Beyond Digital (COVID-19 Committee Report)

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Wednesday 6th September 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, the Covid-19 pandemic was the worst global crisis since the Second World War, an event that changed the world for ever. It came from nowhere. How many people predicted that it would happen? How many people predict these black-swan events that change the world? How many people predicted 9/11? How many people predicted the financial crisis 15 years ago? I have learned from my own experience over the last three decades of building my business, Cobra Beer, from scratch—a business that I nearly lost three times—that crises almost always come out of the blue. No one predicts them. What matters is how you deal with these crises, how you survive, how you get through and how you learn from the crises and from the mistakes that have been made.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, and her committee for their report, Beyond Digital: Planning for a Hybrid World. I emphasise a point she made: it was published more than two years ago, on 21 April 2021, but better late than never that we are debating this really important issue.

In her opening remarks, the noble Baroness highlighted how the committee looked at issues concerning hybrid, the high street, parents and children, as well as the resilience of the UK. The report clearly says that

“dependence on the internet as a result of the pandemic has led to a massive acceleration in many pre-existing digital trends: from online shopping to online GP appointments, automation of jobs to remote working”.

From my experience, I remember that many of the financial transactions I have been involved in—the deals, mergers and acquisitions in my business over the years—used to be conducted face to face, with the lawyers and everyone gathering around a table in a boardroom. Then we moved on to conference calls more than face-to-face meetings. The technology for videoconferencing was there; we just were not using it. The pandemic led to this technology being used, which I will come to later.

The report also clearly highlights the “huge inequalities” that exist in our country, which have been spoken about; how children lost so much of their schooling; how businesses could not move to trade online because they just did not know how to do it; and the isolation created by the pandemic. The future was always going to be hybrid—a mixture of online, offline and real-time—but due to the pandemic, as the report says, the future “is here now”.

I am happy to note that the report states that digital is

“a very poor substitute for ‘in person’ services and interactions”.

There is no beating that. You can never replicate what we are doing here: having this debate face to face. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, I commend the House of Lords for adapting so quickly and enabling us to continue to function as a Parliament even during the lockdown and to operate remotely. We did it, in many cases from abroad. We functioned, but nothing beats what we are doing now.

The report also mentions and recommends that, like many other cross-cutting issues, such as Brexit and devolution, responsibility for the Government’s strategic response should lie with the Cabinet Office. I presume that is where it sits now. It also quotes Yuval Noah Harari as saying that, pre-internet,

“if you ordered the entire population of a country to stay at home for several weeks, it would have resulted in economic ruin, social breakdown and mass starvation”.

The internet made it possible for us to stay at and work from home, and kept us safe.

In July, I was privileged to be the guest of honour of one of my old schools in India, the Hyderabad Public School, for its centenary investiture ceremony. The school has many illustrious alumni, including Ajay Banga, the president of the World Bank, and Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft. I have quoted many times what he said at the beginning of the pandemic, which the report also quotes:

“We’ve … seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”.


That is where necessity becomes the mother of invention. We did it. Research by the Royal College of General Practitioners found that

“at the peak of the pandemic, around 71% of GP consultations were conducted remotely by telephone or video”,

compared with 25% for the same period the year before. A hybrid world is very beneficial. We are now living in that world, where we make the most of in-person interactions and the virtual interactions that the technology allows us, which we demonstrated throughout the pandemic.

The problem is that we can have a truly good hybrid world only if it is truly inclusive and everyone has access and is able to use the technology and the internet. The reality is that at the end of 2019, before the pandemic, there were more than 600,000 premises that were unable to receive decent broadband. Of course, many of those were in rural areas. I ask the Government to confirm whether they have a target of 100% broadband coverage throughout the United Kingdom, and by when they hope to fulfil that.

Then there is the aspect that a huge proportion of the population are digitally illiterate. Up to 9 million people—some say more than 11 million people—do not have the ability to use this technology in the way that many of us, fortunately, can. Some 9% of households with children have access to the internet only through a smartphone. The Sutton Trust found that 15% of teachers in the most deprived schools said that more than one-third of their students did not have adequate access to an electronic device for home learning, compared with 2% of teachers in the most affluent schools. In the United States of America students and teachers in all government schools are able to have computers or laptops. Will the Government confirm how many of our students and teachers have that 100% access to computers and digital devices?

The noble Lord, Lord Hain, mentioned that many children missed out on their schooling because of the pandemic. I know, from personal experience, that children lucky enough to have access to broadband, their laptop, a room and teaching taking place—forget missing lessons, they did not miss even an art lesson or a music lesson. Yet at the other extreme, we had children on a council estate, in a tower block, who had no laptop, no broadband and no room in which to have access. They missed, many of them, a year of education.

Another area where the Government could have done more is that they were too late in implementing lateral flow testing. As president of the CBI from June 2020 until June 2022, I was one of the first people in the country, in August 2020, to recommend to the Government to implement lateral flow mass testing. The Government would not listen. As an entrepreneur, you never give up; I persisted and eventually the Government did listen. They listened in November 2020, and it was the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, who said, on the Floor of the House, “Lord Bilimoria, you have won this argument”, and they started to implement lateral flow testing. By the time it was fully implemented, it was November 2021, running into December 2021 and January 2022. Noble Lords will remember that we ran out of lateral flow tests because they were being offered, as I recommended, free to the public and to businesses.

How many people—not many—have heard of the Oxford University test that was done in 200 schools with 200,000 children and 20,000 staff? Half used a bubble system, isolating, so that when one person got Covid, the whole bubble would isolate and miss their schooling; the other half used regular lateral flow testing. They found that the ones in the bubble missed out on schooling while the ones with regular lateral flow testing, except for the individual who tested positive, did not miss out at all. We could have saved so many more school days if we had implemented lateral flow testing earlier. I go further and say that if we had implemented lateral flow testing earlier, we would have avoided the second and third lockdowns and would have saved hundreds of billions of pounds, let alone lives wasted and school days wasted. I hope that is one of the lessons that is learned.

To conclude, we have a digital divide that has been highlighted by the pandemic, digital poverty, digital access, digital illiteracy. I make the point that, going back, my first government appointment was in 1999 as a member of the New Deal task force, which then became the national employment panel in the Department for Work and Pensions. I remember there that the whole idea of getting people from welfare to work was not just to save money and help the economy but to help those individuals, because experiment after experiment, research after research, showed that work is actually good for you. It is good physically and good mentally.

When you are in a face-to-face working environment, you have the ability to be more creative, to be more innovative, to have that buzz and to have the social interactions. There is also the ability for your local high streets to survive. I am sorry to say that the high streets have suffered hugely because of the pandemic. They need support, and one area would be a reform of our business rates. Will the Government acknowledge that we desperately need to reform our business rates to save our high streets?

I conclude by saying that good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. We need to learn from our mistakes.