009 was a drop-in centre in Leeds. It was a day much like today, with catastrophic rain, and I thought, “I cannot quite face this; I’m going fall over with my walking sticks”. But I went there and I met a young man—the first person I talked to on this whole journey—who said to me, “The internet saved my life”. I looked at him and thought that it probably was not the internet but something else, such as shelter or food—but no. He said, “It saved my life because I learned how to make music online. I had been found with a terrible drug problem, but now I have a purpose, I have skills I did not have. I credit completely the internet with saving my life”. I have told that story a lot over the past decade because it sits on my shoulder. I tell it mostly when I go to tech conferences, where there is a shocking lack of appreciation of the scale and challenge of this issue.

I fast-forward to 2020, when I was chairing the committee on the long-term implications of Covid, which was a complex task for many reasons. One of the threads we looked at was digitisation and how it leapfrogged over the course of the pandemic. I will never forget a woman who came on to our Zoom inquiry when we were looking at the role of technology in a very broad way, who told us, “I’m choosing right now between data and food”. This was in 2020 in one of the richest countries in the world. She was having to decide on a daily basis whether her three children would be able to access the one smartphone the household shared in order to do schoolwork or whether they would have supper. That was a pretty horrific choice to have to make.

Fast forward again to 2023: I am proud president of the British Chambers of Commerce. I was at a round table in Doncaster with a bunch of businesses—big and small, all kinds of things. The boss of one very impressive insurance company looked at me and said, “My company is going to be completely different in 18 months. I’m going to deploy GPT technology to take out half my workforce”. Another, a founder of their business, sitting next door to me said, “I haven’t got any digital software in my company at all”. Digital exclusion is a hugely knotty problem and I really welcome the committee’s work on it, including in trying to put parameters around it.

It is not just about individuals; it is also about businesses. We know that 20% of small and medium-sized businesses, which make up 85% of our economy, do not use basic digital skills. We know that it affects people hideously if they do not have access, as many noble Lords have documented this afternoon, and I really welcome the suggestions that the committee has made. I would just like to double-click on one of them: community interaction and how you bring community groups together.

Everything happens in this country, in my experience, and I do not think we need to invent anything new. As the committee has said, we should double down on the things that are going well. There are many community groups that know how to solve this problem, but they are not co-ordinated. They are not joined up or sharing best practice and the Government are not aware of all of them. Yet every time I travel to somewhere, I have found another amazing little project—in a post office or a care home, wherever it might be. I really urge the Government to think about how we can lift up all these amazing projects, exploit the best of them and maybe help some of the less good to slowly come to an end, and to have much more community-based innovation at a very local level. That is how this next wave of the issue will be solved.

I want to finish with a more macro point, which is how we pose this question. I have been thinking about this a lot over the past decade and it is framed completely wrong. We will never make the progress that all noble Lords clearly want if we do not reframe the question. This is about the economy: “It’s the economy, stupid”. I have tried with the human stories. I have told that story about the young man in Leeds literally thousands of times but that does not seem to have worked. We will not be able to level up, as the noble Lord, Lord Foster, mentioned, we will certainly not be able to build back better and I do not believe we will build a country that works for everyone unless we put a deep understanding of connectivity and internet access and skills, and the ability to afford them, at the heart of how we do that. It is not that complicated; it just needs to be a priority.

I have sat next to multiple Culture Secretaries. They shall remain nameless but one of them looked at me once with incredulity when I got on my soapbox again about this issue. They said to me, “No, we’ve got over 95% of people in this country on the internet. This is not a priority for me”. Therein lies the rub: 95% sounds pretty good, does it not? I aspire to getting that mark sometimes—my children certainly do not give me anything much above a 50%—but 95% is not good enough. It does not unpick the problem well enough.

I heard the noble Baroness on a “Money Box” podcast. It is not one I often listen to but I caught it when she was talking about this report that she had done. The response from the Government, as part of that “Money Box Live” special on the digital divide, was, “But 95% of people have access to some kind of broadband infrastructure”. That was completely missing the point. We need politicians to prioritise this but to do so in the right way. We need one of the next 200 Culture Secretaries to appreciate that this will make their life easier. We also need a plan, as everybody here has rightly said. Most of all, we need to remember that it is impossible to function right now in our country if you do not have these basic skills, and the ability to afford them in your life. You can save £1,000, you can get work and it is unacceptable that, in a country which aspires to be one of the most digital in the world, we have not put this as a core ambition.

Beyond Digital (COVID-19 Committee Report)

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Wednesday 6th September 2023 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho]

That the Grand Committee takes note of the Report from the COVID-19 Committee Beyond Digital: Planning for a Hybrid World (1st Report, Session 2019–21, HL Paper 263).

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, I speak today at what I think might be my least last-minute event ever. We completed the work of this committee nearly two years ago and, after a year of hospitalisation, it is entirely on me why we have had to move the debate so far into the future. I thank the clerks for their heroic attempts in working to find time when I was able to be detached from a drip to come here to speak today. I also thank my colleagues for their patience; the incredible effort and work that they put into our committee should be aired and given the proper debate and time. I thank everybody for bearing with me.

I am reminded of how, in 1972, the Chinese Premier was asked about the effects of the French Revolution. At that time, he said:

“It is too early to tell”.


That famous quote sat in my mind while I was chairing this committee, because we were set up in June or July 2020 when, as it now transpires, it was far too early to tell the long-term implications of Covid. Although I hate to start on a downbeat note, on reflection perhaps the biggest learning of this committee is that when considering long-term implications we have to think very carefully about when structurally to put work in place, when to set up committees and when to make sure that we have the right perspective and timeframe with which to reflect back.

Who could have imagined, as we sat in our first committee meetings on Zoom getting to know each other and trying to work out what we all thought, that the tsunami of the Ukrainian invasion, a cost of living crisis and an energy crisis would be upon us as they have been over the past year? None of us thought that there would be anything other than the fallout from Covid, which we were trying to analyse, as the main factor for policy-making over the next year. As it turns out—I will return to this—it is scary to think how little we returned to some of the themes and implications of Covid over that period, given how they are still profoundly in existence in our society. I will show how some of what we talked about in our report has come to be.

First, we decided to open up the work and gather evidence in a new way—with, to be frank, slightly mixed reactions from some of my colleagues—by asking people outside this building what they thought the long-term implications would be. We had many small focus groups and many declarations of evidence—thousands, in fact. We married them with some of the work from POST, the incredible team that sits here in Parliament.

One thing that I hope will be a lasting legacy of this work is that we now have that bank of data that Select Committees can use as evidence. If all else is ignored, I hope that Select Committees in the future will look back on this rich source of information, gathered, as I say, in a very new way. We asked people to send us anything: a drawing, a poem, a line, a tweet or more substantial evidence and data that they might feel was in our purview.

We did three sets of work. We looked beyond hybrid at the impact of technology, or the absence of it, at that time. We looked at the high street, and we looked at parents and families. This debate is focused mostly on that first piece of work, but it would have been a missed opportunity not to continually frame everything we did by thinking about the resilience of the UK and how its structures, both within and beyond this building, worked to ensure that, when we are faced with such moments in the future, as we inevitably will be, we are able to offer citizens the best services and the best opportunities to work and live as they deserve.

A lot of the recommendations in the final report on the resilience of the UK and living beyond Covid came down to quite structural and detailed things—about how Select Committees might work, how government departments should join up and how plans should be built. I will not dwell on them now, as I fear the Minister may not necessarily have prepared for all of them, but this was a constant theme in how we approached the work and how important we still think it is that government sees the planes that now run across all the work that it does. That requires a significant shift in how it thinks about how it organises itself.

For the majority of my comments I will turn to the hybrid world of work. It seems extraordinary now that this building managed to get itself online and doing all the business of government within a month. I salute the teams here that did that; I know that the Parliamentary Digital Service showed extreme levels of dedication to make that happen. As someone who came into the House of Lords and was frequently asked, pretty much from the get-go, how to make the wifi work, I understood in extreme detail how incredibly big these challenges were. It felt as though Covid really pushed through the institutional inertia here and across the entire corporate world and our society; where people had before not quite seen the benefits to using technology or had perhaps not imagined the possibilities, suddenly we were in the thick of a brave new world.

That was very beneficial for some and not for others. I often reflect on how many people probably wished that they could stay at home in their pyjamas but in fact donned their PPE gear and were made to go out on to the front line. One piece of evidence our committee heard was that half the British workforce could not work digitally. We truly were a hybrid country. In our race towards technology and the acceleration that we saw, it is very important not to forget all the other people who were working to save us at that moment and who continue to do so in the absence of that opportunity.

Within the digital landscape, we looked at a group of different areas: the way the digital divide dominated the discussion during Covid; how skills could be built and data could be used; how collaboration should be increased and research should be more deeply connected to policy-making; and how the resilience of the infrastructure of the internet stood up during that time. We made some recommendations across each of those areas. I will not go through each one, but there are three on which, even 18 months later, I feel we still have a great deal of work to do.

First is the inequality of digital technology. This is not just about the binary nature of the digital divide; the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee released an excellent report at the end of last year, which we do not need to relitigate, on the digital divide. This is more than that. It is about our capacity to trade in businesses and to make sure that Ministers have the digital understanding they need to make policy, and that hospitals understand the opportunities available to them with technology.

As a country, we sometimes stand a bit shy of really facing into the future. We do it by halves. Many of the people we heard from and talked to in the committee gave the impression that they had made a big investment to help get online in order to function through Covid but that there were still significant challenges. The sharp end of that is those who had no access to technology at all. As noble Lords may have read in our report, at that time only 50% of families earning £10,000 a year or less had any access to technology at all. We heard that more than 2 million children—often two, three or four in a family—were sharing one device to do schoolwork. We also heard of people having to decide between data and feeding their families in what is still one of the richest countries in the world.

That was shocking at a time when everything had to move to the virtual world, but it is just as shocking now, 18 months later, when we are back living firmly in that hybrid world. I would like to know from the Government what specific plans they have and what answers they have to the recommendations that we made about how people could have different benefits wrapped up for the costs of broadband access and so on, which have escalated because of the cost of living crisis over the past year.

The digital divide is a fundamental building block that we have so much opportunity to right in this country. Again and again, we saw its terrible downside when we were doing the committee’s work, but we also saw the upsides for people who had managed to embrace it—growing their businesses, running their charities and offering help online to people they may not have been able to reach before. There is a huge upside if we continue to focus on this with relentless urgency.

Another aspect that we came back to again and again concerned the skills of people working in the public sector and the government estate. We heard about schools where parents felt that teachers had less of a clue about how to use technology than they did, and about schools that did not have access. We also heard of hospitals that were doing pretty whizzy and exciting things and remote appointments, and doctors’ surgeries that had cracked a lot of the problems, but we also heard of doctors that were absolutely unable to commit to this new way of seeing and working with patients.

We made a number of recommendations. I know there have been endless Civil Service skills commitments by the Government, but I would love to understand how they now see skills across the public sector in relation to digital. There is no ability to stop: this needs to be constant and embedded in all workforce learning. We made a number of recommendations about career development and how important it is that all these themes are put into the mix for people working across the public sector.

We have the profound issue of the digital divide, which is not just about people being with or without but about people who may have some but not all—different parts of our society may be better equipped than others—and we have the issue of how the public sector delivers digital. As someone who was instrumental in creating the Government Digital Service, I see the zig-zagging, which is probably inevitable. But we made a number of recommendations about the public services that we use and how much more improvement there could still be so that everyone is working to provide a really hybrid service—not always purely digital but whatever is appropriate—and making sure that we are listening to the patient, the benefits claimant or whoever might be on the other side of the desk.

Another important piece is about how we can use data to make sure that we really understand what happened during that Covid period and who was affected. We heard from many different groups who felt they were not really being seen in policy-making. The black community has been endlessly highlighted for the issues that it faced in the medical system during Covid. Health inequalities driven by bad use—and bad joined-up use—of data were addressed again and again to us in the committee. We made a number of recommendations about how to make sure that data and policy-making are linked together in a more effective way and that there is far less siloed decision-making in government and far more central planning and an acceptance that now, in this new hybrid world, we are living not in one or the other but across both and we need to make decisions across both.

My final point is about overall resilience. A couple of our evidence-givers told us that it was amazing how many things stood up and survived during Covid—I started my remarks talking about the incredible resilience of this organisation to get itself functioning again. But we felt that there was a huge opportunity to make sure that we were stress testing our digital infrastructure in particular, and our other critical national infrastructure, to make sure that, should this happen again, or when it happens again in a different form, we are able to say with absolute purpose that we have tested it regularly and that we are constantly thinking about how the hybrid world has affected our critical national infrastructure, and not seeing it as one or the other.

Since the work was completed and we have come out of the dregs, if you like, of Covid, there have been so many more noisy headlines. I was reflecting on how AI is clearly now the dominant media story. You cannot open a paper, turn on the radio or watch a news programme without there being some element of the world being either about to be saved or about to be taken over and destroyed by robots. I really hope this does not mean that we forget some of the structural things that happened during the pandemic. We may be looking at a very different set of geopolitical circumstances to the ones that we faced during Covid, but we still have a huge number of issues that have surfaced because of this hybrid world.

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

I am very grateful. I apologise for intervening. I put my name down but am not able to speak, because I cannot stay until the end. I pay tribute to the work that the noble Baroness did as chair of our committee in the most difficult circumstances for her personally. It is a very difficult group to chair, in some ways, but she did it with extraordinary sensitivity and ability. I would also like to stress, and I am sure she will agree, that the inequalities we saw were huge. Children on the 10th floor with a single mother did not have separate bedrooms, let alone separate laptops. That is just the tip of the iceberg of those inequalities. I thank the noble Baroness.

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

I thank the noble Lord. I agree 100% and, if he had just allowed me 10 more seconds, that is where I was going to end. I hope that the noise now around the other issues that we face, both geopolitically and locally, and the enthusiasm with which the Government have embraced the dominance that we are going to create in AI and how we are going to become a global superpower, do not mean that we forget the very deep structural inequalities that were created because of Covid. We saw that in this hybrid world work, we saw it in our parents and families work and we saw it in our high street work. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his concluding remarks, and I thank everyone for participating in the debate. These are complex issues and tricky to unpick, and this is the first of what I hope will be two or three debates about our work looking at the long-terms implications of Covid. It is impossible to do enough justice to the things that we uncovered in just this one short debate.

I end by saying that it feels bittersweet standing here: bitter, because we unearthed so many unbearable inequalities in our work and so many things that we felt needed to change, but somehow sweet, because pretty much every person in the debate reaffirmed the importance of face-to-face contact, human interaction and maintaining the combination of mechanisms that we have in order to build fulfilling lives. I beg to move.

Motion agreed.