Digital Exclusion
Ian Byrne Excerpts(9 months ago)
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Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)
It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mrs Harris. I thank my good and hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) for securing this important debate.
Members of this House, charities and trade unions have been warning for years that increasingly essential digital services are becoming out of reach for many. According to a survey for Citizens Advice, 1 million disconnected their broadband in the last year because they could not afford it, and people on universal credit were more than six times as likely to be disconnected. Age UK also told me that 6 million people aged 65+ are either unable to use the internet safely or successfully or are not online at all. Thatcher’s ambition for there to be “no such thing as society” is unfolding before our very eyes due to digital exclusion. Isolating and disengaging huge swathes of the public is not how we build a fair, equitable and equal society.
I have no doubt that one of the drivers of digital exclusion is the 14 years of brutal austerity imposed by this Government. The situation cannot continue. All public services, including the NHS and council services, must offer and promote an affordable, easy-to-access and offline way of using them. The Government must provide local authorities and public services with the funding to do that. Banks, including Lloyds, Barclays and HSBC, made record profits last year. They must provide face-to-face banking for many constituents and avoid leaving communities to become banking deserts. There is no excuse to continue closing branches with such profits being made.
As we have heard in this debate so far, broadband is an essential utility, and I was extremely proud to stand on a manifesto in 2019 that recognised that. It could and should be made free and available to every home in the country as a universal public service, if only the Government had the political will to do so. I hope that the Minister takes note.