Poverty Reduction

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Thursday 22nd February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for his timely debate and his relentless and indefatigable championing of this issue. I declare my interests, most particularly as president of the British Chambers of Commerce and chancellor of the Open University.

I will make three brief points. The first is about business and its role in helping with this issue. I have been travelling around the country as president of the British Chambers of Commerce. I am not going to share my travel diary, but I have most recently been in Preston, Coventry, Doncaster, Poole and Glasgow, and, with the British Chambers of Commerce, I have launched bits of work that look at how we can rejuvenate our economy over the next decade—a kind of playbook for whatever shade of Government we find ourselves with later in the year. The most recent work we did was about the future of the local economy, and I will emphasise how important it feels to make sure that we do not only join up policy across central government but that we link that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, mentioned, with local government and its fundamental role in helping drive local economies that we know are so essential in providing high-quality work and fuelling the economy to enable any of the choices that we are talking about in this debate.

When the British Chambers has been doing this work, we have been trying to reinforce three key planks: we need high-quality local leadership around these issues to make sure that local economies and communities have got the best possible talent around them; we need better collaboration with business at a local level to ensure that we have got, not just the acceptable jobs or jobs that are paying, but jobs that provide the quality that my noble friend Lady D’Souza was talking about; and we need to make sure that we have enough devolution and power locally to enable these communities to build resilience.

There are examples, and I can think of many British Chambers members that are doing interesting projects to help from different angles to build that local resilience, which will help local poverty and local issues. In Old Trafford, Trafford Council is working with a company called Bruntwood; they are doing a huge redevelopment of 24,000 square feet in the area that is generating green pathways, new transport links and big infrastructure investment. But it has taken a lot of work to get to that point with that triumvirate of different groups working together and I believe deeply that we will not help with working on the prevent part of the PECC framework created by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, if we do not think about how to drive that business-led change at a local level and open up collaboration.

As I said, there are examples. There is the one in Trafford and, last week, Aviva launched a project with the British Chambers that looks at local planners, to help build high-quality jobs at a very specific level; we are really trying to find diverse people to train and become local planners. These will be high-quality jobs offered in communities that did not have those opportunities before; just 100 jobs to start with, but we hope to build and scale that over time. So the first point is that it is really important to emphasise that local co-ordination; as if the challenge of central government was not big enough, we must not forget local council integration as well.

The second point—and this is where I fear I will become a bit like the noble Lord, Lord Bird—is around digitisation. I have stood here many times and sometimes I feel like I am talking into a void. It is unacceptable that we think that 95% connectivity in this country is okay: it is not. We will never be able to connect communities that are completely outside the normal ways that we operate if we do not have the infrastructure, skills and digital ability to connect them. It is not just a question of alleviating poverty: it is a question of social justice.

Last week, I talked in a debate with the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, and her Communications and Digital Committee, on a very good report about digital exclusion, but I fear the Minister’s responses did not please many on the committee and they certainly did not please me either, unfortunately. I ask with respect how the Government are thinking about the connections between digital disconnection and exclusion, because we know that of the 2.5 million people who do not use the internet, at least 60% to 70% of them fall into the lowest socioeconomic groups. We also know that you are unable to look for work if you are not looking online; 90% of jobs are advertised only online, so you are caught in a horrible nexus. Digitisation is such an important plank of how we will address the P part of the PECC from the noble Lord, Lord Bird. Local issues and digitisation are fundamental to helping us address poverty in this country.

I will offer one moment of hope before I sit down. If I have achieved anything, I think that one of the small things that I have contributed is building GOV.UK and the government digital service. I mention that partly because it is directly related to access to information and how people can find some of the services for them, but, more importantly, because it is sometimes possible to join up government and policy. When I think back to that project from 2010 to 2015, I ask, what made it marginally successful? There were three things. The first is prime ministerial support; I cannot overemphasise how important it is that a priority comes from the top. That speaks to the point from the noble Lord, Lord Bird; we hear language, but I am not clear that it has ever been a key priority for the Prime Minister to put poverty at the heart of an action plan.

The second is political support and leadership in the Civil Service and in the department. That project was being driven by the noble Lord, Lord Maude, and we also had Civil Service leaders driving it; that took a huge amount of work and more entrepreneurial effort than I have ever had to deploy, but it is possible to join it up.

Finally, we had a clear focus and some measurements and actions at the end of it. That project was flawed, and I do not remind people of it to sound successful or blow my own trumpet—quite the opposite. But it is possible to join up policy and it needed those three things. I leave the Minister with those three things, and I would be interested in his reflections on all of them: local government and its leadership and its ability to join up with central government on these issues; digitisation and not accepting that 95% is good enough, because it is not; and, finally, how we can take those lessons from some of the successful projects in government.

Covid-19: Child Poverty

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Monday 15th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott [V]]

I am well aware of the situation in Leicester; there has been much in the press about it. The Government are absolutely committed to supporting hard-working families. While any reduction in council tax relates to MHCLG, I am pleased that the Government have provided significant funding to reduce council tax bills for a short period. I will write to the noble Baroness on that.

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB) [V]]

There are currently about 700,000 children with no access to internet facilities at home. On 20 April, the Education Secretary announced a £100 million fund to ease this problem. Can the Minister please tell me what percentage of this fund has been distributed and how many families there are left to help?

[Baroness Stedman-Scott [V]]

I completely understand the point the noble Baroness is making. To answer her question, I will need to go away, get the facts and write to her.

Poverty

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for securing this debate. I posit that if he had started his great invention now, he would have started it around the internet. The internet has transformed how we think about everything in our society, but I challenge that it has not yet disrupted, encouraged and inspired us to think about brave new solutions in tackling the causes of poverty.

I feel immensely lucky. I have been an entrepreneur and worked in technology my whole life. I did this based on the most incredible luxuries of privilege and education that you could imagine. However, I believe most deeply that the internet enables people of any background to have access to the same opportunities of education and entrepreneurship for the least cost with the simplest mechanisms, but we are not putting it at the heart of how we think about addressing some of these complex challenges.

Both data and stories point to these ideas. First, on data, as many noble Lords may know—I feel I have become like white noise with these statistics—there are still 12.6 million adults in this country who do not use the internet on a regular basis and cannot get the benefits of being online. It is not only some noble Lords in this Chamber but many millions of people from many different backgrounds. If you map the rates of low internet usage with the areas of deepest deprivation, they are practically layered on top of each other. I cite Torbay, Boston and East Lindsey as places where there is extreme digital disadvantage and social isolation.

Not only this, but women, who often tend to face the brunt of many of the complex aspects of poverty, also tend to lack basic digital skills. Therefore, while being faced with the multi-challenging dimensions of, perhaps, addiction or family disruption, they also face a lack of ability to use any technology to help them.

In addition, families who are using the internet are saving up to £516 a year. We all heard our new Prime Minister talk most boldly about helping people who are just getting by, and I cannot think of a quicker weapon than to give people access to saving £516 a year using the internet. It is fundamental and important.

The charity I co-founded, Doteveryone, has worked out what we call the social return on investment for tackling the digital deficit. We looked at all the indicators that improve when you help people use technology: you are more likely to find a job—90% of jobs are only advertised online—and yet 1 million unemployed people cannot use the internet; the things that happen when you gain confidence; health outcomes; finding relevant information to help in your daily life; and some of the savings that I have talked about. We have valued what people gain from being online, and what we gain from them being online, at £1,064 per person. If you were to wrap that up in a number for the economy, it would be about £76 billion. These are not trivial numbers.

However, it is not only the data but also the projects and the places that I feel lucky to have seen, most particularly since I started doing work on digital skills in 2009. I should like to talk briefly about Knowle West in Bristol, which was one of the first places I visited when I was appointed digital champion by Gordon Brown. I thought I was going to find things to be very different from what I actually took away from there. When I arrived, the local buses into Knowle West had just been stopped. It was the poorest ward in Bristol. I was going to see the media centre. Even I, an internet entrepreneur, thought, “Really? A media centre? Is that what they need in Knowle West? Surely they need transport links”.

More fool me. The media centre had led to a massive upskilling of the local population. On the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, the skills crisis was being addressed through a tenacious local entrepreneur and they were building websites. The lack of buses had led to them campaigning online to have them reinstated.

I am not a techno-Utopian. Not every problem is solved by using the internet. However, I could see from that experience that it gave the local people the tools to empower them to build the things that they wanted—local websites selling vegetables from the gardens that they were creating in the area, and campaigns to bring back the buses. It was a powerful and relatively low-cost way of addressing the massively complex challenges that that community faced.

I have two suggestions for the Government. First, having wildly failed to secure much money from them to build basic digital skills in this country, I would like to throw in the mix that 58% of charities in the UK still do not have basic digital skills, and these are the very organisations that we are relying on to help address the causes of poverty. I implore the Government to help the charitable sector itself become digitally robust. Secondly, no other organisations have more to gain from more people being online than some of the large platform-based technology companies—Google, Facebook and others. We need them to do more to address skills in this country, and to help the internet reach the places it is most failing right now. I also implore the Government to put pressure on Google and Facebook to help us become a more connected country. We need it now more than ever.

25th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho]

That this House takes note of this year’s 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web and its effects on society in the United Kingdom.

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, I start by thanking noble Lords for signing up to my debate. I must confess that, as I saw the list of names increase, I was slightly alarmed that perhaps people thought I was going to give some kind of technology master class in the Chamber. However, I think that noble Lords’ enthusiasm, and the breadth of experience that we will hear from this afternoon, is testament to the extraordinary impact this relatively new invention has already had on all our lives.

I first began grappling with the opportunity of the web in 1997 when Brent Hoberman and I co-founded lastminute.com. We were on an evangelical mission. We had to convince suppliers, customers and investors that the internet was here to stay, that the web was not going to blow up and that it was safe to buy things online. Imagine the landscape then: no Facebook, no Google, no Twitter, and certainly no smartphones. What a short time—and how much everything has changed.

The UK has a long history of technology breakthroughs. Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s invention follows on the footsteps of Ada Lovelace’s first computer program, which she wrote for Charles Babbage’s analytical engine in 1842. Obviously, the Bletchley codebreakers deserve a mention for their role in helping us win the Second World War.

I now find the web’s usage numbers not even surprisingly huge any longer: 2.4 billion people worldwide use the web; 1.2 billion are shoppers online. To put this in context, the rate of adoption is warp speed. It took 38 years for the radio to reach 50 million users, it took 13 years for television, it took four years for the web and it took 10 months for Facebook.

The fastest growing demographic using social media is the over-55s. Africa has the fastest growing number of web users, with Nigeria having the largest number; 47% of them are accessing the web via their smartphones. More than 55,000 projects have been started on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, most of which would never have got started without it. In the UK alone, £4.6 billion has been earned by people sharing their products and services using what is called the gift economy through sites such as Airbnb or Zopa.

The web has transformed the way we work, the way we interact and the way we play. Some of health’s greatest challenges are being rethought. Millions of so-called citizen scientists are plotting cancer gene patterns via online games. Early intervention in dementia is becoming more common after the success of an online test for patients. Education is being opened up on a global scale through the use of massive open online courses, from Khan Academy’s tutorials to Coursera’s degrees.

All industries are being disrupted. Farmers in Ghana are saving time and money by using their smartphones to trade their products before the long walk to market begins. Underprivileged women in South Africa are breaking out of the cycle of poverty after training that enables them to help US customers with their technology problems.

Even the animal videos posted online—much mocked by some—are now enabling scientists to gather meaningful data about animal relationships that would never have been accessible before. Noble Lords may have seen the BBC’s brilliant documentary “Animal Odd Couples” based on this.

Beyond the hyperbole, this 25th birthday—and as part of that, I hope, this debate—is a good moment to reflect on all these different aspects to the web. The UK’s relative position on the technology stage is a complex one. There are many areas where we lead the world. Products and services delivered online now account for at least 10% of UK GDP. We have the highest proportion in G20 countries. The British are the most advanced online shoppers on the planet. Estimates are that in 2014 e-commerce will be 20% of total UK retail. The UK internet sector is bigger than the health, education or construction sectors. Britain has created some world-leading businesses—Asos, Moshi Monsters and, dare I say it, lastminute.com.

London is becoming a significant tech hub, but it is not alone. Edinburgh, Bristol and Brighton are all seeing record numbers of digital start-ups. Our location and our language mean that we are a vital part of every dominant global web business. London is the only English-speaking city in Facebook’s top 10 and we have the highest number of Twitter users on the planet.

The Government are also making some big strides in how they embrace the web. Through the Government Digital Service, which I am proud to have played a small part in creating, the Government are leading the way for open data, open standards and digital government. The government digital platform, gov.uk, even won a design of the year award from the Design Museum—surely a world first.

This year, coding will be part of the school curriculum and all children aged five and above will be taught computer science. The UK now has the most visionary policy in the G8 for educating children. Yet we face some big challenges. There are 11 million adults who lack the ability to do four basic things online—communicate, transact, search and share information—and to do these things safely. Of these, 50% are over 65 but 50% are of working age in a country where 90% of new jobs require basic online skills and many vacancies are advertised only online. In addition, only 30% of small businesses are able to transact online, meaning that they miss out on both huge sales and savings. Go On UK, the cross-sector charity I chair, estimates that there is £68 billion of value to the economy if we address these adult skills.

We will need to fill 1 million technology sector jobs by 2020, which is looking nearly impossible from our current workforce. More depressingly, the number of women in the UK tech sector is actually falling as an overall percentage. If current trends are not reversed, only 1% of the sector will be female by 2040. Looking around the Chamber today, I am sad to see that this does not seem an alarmist statistic.

Despite the Government’s ambition to improve our infrastructure—I welcome Maria Miller’s announcement this morning about a rural broadband fund—we lag far behind Taiwan, Korea and Japan for universal coverage and a long way behind Singapore or Korea for available average speeds.

I am constantly surprised and frustrated that the only local website in the top 10 most visited websites in this country is the BBC. So although we start as many digital businesses as anywhere in the world, we do not scale them and we do not compete with the global web businesses in the world.

Finally, and perhaps most seriously, we do not have the skills and understanding of the digital world at the top of our corporate, public and political life. This leads to a lack of high-quality decisions about our future—a future where so much will inevitably revolve around technology. Only four FTSE 100 businesses have a CTO or digital executive on their plc board and yet all these businesses face huge upheavals.

Turning to Whitehall, the picture changes again. Just think of the UK Government’s reaction to the Snowden allegations. The political discourse lags far behind that of the US, where an expert panel has looked into the NSA’s claims about the necessity of data gathering and found that only one case was solved by the bulk collection of data—just one, and that was a small incident of money-laundering. We are woefully quiet on the subject of liberty versus security. Allegations that GCHQ and the NSA worked to undermine encryption should caution anyone who trusts the web with their medical, financial or personal records. To add to the complexity, the technology landscape is not remotely stable but is changing at mind-boggling speed.

We face hard questions as we grapple with the technology we already know about, let alone that coming up in the future. What should be the regulation of personal drones? How do we regulate driverless cars? How do we protect against increasing cybercrime? What are the privacy implications of wearable technology? What is the IP of a 3D-printed object in your home? How do we teach children about online identity and anonymity? How do we protect the free flow of information around the world and avoid a balkanised web? How do we make sure that we have the understanding and experience to debate these areas effectively?

To celebrate this anniversary year, Sir Tim Berners-Lee wants to kick off as many open source-style, local discussions as possible to try to answer the question, “What kind of web do we want?”. I would construct my answer by going back to what I imagine were some of his guiding principles in 1989: inclusion, by making sure no one is left behind demographically or geographically; freedom and transparency, by making sure that consumers understand the quid pro quo with the handful of big companies whose services they mainly use without obvious charge; and openness, by making sure no Government can control access and content. This is tested every day. Just this weekend, the Turkish authorities announced a clampdown on websites and a new wave of censorship.

The web has immense power. I find something magical and remarkable on it every single day, but I agree with Sir Tim. We need to talk about the web we want. We need to pause for breath and perhaps be more conscious of the next 25 years of development. At the moment, we are sleepwalking into assuming that the platform underpinning so much of our daily life is not changing.

I should like to ask the Government two questions. First, what plans do they have to mark this extraordinary global invention that should be a brilliant inspiration for the next wave of British inventors? Secondly, do the Government agree that a fitting tribute to Tim’s vision that this is for everyone would be to review the billions government invests annually in adult skills and employment training to ensure that digital skills are embedded throughout the whole of our society?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho]

I thank the Minister for his answers. I am delighted that we have had the first debate on the world wide web here in the Chamber. It is perhaps one small step for mankind and one bigger leap for the House of Lords. If I was going to organise a birthday party, I think I would engineer the presence of an astronomer, a writer, a philosopher, a composer, some film directors and maybe, dare I say, even a politician or two. I would argue that it has been a very successful birthday party for the world wide web; I thank all noble Lords for their contributions and look forward to many more high-quality debates about the future of our technology landscape.

Motion agreed.