Tackling the Digital Divide

Stephen Timms 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.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Media, Data and Digital Infrastructure (Julia Lopez)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ali. I hope that my voice holds up today. I have done my test and thankfully I do not have covid. However, I have a very tickly throat, so I hope that I do not have a conference whatever-it-was—2018?—moment. I am grateful to the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) and my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) for securing this incredibly important debate, and I am grateful to other hon. Members for their useful and heartfelt contributions.

Improving digital connectivity for everybody across the UK is a priority for our Government, for all the reasons that have been cited. If we knew before the pandemic that digital services, infrastructure and skills were important, our experience during covid has really deepened that understanding, in ways that I do not think any of us could have imagined. The moving of so much economic activity online, as well as so much of our social lives, and even schooling and healthcare services, in the past 18 months to two years means that the challenges arising from any existing digital divide have been amplified. And just as our eyes are open to the huge opportunities presented by a more digital world, as set out by the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah), we have to be aware of the risk that people who do not have the confidence, the capability or the tools to access that world could be excluded from those opportunities. So, I am very grateful to hon. Members here in Westminster Hall today for highlighting that risk. My hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich West (Shaun Bailey) really brought the issue to life in his contribution; I must say it was an excellent first contribution by him in Westminster Hall.

In my previous role, in the Cabinet Office, I looked closely at how we could improve online Government services for the citizen and tried to put accessibility, inclusion, trust and good customer services at the heart of the system that we are designing for a new Government app. A lot of work has also been going on about how easy it is to fill out forms online and how to streamline things on gov.uk, so I hope that reassures the right hon. Member for East Ham that I will want to apply similar principles to my new role as the Minister for Media, Data and Digital Infrastructure. I want to know how our interventions are working on the ground for people. Are we getting people the connectivity they need? Are we equipping them with the right digital skills? Are we creating the right environment for companies to deliver? Are we putting resources in the right places?

There is a lot of work to do here and we are ambitious in what we want to achieve. But as we have discovered here today, there will be challenges along the way, which is why debates like this one are helpful to me as a Minister, because they give me intelligence about what is really going on on the ground, rather than just the official view.

On the pandemic, of course there were challenges, but the superfast infrastructure that was already there has held up pretty well. Huge amounts of work were done between telecom providers and Government on social tariffs and I want to try to build on some of that progress, because there was excellent working between some of the providers—thousands of laptops were provided.

In terms of isolation, when I spoke to some of the charities in my constituency, particularly those for disabled people, I found that they were able to innovate and introduce new ways of connecting with the people whom they were serving with quiz nights, meetings and different kinds of outreach which, for some people, was a new and beneficial addition to their life—notwithstanding all the other problems of isolation that, obviously, the pandemic brought.

Addressing the digital divide means that we make sure that everybody in the UK can access and use digital communication services. That means getting the right infrastructure in place to deliver connectivity for everybody. It means making digital skills training available to everybody who needs it. I will set out what we are doing in each of those areas. Some of those issues are covered by other ministerial colleagues, so I will take away the things that I am unable to cover in this debate. I also assure hon. Members that meetings are taking place between DCMS Ministers and ministerial colleagues in DFE and DWP, because we think there is a lot of overlap here and we need to get this policy right.

On connectivity and infrastructure, we are in the midst of the biggest digital build in UK history in the form of Project Gigabit, which aims for nationwide gigabit coverage. One of my concerns in this area is whether people understand why they should want gigabit speeds over superfast speeds—a point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon. It is important to say that Project Gigabit is as much about future-proofing against the needs of tomorrow as it is about giving constituents lightning-fast speeds today. As we start to understand and anticipate a world where more and more applications depend on having reliable digital infrastructure, it is important that we have the highest quality infrastructure in place.

The best way to achieve gigabit coverage and eliminate the digital divide is to create a competition-friendly environment where deployment is commercially viable, and then to focus Government funds on that 20% of the country where we think commercial deployment is unlikely. This approach is working. In January 2019, 6% of premises had access to gigabit-capable networks. That figure is now 58% thanks to our thriving market of 80 providers. We think that will reach 60% by the end of this year, but we are targeting a minimum of 85% gigabit coverage by 2025.

To address the right hon. Member for East Ham on our targets, we have been transparent that delivering nationwide gigabit coverage by 2025 will be challenging. There are various different issues, including skills, where some of the commercial roll-out means that there is a challenge in trying to incentivise providers to want to provide for the very difficult, hard-to-reach areas. Our manifesto explicitly acknowledged how difficult it will be, but 85% coverage would still be a huge jump on 2019, when the coverage was 6%. That is not the limit of our ambitions and we want to keep going so that we get as close to 100% as possible by 2025. The Prime Minister is extremely passionate about that target and we want to make sure that he is not disappointed.

By listening to industry and working closely with Ofcom, we have made a number of policy and regulatory changes to stimulate the market, including instructing Ofcom to create a pro-investment, pro-competition regulatory system for telecoms. We are introducing a 130% super deduction on qualifying plants and machinery investments, which means that millions more homes are expected to receive coverage without any Government subsidy.

We want to change the law to make it easier to connect premises and blocks of flats. We are piloting innovative new approaches to streetworks, which we think will speed up build by 10% to 40%. We are working with industry to set up a gigabit take-up advisory group with the Confederation of British Industry and the Federation of Small Businesses, so that we can increase consumer demand for gigabit and incentivise further investment from the private sector.

[Stephen Timms]

I am listening with great interest to what the Minister is saying. She has explained a little about why the target was downgraded from, I think, initially 100% fibre by 2025 to 85% now. Surely it would be possible to do better if more of the funding was available earlier, rather than much of the £5 billion being postponed until after 2025. Could it not be brought forward again?

[Julia Lopez]

It is all part of the Treasury gating process. The money is available, but there needs to be confidence of success. We will have to iron out some difficulties in the way that we procure contracts, and learn some of the lessons that my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon referred to in relation to the superfast roll-out and other parts of the gigabit coverage. There will be a bit of testing to see what works best before the Treasury is confident to release the next funds. However, the funds are available. I am happy to explore that further with the right hon. Gentleman if he would like more details.

Since 2018, we have provided gigabit coverage to more than 600,000 rural premises, so that the same commercial and other opportunities reliant on connectivity can be provided for those living in the countryside as those living in towns.

[Julia Lopez]

That is one of the issues that we are talking to the DWP about. We are also working very closely with the likes of Openreach and others to try and get that skills pipeline going, because it will be critical to the success of the roll-out.

Those 600,000 rural premises are just the start. In Devon and Somerset, 66,000 further premises now have gigabit coverage through the gigabit-capable delivery as part of the superfast broadband programme. I have been pressing officials on some of the previous challenges of that programme further to discussions that I have had in the Lobby with my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon.

We have a number of interventions to address the part of the build that we think the market will not cover, including broadband vouchers. We are funding full-fibre networks at 1,084 schools that were previously stuck in the digital slow lane, and we want to connect 6,800 public buildings by the end of the year, including hospitals, GP surgeries and fire stations. That was another important point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon.

We are also bringing forward procurements to provide coverage to as many of the remaining premises as possible. My hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich West raised some incredibly important points about some of the issues that the Public Accounts Committee looked at in relation to procurement, which are very much on my mind. I want to make sure we get this right, but there will be challenges.

The first procurement for Cumbria got under way last month, and further procurements will begin shortly for areas including Cambridgeshire, Durham, Northumberland and parts of Dorset. We will then continue with the pipeline of procurements to cover the rest of the UK as quickly as possible. I note the points raised by the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) about Scotland. I am exploring BDUK’s relationship with the Scottish Government and what more we can do to help people in the devolved nations. I am talking to my officials about that.

[Stephen Timms]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way again. I want to make sure I have understood the point she is making. Is she saying that the constraint is the industry’s capacity to deliver the infrastructure?

[Julia Lopez]

I think there are challenges with that; yes. As I say, it is something that I am discussing closely with industry. There are some questions about where we want to target resource because, looking at the final percentages, those will be the hardest to reach. It will require a different kind of manpower and skill, and it will require much more resource and time. We have to decide whether to go for the hardest-to-reach areas or to focus resource on getting as many people covered as possible. Those are some of the tricky choices that have to be made. I am fairly new to this brief, so I am trying to work my way through all these questions with officials.

[Stephen Timms]

If the industry comes forward with proposals with capacity to deliver this more quickly than achieving 85% coverage by 2025—and the funding could be brought forward, as the Minister said—would she be open to looking at possibilities along those lines?

[Julia Lopez]

Yes, we certainly would. I appreciate the point that the right hon. Gentleman is making.

Since the launch of the broadband universal service obligation, which has been raised by a number of Members, BT has already delivered USO connections covering more than 3,700 homes, and it is in the process of building more than 2,500 more. Ofcom now estimates that just 134,000 premises—or 0.4%—do not have access to a decent broadband service and they may therefore be eligible for a USO connection. However, to address the right hon. Gentleman’s concerns, we know that some premises have received very high quotes and may therefore be very hard to reach, potentially requiring a different approach to deliver cost-effective upgrades. That is why, in March, we published a call for evidence on delivering improved broadband to very hard-to-reach premises.

In addition, Ofcom announced in July that as a result of its investigation, BT has provided assurances that it would use Ofcom’s approach to calculating excess cost quotes. I therefore encourage anybody who had previously been given a universal service obligation quote to speak to BT, if they have not already been contacted.

The progress that we are making with gigabit builds on the earlier success of our superfast broadband programme. The final independent evaluation of superfast by Ipsos MORI concluded that the programme met its objectives to reduce the digital divide and have significant local economic impact, including through the creation of 17,000 jobs and an increase in the annual turnover of local businesses by approximately £1.9 billion, which underlines the importance of connectivity.

My hon. Friend the Member for North Devon mentioned the telecom industry’s plans to look at a landline upgrade by 2025. I appreciate the importance of landlines, particularly to older people. I want to be clear that nobody is having their landline taken away or removed. The way that landlines work in the UK is changing. Providers are moving from the old public switched telephone network to the new voice over internet protocol technology.

The PSTN is a privately-owned telecoms network and the decision to upgrade it was taken by the telecoms industry. What people often miss about the issue is that the industry’s decision to upgrade the PSTN is due to necessity, because that network is increasingly unreliable and prone to failure, with some telecoms companies finding it very hard to source certain replacements or spare parts to maintain or repair connections. That makes it very unreliable for consumers long into the future.

The VOIP technology is expected to offer consumers clearer and better-quality phone calls, but I assure hon. Members that we are working extensively with Ofcom, the emergency services and others to ensure that all consumers and sectors are fully prepared for the migration in 2025.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Timms]

Thank you for the opportunity to say a few remarks by way of concluding, Ms Ali. I am grateful to the Minister and to all hon. Members who have taken part in the debate.

I particularly welcome the Minister’s offer that if the industry proposed to extend the fibre and gigabit infrastructure at a faster rate than is projected to meet the current target of 85% by 2025, it would be possible for some of the £5 billion that has been earmarked for that to be brought forward before 2025, and hopefully to get a higher level of penetration than the current 85% target. If that is possible—and I want to pass on a message to the industry to look at what they could achieve if additional funding was available—I would hope that that would really help in Orkney and Shetland, North Devon and elsewhere around the UK.

I hope as well that the Minister will be updating the digital inclusion strategy, which we last saw in 2014. I welcome a number of the points that she made towards the end of her speech about that, and I particularly welcome the work that she described the Department undertaking with the Good Things Foundation. However, if that was all set out as a strategy, that would be encouraging and would help achieve the goals that we have all agreed are so important.

I am very grateful for the opportunity we have had to air the matter of tackling the digital divide this afternoon. I hope that we shall be able to review it regularly over the months ahead, given its importance to the inclusion of all our constituents.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

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