Digital Exclusion (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 8th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths. Like him, I find myself largely in agreement with many of the contributions from the Conservative Benches, which is not always the case, although I disagree with him that a knowledge of Plato and Aristotle should be seen as mutually exclusive with knowledge of STEM subjects and digital skills; I am always very keen to see these joined together and working cross-disciplinary in the broadest sense.

I join other noble Lords in thanking the committee for its excellent report, and join it in expressing disappointment with the government response. What I will seek to do today, however, is mostly to add some different points, some of which I take a slightly different perspective on and some of which the committee perhaps felt were outside its scope but none the less, I think, have a significant impact on its work. The report talks throughout, quite rightly, about confidence—the word “confidence” appears all the way through—but there is very little discussion of fear. I think we need to acknowledge that people have a rightful fear of going on the internet.

Because I do joined-up-ness, I work in many different areas in your Lordships’ House, but last night I was unable to take part, due to another commitment, in a debate on the Victims and Prisoners Bill, on Amendment 112 in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, about compensating victims of financial fraud. A great deal of financial fraud happens online, of course, and its scale is terrifying. People are frightened to go on the internet because of the scale of that fraud. They are often being warned, rightly, about that, and we need to acknowledge that it is a genuine problem; it is not just a case of giving people confidence. To cite a couple of figures I was looking up, the City of London Police says that courier fraud, affecting particularly the over-70s, cost £12.6 million last year. Romance fraud, which affects people of all ages, cost £93 million.

It is not just fraud that makes people fearful of going online. I happened to see one of our national newspaper consumer champions addressing the case of a pensioner who was left without any money over Christmas because, using telephone payment, she had accidentally pressed one extra zero and paid £1,000 instead of £100 for a service. That got fixed only when a national newspaper champion got involved. People are fearful of engaging with these services, with good cause, and there is an urgent need for much more to be done, to have regulation and protection, to ensure that companies react very promptly and rightly and do their absolute best to set up systems that do not go wrong in that manner.

I slightly disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell. We want everyone to have access. The noble Baroness said there should be no digital exclusion, but I am with the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, in acknowledging that this is not something we are going to miraculously make disappear. At different stages in our life, we will have different levels of capacity to engage with digital. Many of us, at some point in our life, might find ourselves without the skills to deal with digital. This is where I pick up the point of the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, about libraries. I put to your Lordships that we will always need to have everyone able to access a facility where they can go and say, “I have a real problem; can you help me sort this out?”. Libraries are a very obvious place, and the collapse in the provision of libraries is a huge tragedy. It is a logical place. The noble Lord identified other places as well, such as churches, but we need libraries as a place that people can go when their digital skills are not adequate for the task at hand. I stress too that many voluntary groups do great work. I know many people who have learned their digital skills through the University of the Third Age, but lots of those groups need a bit of government funding to enable them to function.

I want to pick up some points about digital exclusion because of poverty. Figures from Ofcom show that 7% of households now do not have internet provision, and 20% said it is because of the cost. Also, currently 23% of people, 12.2 million people, are looking for cheaper data plans because of the cost. Perhaps we need to coin a new phrase here. Because of the cost, people are going to see their data flows squeezed down; they might maintain a trickle of data but they will have data starvation. We all know that digital provision is using more bandwidth all the time. We need to think about whether there are low-bandwidth options available that people are actually able to afford.

Good things are happening, but they urgently need to. As noble Lords may know, the UK is the second-largest producer of electronic waste in the world per capita. This is a huge environmental issue but also a huge prospect in solving some of the problems we are talking about. Liverpool City Region has just signed up to the National Device Bank, a recycling network run by the Good Things Foundation that is looking to take some of what could go into electronic waste, repurpose it and give it to people who cannot afford to buy computers and high-tech mobile phones. It also operates a national data bank, which is like a food bank but for mobile data. These are very good things that the Government, with a bit of funding, could help enhance.

We need to look at austerity. I declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. Local government has to be at the core of providing and funding these services, but its lack of funding means that it is struggling to do so. The head of 100% Digital Leeds has recently been focusing on it, and Leeds is leading the way. Many others would like to follow but simply do not have the funding to do so.