Digital Exclusion (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Young of Norwood Green Excerpts

Thursday 8th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Norwood Green (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, echo the praise to our support team for our committee. You hear a lot of criticism of civil servants recently, but we can only speak from experience, and they were superb. We were well chaired, too. It is true to say that there was a wide disparity of views on our committee. Listening to the debate, I reflected on whether I am “glass half full” about this matter rather than “glass half empty”—and I think that I am. There is a danger that we will emphasise too much of the negative. Of course, we need to consider both aspects of the debate.

Demographics interest me. When we talk about older people, I presume that I am included as I am now an octogenarian. Am I brilliant with technology? No, but I am not too bad. I have a consultant—my son, who is highly paid in IT—so I suppose that I have that luxury. I will reflect on what happened during Covid, which was a very interesting scenario. Thousands and thousands of people started to learn how to Zoom, especially among the older generation, including grandparents. Why? People wanted to contact their grandchildren, who became their educators. That was a positive thing.

I will also reflect on my now late—unfortunately—stepmother-in-law, a wonderful woman called Wyn, who purchased an iPad. About six months later, my wife and I visited her, and we asked her how she was getting on with her iPad. She replied, “That bloody thing? I wish I’d never bought it”. I asked where it was; she said it was in the box; and I said that they do not work very well if they are in the box. We got it out of the box, and we spent probably two hours with her, at the end of which she learned how to email and take photographs and she enhanced her life considerably. There are thousands, if not millions, of what were once known as silver surfers—elderly people who are managing to cope with the technology. But it is not all of them: we are in a society in transition, and we have to recognise that; for example, some people still want to use cash, and we need to take that into account.

I have mentioned Covid already. I could not help but think about it when the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, referred to the strategy. I commend to her an article in the Times on 5 February by Helen MacNamara, a former senior civil servant who sat in on the Cabinet meetings. I will start with the good thing: I absolutely agree with her that the vaccine strategy was brilliant; it saved thousands and thousands of lives. But she comments on the fact that there was a slight problem with the Cabinet meetings: they were all men. She said that the worst decision they made was to shut down schools. She is absolutely right; that was the very worst decision that could possibly have been made. Young people desperately needed their school; it was their refuge and the place where they got at least one hot meal and access to technology and where they socialised with their schoolmates. That was an unfortunate decision, and the Government have been trying to deal with the backwash from that.

What did that mean? If you talk to people in education, they will tell you. It meant that young people come into school now and they are not potty-trained, have no social skills, do not know how to use a knife and fork, and they are so badly dressed that they have to have spare sets of clothes, and so on. So it is a huge problem.

The Government employed somebody to look at that problem—I think his name was Kevan Collins. He recommended to them that they needed to spend a huge amount of money—£15 billion—to retrieve that situation. They put in £5 billion, and he resigned as a result of that. He got it right. We know that if we do not get it right in early years education, it costs a lot more; those children will be digitally excluded. As somebody already mentioned, when they were at home, sometimes the only piece of apparatus in the house would be one phone. It would be cheaper if the Government distributed laptops to everybody—to children at least—to stop that kind of deprivation.

I wholeheartedly endorse one of our committee’s recommendations, and I hope the Minister will give it some positive response, although I will not hold my breath. It was:

“Removing VAT from social tariffs would be one of the most straightforward ways of reducing the cost. Helen Milner”—


one of our witnesses—

“said it would cost the Treasury £151.2 million per year if every Universal Credit recipient took it up. Current take-up rates suggest it would cost around £7.5 million per year. Both BT and Vodafone committed to passing any such VAT cut onto their customers”.

We did not get a very positive response from the then Minister, Paul Scully, so I hope that minds might be changed on that issue.

Your Lordships will see that I am wearing my badge; it is National Apprenticeship Week this week, in case you were not aware—a very important week. I was interested in a company called Metaverse Learning, which specialises in trying to help underprivileged young people become digital apprentices. However, it has recently started to look at the age range of 50 and above. That is interesting, because if we are talking about the importance of reskilling and upskilling in today’s society, we know that people will probably have to do that two or three times more in their life or they are likely to be digitally excluded from employment.

On community activity, I was interested in what my noble friend Lady Armstrong said about the benefit of taking local action. My noble friend Lord Griffiths reminded me about Newham—I was struggling to remember where we went to—and a wonderful experience we had there. A local group was helping people get to grips with the new technology—I have to finish now; I will be very quick—and they demonstrated the benefit that had to people, plus there was the positive involvement of the DWP.

I look forward to the ministerial response; I am sure the Minister will give us 101 reasons why the Government really have a strategy.