Tackling the Digital Divide

Rushanara Ali Excerpts

Thursday 4th November 2021 Westminster Hall

[Rushanara Ali (in the Chair)]

Before we begin, I remind Members that they are expected to wear face coverings when not speaking in the debate. This is in line with the Government’s guidance and that of the House of Commons Commission. I also remind Members that they are asked by the House to have covid lateral flow tests twice a week—I am sure you all have. You can do that at home or on the parliamentary estate, and you can pick up tests here to take home. Please also give each other enough space when seated and when entering and leaving the Chamber.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of tackling the digital divide.

I am delighted to be serving under your chairmanship this afternoon, Ms Ali. It strikes me, and I am pleased to see, that with you, me and the Minister, we have strong east London representation in the Chamber today. I am also pleased that the Work and Pensions Committee is strongly represented in the debate. I think there is a significant crossover between the digital divide and the concerns the Committee has been engaged with.

Let me begin with a tribute to the hon. Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby), who is chair of the all-party parliamentary group for broadband and digital communication—I am the vice-chair of that group. Before her recent well-deserved promotion, she was the sponsor—the initiator—of this debate. She is not able to lead on it, given her current position, but I am pleased to have the opportunity to do so as a rather poor substitute.

As we all know, there has been dramatic progress in getting people online since March of last year. Lloyds Bank’s UK consumer digital index, published in May, reported:

“In the last 12 months, 1.5 million more people have started using the Internet, resulting in 95% now being online… We have made five years’ worth of progress in one”.

It has been a pretty dramatic change. The report makes the point that it is

“well evidenced that people using digital tools and services have a real advantage”.

It also points out that digital skills have moved from being an advantage to being a necessity during the pandemic.

The fact that so many have come newly online is an opportunity for us to build on. But 2.6 million people still are not online. Ofcom reported in July that 2 million households struggle with the cost of broadband or smartphone services, with some staying offline as a result of those cost barriers. Ten million people also lack basic digital skills.

I am sorry to say that the Government’s digital inclusion strategy has not been updated since 2014. It is high time that it was. The topic has not had the priority in Government that I hope it will have in the period ahead. I warmly welcome the Minister to her post, which she took up relatively recently. I hope that in winding up the debate she will be able to hold out the prospect of new priority being given to digital inclusion and of policies enabling real progress on it in the period ahead.

The Good Things Foundation focuses its impressive range of programmes on the digital divide. Its document “A blueprint to fix the digital divide”, published in September, identifies three requirements. No.1 is digital skills, No. 2 is community support and No. 3 is affordable internet, and I will use those three headings in my remarks.

First, on digital skills, progress is very important for levelling up. The Lloyds Bank report pointed out that people using digital services are

“more likely to build their savings reserves, find new ways to save money and can more easily find and access new information, plus manage their well-being”.

We might add that they can also more readily look for a job, apply for universal credit and manage their universal credit account online.

There is a real levelling-up challenge here. Whereas, according to Ofcom, fewer than 21% of people in London are limited internet users, that proportion is almost twice as high—38%—in the north-east, the region represented by my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah), who is the shadow Front Bencher for this afternoon’s debate. The other nations and regions fall between those two figures, and within regions levels of engagement are much lower among benefit claimants than among other people. I hope that digital inclusion and the development of digital skills will be supported by the UK shared prosperity fund, and that the Government will support local initiatives to tackle the problem, such as Andy Street’s digital catch-up programme in the west midlands to help those who cannot use the internet to learn digital skills, and Andy Burnham’s ambition for Greater Manchester, which is to help all people who are 25 and under, over 75 or disabled to get online.

The Government’s entitlement for people to get full funding for essential digital skills qualifications is welcome, but we need to go further. Level 1 qualifications are not meeting the needs of local employers, while those who stand to gain the most are least likely to engage if they do not first get informal, community-based help. Age is the biggest determinant, with older people less likely to have digital skills. Age UK reports that in the first quarter of this calendar year 40% of over-75s and 12% of 65 to 74-year-olds had not used the internet in the previous three months. However, there is also a big group of younger people who need help. Ofcom’s 2021 technology tracker research found that among school-aged children—those aged between four and 18—eight in 10 had access to an appropriate device at home all of the time, enabling them to connect to the internet for online schoolwork or learning as needed. Of the remainder, 13% had access some of the time, but 2% rarely had access and 2% never had access, meaning that a significant group of school-age children are fully excluded.

Over a fifth of the respondents to a survey quoted in a Vodafone report on the UK’s digital divide last month did not have the software in their household to complete their work, education or leisure pursuits. We also need to reflect on the digital skills that more and more people in work are going to have to acquire, and the Government’s lifetime skills guarantee needs to address that issue directly. techUK has highlighted the gap between, on the one hand, the upsurge in demand for digitally skilled workers in areas such as coding and, on the other, the limited opportunities to retrain in those fields, with a need for immediate action to close that growing digital skills gap. By 2030, it is estimated that nine out of 10 workers are going to need to learn new skills to do their job, at a cost of well over £1 billion a year.

That brings us to the second area, community support. Helen Milner, the chief executive of the Good Things Foundation, has called for support to develop

“a national network of at least 10,000 trusted places where people can get community help with digital inclusion—reaching into villages, towns and cities, and supporting COVID-19 recovery.”

A very good example of such a place is Skills Enterprise, a charity based in Bonny Downs Baptist Church in my constituency and founded in 2006 by the energetic social entrepreneur Malathy Muthu. It is a small but very effective training provider, which quickly reorganised for the pandemic to stop people who were already digitally excluded being further isolated. The Good Things Foundation helped by providing devices that Skills Enterprise could distribute through its DevicesDotNow partnership with FutureDotNow, which raised over £1.5 million nationally to supply devices and data. Skills Enterprise used those devices to ensure that people who would not otherwise have been able to get online could do so during the pandemic.

The number of service users Skills Enterprise supported increased by 50% during the pandemic, and it is now supporting 160 people. I presented certificates to a number of them on a visit last month. It has helped people who were setting up businesses, who were home-schooling, or who were simply having to self-isolate—showing them how to download and use things such as Zoom. Skills Enterprise has helped people with online shopping and banking, and it has helped a large number of people to apply for universal credit, as applications became online-only during the pandemic. It found that virtual form-filling sessions typically lasted around three hours over the telephone for applicants who were not digitally confident and who needed to be talked through the process of applying for universal credit. I am pleased to say that Skills Enterprise has worked with Jobcentre Plus as well. Two people were able to save £300 a year after Skills Enterprise helped them to switch energy providers online, and 23 people it has worked with have found jobs during the pandemic thanks to the acquisition of new digital skills.

Skills Enterprise is an example of exactly the kind of place that the Good Things Foundation rightly says we need across the country. It is having a positive local impact, but there are not enough centres like that around. Funding from central Government is needed urgently to deploy digital champions around the country and to support grassroots organisations to address the divide.

The third area is affordable internet. The scaling back of the Government’s ambitions for connectivity has been a big disappointment. The Government started with a target of 100% fibre by 2025. That was downgraded to 100% gigabit by 2025, and then down again to 85% gigabit by 2025. We are now falling further behind the rest of Europe, and we really should be doing better. Some £5 billion has been provided, but I understand that only a fraction of that will now be invested by 2025; the rest will not be invested until later.

Openreach has estimated that a nationwide full-fibre deployment could add £59 billion to the UK economy by 2025. With growth so elusive in the economy and the Chancellor forecasting that it will be down to 1.3% by the end of his forecast period, that sort of growth is a prize that we cannot afford to forgo.

The Government’s shared rural network scheme aims to provide 4G coverage to 95% of the UK by 2025. I think Vodafone has announced coverage of two Welsh villages under the scheme, but I do not know of any other announcements on increasing coverage that have been made by UK mobile operators as part of this initiative. Will the Minister update us on its progress and on whether there are prospects for more such projects in the near future?

The universal service obligation, launched by the Government in March, which I welcome, allows rural households to demand connectivity from BT, but some of that connectivity might have a very high price indeed, with reports of 60,000 households being charged up to £100,000 each in order to gain the access being provided. Will the Minister give us some reassurance that the access that the USO ensures will be affordable, and will she give an indication of the extent to which the USO has been effective in extending access in the first six months or so of its operation? I commend the work of the Broadband Stakeholder Group, which has set out a range of ideas for steps that the Government can take to increase access in the hardest-to-reach areas, and I hope Ministers will take those ideas forward.

The price to users is a major issue. Households with the lowest incomes spend nearly four times more as a proportion of their disposable income on fixed broadband than the average. Ofcom reports that at least 100,000 households, and possibly many more, are unlikely to gain internet access in the next year because of the price they would have to pay to get it. Ofcom research also found that 4% of families with school-age children relied solely on mobile devices during the pandemic.

I welcome the efforts of telcos and others with innovative partnerships and new social tariffs. TalkTalk’s partnership with the Department for Work and Pensions provides eligible jobseekers with an uncapped broadband service for six months to help them search for jobs, with the DWP paying the fixed cost of the connection and TalkTalk offering the service on a not-for-profit basis. I welcome that imaginative approach and the partnership that has been established.

Vodafone has a buy one, give one scheme in partnership with the Trussell Trust, which I also welcome. BT, Community Fibre, Hyperoptic, KCOM, Virgin Media and VOXI each offer at least one targeted tariff with unlimited internet access, priced with varying degrees of affordability. Some are priced at £10 per month, which is very good, and some at rather more than that. Is the Minister keeping under consideration the possibility of imposing a requirement for social tariffs on all providers?

There is clearly a great deal more to be done on this front. After the pandemic, there can be little dispute about the central place of digital inclusion in any programme for levelling up. The pandemic has rapidly accelerated take-up, but it has also deepened the disadvantage experienced by those who do not yet have digital access. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure the House that the Government recognise the crucial importance of this issue and that she will prioritise making progress on it in the spending review period ahead.