Digital Exclusion

Robin Walker Excerpts

Wednesday 28th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) on securing this debate. Digital exclusion is a really important issue, and like other Members, I have been contacted by lots of constituents as part of the Age UK campaign on this. While it is of course true that the older generation are particularly affected, we should remember that young people can also be affected by digital exclusion. During the pandemic, we saw a big move towards digital education online, and ensuring that the right devices and broadband access were provided to young people was a key part of the challenge. In areas of digital notspots, those people would not have been able to receive the support they needed.

I have to say that the situation in my constituency has improved a great deal over the last 15 years. We have gone from having a number of areas that did not have digital access to now having 5G pilots and universal high-speed access in the city of Worcester. But it is a city, and I recognise the challenge for more rural colleagues.

I want to sound one note of caution about the drive to go ever more digital. The Education Committee are currently carrying out an inquiry into the impact of screentime on young people, and there are serious concerns about their mental health and the impact of too much screentime in that respect. We are often told that part of the challenge with telling young people to reduce their screentime is the modelling they see from adults—we are all walking around staring at our phones the whole time. The youngest children see their parents spending a lot of time online and in front of devices. UNESCO has recently changed its advice from a big drive towards digital education worldwide, and particularly in developing countries, to sounding some warning notes on the risks of too heavy a focus on digital. In this debate, we absolutely need to focus on eliminating digital exclusion and ensuring that there is support and offline services for those who need to access public services. We also need to think about the balance that adults, as well as children, need to strike between their digital lives and real lives.

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[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

Thank you for your work chairing this debate, Mrs Harris. I congratulate the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) on bringing forward such a popular and important debate.

I will focus my comments on the skills required to access digital. The access issues have been raised, and are incredibly important—I do not want to take away from that. However, on the issues with skills, by 2030, 5 million workers will be acutely under-skilled in basic digital skills. That is a significant number, and it must be a massive concern for the Government.

The skills that people require to access digital must be considered. There is a generational issue: younger people are better at accessing these things. However, that is not true across the board. There is an intersectionality of issues. People are less likely to be able to have digital skills if they are more vulnerable, older, or in poverty, or if they do not have the capacity or time to access them. Given the cost of living crisis, I am increasingly seeing constituents working multiple jobs who just do not have the time to work on their digital skills because they are too busy trying to make ends meet. That is a really big concern for me.

Covid and the roll-out of accessing things online were mentioned. During covid, the Scottish Government provided 72,000 devices and 14,000 internet connections to individuals, children and families that were at risk of being digitally excluded. That has massively increased—the number of devices was up to 280,000 in 2022. We are increasing that as we go in order to ensure that young people are not digitally excluded and are able to spend time typing up documents in Microsoft Word, Google Sheets, or whatever the school prefers them to use when they are at home, because it is so important that digital skills are available for people and that the workforce of the future has digital skills.

[Mr Robin Walker]

I recognise the good work the Scottish Government, and indeed the English Government —the UK Government—did on getting devices out to people. However, UNESCO highlighted to us, among other things, the cost of devices: having gone out to people, they need to be maintained and their security needs to be upgraded. One of the things we need to think about very carefully in all our Government budgets as we go forward is how to ensure that there is ongoing investment in the digital technologies that are needed both for the people receiving them and those distributing them.

[Kirsty Blackman]

I agree. On continual access to the internet, a universal credit social tariff is available for people. Every time I meet with my local jobcentre, I make clear how important it is to stress that the social tariff is available so that people can access that reduced-cost internet access. It is important that we have that and that people know that it exists so that they can take it up.

Within my constituency, I have spoken to Virgin Money, which provides access to internet services. There is also an organisation called Silver Surfers, which provides older people with access to the services and advice they need to access the internet. We have heard about some of the negatives of the internet and some of the positives of online life. It is important to be able to access services online, particularly for people in rural communities who are a long way away from those services. It is important for tackling loneliness to be able to access communities online.