Oral Answers to Questions

Michelle Welsh Excerpts

Wednesday 26th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Peter Kyle]

I can assure the hon. Lady—she will have heard this from my previous answers—that we are determined to keep young people safe online. Online activity and the services offered to people in this country and around the world are adapting and evolving fast because of the speed of innovation. We need a regulatory and legislative landscape that can keep up with that innovation, and we need a Government who will ensure they are on the side of young people and vulnerable people of any age. I can assure her that, in this Government and this Secretary of State, they have that.

[Michelle Welsh (Sherwood Forest) (Lab)]

6. What recent progress his Department has made on improving digital inclusion in Sherwood Forest constituency.

[The Minister for Data Protection and Telecoms (Chris Bryant)]

If we are to be a successful digital nation, we have to take the whole nation with us. We were proud recently to publish our first digital inclusion action plan, the first for 10 years, because of precisely that: we want to take everybody with us.

[Michelle Welsh]

Too often, in ex-mining communities such as Ollerton and Edwinstowe, in rural communities such as Farnsfield and even in Hucknall West, people struggle to get a phone signal and access to the internet. Constituents feel that they are left behind and miss out on the new and upcoming technologies that we know improve access to online jobs, education and business opportunities. Does the Minister agree that we need to ensure such communities are at the heart of the Government’s digital inclusion ambitions, so no one is left behind, especially those in deprived communities?

[Chris Bryant]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and her constituency exemplifies one of the issues we face, which is that we might have relatively affluent areas cheek by jowl with much poorer areas. That is why, in our digital inclusion action plan, we have tried to ensure that we address all the different forms of digital exclusion, whether it is by virtue of age, ethnicity, educational background or physical geography.