Beyond Digital (COVID-19 Committee Report)

Debate between Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho and Lord Hain

Wednesday 6th September 2023 Grand Committee

[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.