To move that this House takes note of the Report from the Communications and Digital Committee Digital exclusion (3rd Report, Session 2022-23, HL Paper 219).
My Lords, it is a great privilege to open this debate, just as it is a privilege to chair the Communications and Digital Committee of your Lordships’ House. I am hugely grateful to all members of the committee who contribute so much through their expertise and dedication to our work. I know that they would all want me to pay the greatest tribute to the team who support us and deserve so much credit for the quality of our output: Dan Schlappa, Rita Cohen, Owen Williams and, until last autumn, Emily Bailey Page, who left us on promotion and has recently been replaced by Anna Herzog. They are all brilliant and work so hard. On behalf of all members of the committee, I put on record our sincere thanks to them.
It has been a busy week for tech policy. On Friday, the committee published our report on large language models and generative AI, looking at what needs to happen to ensure that these new technologies benefit people and our society. On Monday, the Government published their AI White Paper response, and, on Tuesday, we took evidence from the Secretary of State for DSIT about AI digital exclusion and skills. On Wednesday, I spoke at a conference emphasising the importance of ensuring that technology benefits us all, not just the big tech firms. Today, we are debating my committee’s report on digital exclusion. Some of us, including the Minister, have also been busy on the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill.
I say all that not to complain—I love my work and I am privileged to have the opportunity—but to illustrate how quickly developments in technology are happening, how wide-ranging the impacts are for all sectors of society, how closely they are all connected and how difficult it is for us all to keep pace with the vast array of issues. The pace of change, and the huge social and economic implications, underscore the need for more action on digital exclusion. Technology policy, particularly on AI, is a major government priority; the consequences of those changes must be, too. Digital divides are deepening, and basic skills gaps persist, yet our inquiry found that the Government are not paying nearly enough attention.
It is important to see the big picture here. Digital exclusion is not just about old people, although many of them are seriously affected. It can affect people from all age groups and all walks of life. Some 2.5 million people in the UK cannot do a basic digital task. Digital exclusion is not about asking for government handouts or about giving everyone free internet. It is about making sure that everyone benefits from technological change and ensuring that people are not left behind. It is about ensuring we do not create second-class citizens who cannot use online banking, NHS services such as making a GP appointment, or any public service such as submitting tax returns, applying for benefits, a new passport or a blue badge parking permit. It is also about making sure that there are not some people who cannot apply for jobs, 90% of which are now only advertised online.
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness. Until very recently, I served on the committee. I pay tribute to her and all the other members, from whom I learned a great deal. I also join in her praise for the excellent staff who supported the committee. Today, I want to underscore the urgent need for more government action in this area.
The committee produced some excellent reports, including the one that we are debating today. However, highlighting the importance of today’s topic, I point out that the report that preceded it on the creative industry and the one that followed on AI also stressed the importance of addressing digital exclusion. In the AI report, for example, we reference a large language model that was supporting computer vision programmes for people with visual impairment, but the ability to benefit from these would be far less for those with low or no digital skills. Indeed, the digitally excluded miss out on so many things, such as online banking, which 40% of over-65 year-olds do not use. Yet as more bank branches close, unless people can arrange long-distance round trips to the nearest bank, online banking becomes the only viable solution. I avoid the problem of a 50-mile round trip to my nearest bank as I am online, but that is not an option for those without digital skills.
Nor can such people connect with family and friends through video calls, access health information or apply for jobs online. Digital exclusion increases social isolation, hindering community participation and civic engagement. As technology permeates every aspect of our lives, the inability to access and use digital resources creates a significant divide in our society. It exacerbates existing inequalities, disproportionately affecting older adults, people with disabilities and those on low incomes but, as the noble Baroness said, it is not just an old-people problem. It affects people from all walks of life and of all ages—far too many people. Even when people have affordable access to the internet—still not enough do—2.4 million cannot do a single basic digital task, while 5 million employed adults cannot do all the basic digital work tasks. More starkly, three years ago the Good Things Foundation talked of over 10 million people lacking the digital foundation needed to function in today’s digital world.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate, and I declare my technology interests as set out in the register as adviser to Boston Ltd. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Stowell, not just on this report but, as she rightly set out, quite a week for the committee. It shows how all these issues touch so many elements of our society and our economy.
I will pick out the most significant recommendation from the committee’s report, and that is the need for a strategy. Some 10 years ago, I sat on my first House of Lords Select Committee on Digital Skills. We began our work in 2014 and we finished in 2015 by talking of a strategy, and yet the strategy that was published before we began our deliberations is still the strategy we have today. There are clearly good examples of operational delivery happening across the country and across Whitehall, but without a strategy it is de facto non-strategic. Does the Minister not agree and see the urgent and pressing need to have a strategy so that we can be strategic about our approach?
A lifetime ago, EM Forster entreated that we should “Only connect!” These words can be helpful on our journey through digital inclusion, because we have never been more connected. Yet look at the rise of populism, nationalism and retreatism—horrific geopolitical outlooks. We have never been more connected and yet we have an epidemic of isolation and a mental well-being crisis.
Why? There are many factors, but a significant one is that this is connection without inclusion, enablement and empowerment. Those who find themselves at the sharpest end of digital exclusion are often those who would have the most to gain—older people, disabled people and those in lower socioeconomic groups. Even when they manage to get online, for want of information only 5% of those who could take advantage of social tariffs do so.
My Lords, I enter the debate with some trepidation. I am not a member of the committee, but I think the report is very important. I bring to the debate that in 2007-08, when I was at the Cabinet Office, we had a look at digital exclusion. One of the big issues then was coverage: the fact that there was so little connectivity and internet access around the country.
Also, when I chaired the Public Services Committee in this House, it became very clear in many of our investigations just how important digital inclusion was, but also that we really could do things if people got working on it. For example, when we looked at access to public services and other things during Covid, we heard from some older people that they got support from Age Concern to do precisely what the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, talked about—access internet shopping—but they could not afford the minimum level of shopping they needed to commit to in order to order goods. We wrote to and engaged with those companies to get them to lower the rate for those people whom the local authority had identified as vulnerable. So we can do it; we did lots of those sorts of things during Covid that have now got lost. I really want the Government to think about that.
Since I first looked at this with my very good junior Minister, Pat McFadden, in 2007-08, we have seen change at an unprecedented rate in the use of digital internet opportunities across the board, in virtually every area of activity—and we know for certain now that that will change much more quickly in the future. If the Government do not have a strategy or a plan, or do not feel that they can keep up with what is happening, then we will leave a lot of people without the basics that will be necessary for everyday life in the future.
There are new and urgent demands for government action. It is clear that the development and improvement of public services can be made only with much more use of digital tools. On health, the Times Health Commission signalled this week that we need digital passports. Of course we do: folk get frustrated when they go from one bit of the health service to another and have to tell their story again and again, with nobody keeping the stuff together. The patient, if nobody else, should be able to keep all of that together.
My Lords, I, too, thank the committee for its work on this important subject, although I must confess to raising my eyes to heaven when I saw that it was still necessary to do this work. I studied ancient history, so forgive me a minute, but my ancient history has a very deep connection with this important topic. In 2009, I was asked by the then Prime Minister to become digital inclusion champion for the United Kingdom, and I continued my work under the next Government as digital champion—it was perhaps telling that “inclusion” was taken out of my title at that point. I mention that because I feel such a failure in that work. So often, I have been presented with appalling and horrific facts, many of which noble Lords have talked about this afternoon. I would like to share three which perhaps present the complexity of this problem and show why it has not changed as much as it should have over time.
The first place I visited when I was appointed in 2009 was a drop-in centre in Leeds. It was a day much like today, with catastrophic rain, and I thought, “I cannot quite face this; I’m going fall over with my walking sticks”. But I went there and I met a young man—the first person I talked to on this whole journey—who said to me, “The internet saved my life”. I looked at him and thought that it probably was not the internet but something else, such as shelter or food—but no. He said, “It saved my life because I learned how to make music online. I had been found with a terrible drug problem, but now I have a purpose, I have skills I did not have. I credit completely the internet with saving my life”. I have told that story a lot over the past decade because it sits on my shoulder. I tell it mostly when I go to tech conferences, where there is a shocking lack of appreciation of the scale and challenge of this issue.
I fast-forward to 2020, when I was chairing the committee on the long-term implications of Covid, which was a complex task for many reasons. One of the threads we looked at was digitisation and how it leapfrogged over the course of the pandemic. I will never forget a woman who came on to our Zoom inquiry when we were looking at the role of technology in a very broad way, who told us, “I’m choosing right now between data and food”. This was in 2020 in one of the richest countries in the world. She was having to decide on a daily basis whether her three children would be able to access the one smartphone the household shared in order to do schoolwork or whether they would have supper. That was a pretty horrific choice to have to make.
My Lords, I knew it would be impossible to follow my friend the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox. I begin by thanking the chair of the committee that I sit on, my noble friend Lady Stowell, for introducing our report so brilliantly. I add my voice to thank all the team who support the Communications and Digital Select Committee so brilliantly, on this and the other reports that they have been doing for us. I should also declare my interests as set out in the register, but also as a former trustee of two organisations chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, Go ON UK and Doteveryone, and obviously as the former chief executive of TalkTalk.
I too have worked on this—perhaps not as long as some in this Chamber, but for a good 14 years—and I too have rolled my eyes when I felt we had to look at this issue again. Fourteen years ago, people used to say to me that we just needed to wait for people who were not online to die. We now know some things. First, we all live longer and, the longer we live, the more important digital is to us. Secondly, as noble Lords have said, young people are also digitally excluded. Thirdly, one of the key things we learned in this inquiry is that digital literacy is a moving target: it is not just about learning to read and then you are done. Because technology is changing so fast, it is highly likely that some of us will suffer from digital exclusion, as technology moves faster than we can, as we age. Societies will have to think about and work on this for ever. The job will not just be done; it will be with us for ever.
A few days ago, I read with despair, if I am honest, an article in an online magazine called Digital Health. It is a niche magazine for those of us who are interested in health and digital, as befits the name. The article was about a pilot in north-west London to engage the very community organisations that the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, references, to bring people online to access health services in the last two years. Unsurprisingly, the pilot has been a success. It set out how, for a relatively small amount of money—I think it was just over £1 million—not only had a number of people in the community come online but they all reported that their mental and physical health had improved, because they had been able to access services that they were previously excluded from. The really depressing thing is that those studies have been in place for 14 years.
My Lords, it is a privilege to follow three noble Baronesses, one after the other, and particularly wonderful to hear the passionate pleading from the Conservative Benches about the lackings of the present Government. At the same time, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, who chaired the committee admirably. I approach these bipartisan things with an open mind, to see just where I am being led by the nose. However, genuinely, the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, encouraged views across the board, welcomed pertinent comments quite critical of the party she belongs to, and indeed gave voice to some herself. Her leadership—and we are talking about leadership—has been splendid. I need to have a cup of coffee with her and talk about other matters, but that is not for now. We were supported, of course, by a truly astonishing bunch of people in the secretariat, whose skills have been wondrous.
The noble Baroness began by simply saying what is incontestable—that technology is changing very quickly. Let us test that hypothesis. The report was published in June 2023. Eight months later, we are debating it and responding to it here in the Chamber. But on 7 August 2023, the newspapers, because of the astute handling of the report with the press and other communication outlets, picked up on the major themes in a very big way. I have in my hand an article that I clipped because it was so informative, principled and punctilious. It is an editorial in one of our leading newspapers, headlined: “Britain is isolating people who are digitally excluded and at a very high cost”, as many of us have said. But the fact is that the newspapers were saying it in August. The Government, and those who plan the use of our time here, have given us the last fag-end of a day’s business to look at this report, which contains important things that need to be heard, and with urgency.
I want to know what influence the Minister can bring to bear on those who are faced with the fact that we are not content with the lack of a strategy for 10 years. We need more focused leadership. Not only this report from the Communications and Digital Committee, but all our reports talk about the skills base that needs to be improved for the whole gamut of national life and our economy. We lament time and again, as we have in this report, that so much of what we look at throws responsibility on to one government department after another—education, business, communications and so on. No one seems to pull it all together, which is of course what a strategy would do. It would bring together the places where these needs are identified and forge a path that shows practically what can be done.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths. Like him, I find myself largely in agreement with many of the contributions from the Conservative Benches, which is not always the case, although I disagree with him that a knowledge of Plato and Aristotle should be seen as mutually exclusive with knowledge of STEM subjects and digital skills; I am always very keen to see these joined together and working cross-disciplinary in the broadest sense.
I join other noble Lords in thanking the committee for its excellent report, and join it in expressing disappointment with the government response. What I will seek to do today, however, is mostly to add some different points, some of which I take a slightly different perspective on and some of which the committee perhaps felt were outside its scope but none the less, I think, have a significant impact on its work. The report talks throughout, quite rightly, about confidence—the word “confidence” appears all the way through—but there is very little discussion of fear. I think we need to acknowledge that people have a rightful fear of going on the internet.
Because I do joined-up-ness, I work in many different areas in your Lordships’ House, but last night I was unable to take part, due to another commitment, in a debate on the Victims and Prisoners Bill, on Amendment 112 in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, about compensating victims of financial fraud. A great deal of financial fraud happens online, of course, and its scale is terrifying. People are frightened to go on the internet because of the scale of that fraud. They are often being warned, rightly, about that, and we need to acknowledge that it is a genuine problem; it is not just a case of giving people confidence. To cite a couple of figures I was looking up, the City of London Police says that courier fraud, affecting particularly the over-70s, cost £12.6 million last year. Romance fraud, which affects people of all ages, cost £93 million.
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Digital inclusion is about ensuring that we do not exclude people from things that most people take for granted but which require basic digital skills, a working device and a decent internet connection. It is also about economic prosperity and efficiency. We cannot hope to become a science and tech superpower if 5 million employed adults are unable to complete all the main digital tasks expected at work, and the same number are expected to be acutely underskilled by 2030. It is worth pausing to reflect that the shortage of digital skills is costing the UK economy £63 billion a year.
We cannot hope to achieve public sector efficiencies by digitising services without simultaneously addressing digital divides. Otherwise, we will end up creating a two-tier system where digitally engaged citizens get increasingly better service than those who struggle.
The main recommendation from our report was for the Government to acknowledge the challenge by updating their digital exclusion strategy, last published a decade ago. The strategy’s delivery partners have not existed for years, and updates to it now sit in the National Archives, none of which inspires much confidence.
On Tuesday, the Secretary of State for DSIT told us she was not a fan of updating strategies, saying that they consume government time which could be better employed delivering progress. That would be fine if there had been a lot of progress. However, the Government’s response to our report declined to give a structured update or set out clearly defined targets. I can sympathise with the Secretary of State if officials spend time writing strategies, believing a document is an end in itself. However, I do not agree that they are a waste of time if the point of the strategy is to bring together all the disparate parts of government and to make sure they are delivering valuable work.
DSIT has plenty of strategies for other things, so I am afraid that we suspect its reluctance to publish one for digital exclusion is because there is not much to put in it and it is not a priority. This is odd, because digital exclusion is linked to deep-seated structural challenges and is holding back progress on key government pledges, on levelling up, education inequality, digitised healthcare and productivity. Having a joined-up plan to get to grips with this would be helpful. We heard that there is now an interministerial group to consider digital exclusion across government, which is good, but we were not entirely clear what outcomes this had achieved, and without high-level political attention and clear objectives, it will not achieve very much.
If the Government are averse to strategies, perhaps we could push for a public action plan instead, which could start by covering the recommendations we made in our report. I will go through the headlines. First, it should tackle basic skills gaps. Schemes offering certificates and qualifications get lots of the attention, but these are often poorly suited to the target demographic. Instead, there should be more focus on long-term support for community organisations.
Secondly, more effort is needed to create place-based local digital inclusion hubs, with basic facilities and people on hand to help. Libraries are bearing the brunt of this expectation but they cannot solve everything. Demanding that high-street banks accelerate the long-promised banking hubs, which are becoming increasingly urgent in towns losing bank branches, and working with the banks to make them digital hubs would be my personal suggestion. I raised this idea with the Minister, my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe, during an Oral Question in December; I would be interested to know from the Minister today, my noble friend Lord Camrose, what discussions there have been in government on this topic since then.
Thirdly, the Government should be much more proactive in ensuring that public services are not excluding people. Often, it is the people who need help the most who struggle to get it; helping them early on saves on costs later down the line. The same is true for the private sector. Of course, offline alternatives remain essential—I will come back to this later.
Fourthly, the Government should cut VAT on social tariffs to make them more affordable. Too many people struggle to afford internet in the first place; cutting VAT would help. The Government could also do more to ensure that telecoms firms are advertising their social tariffs prominently.
Fifthly, the Government should do much more to help scale up existing good ideas. The public sector has vast numbers of devices that, with a bit of imagination and security work, could be donated. Internet voucher schemes are a great way to help people, in particular jobseekers, get a temporary boost if they are struggling. There are plenty of other good ideas out there, including something called wifi in a box.
Sixthly, the Government should keep paying close attention to the value of alternative network providers. These are smaller, local internet providers that deliver huge value to poorly connected communities, including plenty of doorstep support to people who need it most. They are a good demonstration of what can be achieved when companies put people first. They must not be forgotten as Openreach continues to build out its network.
Lastly, I emphasise that the whole point of new technologies is supposed to be making life better. Making services digital is not an end in itself; it should be about improving the experience for users, not a cost-saving exercise that benefits bosses but leaves everyone else dissatisfied. I recently read an article by Jamie Bartlett on the website UnHerd about something that he calls techno-admin. He coined the phrase; it captures this issue well. He said that it is
“a pervasive phenomenon, whereby we customers are forced into infuriating, confusing, absurdly time-consuming and bleakly unrewarding tasks by a machine”.
I am sure that we all have experienced the same more often than we should. Moreover, the Post Office scandal shows how important it is for new technologies to be designed and used in ways that benefit people, and to have humans in the loop rather than putting blind faith in automated processes. To avoid becoming strategically reliant on a small number of tech firms, with no alternative providers, we must prioritise open-market competition and diversify our service providers. I am optimistic about new tech but we need to ask companies and government to ensure that their systems put people first.
I would like to conclude by emphasising the need for joined-up thinking across government, particularly on AI policy and digital exclusion. AI is introducing major changes to our society. Large language models, such as ChatGPT in particular, will drive ground-breaking scientific advances, provide huge boosts to productivity and fundamentally reshape our relationship with machines. Widespread AI-related unemployment is not likely. That said, some industries and sectors will inevitably be disrupted and some people will lose out, but new jobs will also be created. The problem is where those new jobs will be. Unless we invest much more effort in supporting disrupted sectors to transition and upskilling those who are losing out from the AI boom, we will create a whole set of people who see technology as a threat rather than an opportunity.
If they lack the skills to get one of the new jobs which the economic experts promise are coming, or to use the fancy new chatbot services, then why would they feel positive about technological change? Digital exclusion is the flip side of all the good things about technological progress. Being included is a constantly moving target. People who have the skills to get by today may struggle in the future.
I hope that the Minister can provide reassurance today on these matters. In particular, I would like to know why the Government are so averse to having a coherent public plan about what they are going to do. The sad fact is that we are not confident that the Government are taking this seriously, and that is unlikely to change until we see an updated plan or strategy. I would also welcome reassurance about how the Minister is ensuring that the teams working on AI policy and digital exclusion are working together and engaging other departments to ensure a properly joined-up approach to this challenge. I look forward to not only my noble friend’s response but all the contributions from noble Lords participating in today’s debate. I beg to move.
As well as exacerbating inequalities, the lack of digital skills holds back the ambitions we all have to make our country a tech superpower, level up the country, boost economic growth and make public services more effective. A digital skills shortage means those ambitions will not be realised. Addressing digital exclusion is both a social and an economic imperative. We cannot become a tech superpower when basic digital skills are projected to become the UK’s largest skills gap by 2030. Failing to bridge this gap will hinder productivity and economic growth, yet tackling the problem would have significant economic value. The CEBR estimates that it would cost £1.4 billion to upskill excluded groups by 2032, but the return, in the same timeframe, would be around £12.2 billion gross value added—a great return on investment.
Despite a few random measures, such as £8 million for digital skills boot camps during the pandemic, there are social and economic imperatives to do far more. The committee came to the clear view that:
“The Government has taken its eye off the ball”.
The noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, suggested in a letter to the Minister that the Government were showing a distinct lack of leadership. This is especially concerning given, as a Lloyds Bank report recently showed, that the proportion of people offline has for the first time increased.
Details of the committee’s recommendations have already been outlined by the noble Baroness, but it worth summarising the implications of them, because they require a new strategy, fronted by a digital exclusion unit, with the aim of boosting digital skills so that everyone can use the internet for life and work; developing place-based digital inclusion hubs, starting with libraries, so that everyone has somewhere local to go for internet help; and ensuring the availability of affordable internet, so that everyone has the access they need.
Sadly, while acknowledging that more needs to be done, the Government have rejected most of the recommendations, most significantly the call for a new strategy. Although it is not a silver bullet, a new strategy would signal that the Government are prepared to dedicate time and resources to fixing the problem. Their previous strategy is 10 years old and is now in the National Archives—its main delivery partners have not existed for years. Instead of a new unit, the Government have established a cross-Whitehall ministerial group—they have opted for second best. I hope the Minister can, at least, tell us the details of that cross-Whitehall ministerial group’s work to date, its achievements and its plans for future action, and explain how it will be accountable to Parliament.
Digital inclusion is not a luxury. It brings huge social and economic benefits. No one should be left behind in the digital revolution. However, the Government’s response to the committee’s report does not give any confidence, frankly, that they have gripped these issues.
Take the example of a grocery shopping app. Imagine how you place your order and it comes to your door. Many people are familiar with this and the convenient offers within it, and it is a great way to shop. But imagine that you are not online, and so you cannot use that app; imagine that you have the app but do not have the digital skills to transact, and so it is not working for you; imagine that you have the skills but have no or low internet connectivity, and so the app is not working for you. For want of digital inclusion, more than a few folks are not getting their food.
Digital inclusion is about the stuff, the kit, the skills and the learning. It is about enabling people to have the comfort and confidence that come through digital inclusion in all aspects of their lives. It needs leadership at a national and local level. The hubs are an excellent suggestion, where they exist, but we need more of them on a strategic basis.
Everything starts with education. Does my noble friend the Minister agree that, if we are really to enable digital inclusion, and enable and empower our young people to take all the advantages of the fourth industrial revolution, we need a complete overhaul of our school curriculum? Great stuff happens, if you are lucky, but it is not strategic and it is in pockets.
The PISA results on numeracy and literacy are impressive. We know how to take this performance approach, but alongside numeracy and literacy we need data literacy, data competency, digital literacy and digital competency. They are equally important. Then young people will be enabled and empowered, with all their talent unleashed through digital inclusion and education.
Taking this broader, we have nothing short of an opportunity to completely reimagine our economy and society and the very social contract, transformed into a digital social contract between citizen and state, for the benefit of both.
I finish on the essence of all this—inclusion and innovation. More than that, it is inclusion for innovation. That must be the mission of us all.
There are other things, such as prevention of hospitalisation through contact with the relevant health worker for people with certain conditions. Those people need to be given a particular gizmo that will track their diabetes or their heart and give direct messages to somebody located in the primary care or community care workforce. These things are now automatic in other parts of Europe. We must make sure they are automatic here, but that means an absolute sea-change in how people access these things.
Other people will talk about education in more depth, but I have seen AI being used by a teacher to keep in contact with what on earth is going on in the different groupings in the classroom, so that they can keep up with who is falling behind and who has finished and is bored. We need to make use of the benefits of things like that. The north-east has the highest rates of digital exclusion. That inevitably correlates with us having among the highest rates of poverty and child poverty in the country.
With the right messaging and the right support, even without the VAT on social tariffs being changed, in one of the social tariffs, on water, we have been able to increase access up to 47%, when nationally it is 17%, because Northumbrian Water was persuaded by others that it had to take action to use the data it had on who was vulnerable to contact them and help them to get access to the tariff. There is still a lot further to go, but that is an example of where, by using the data you have effectively and by actually contacting people, you can increase their participation. If it can be done with a water tariff, it should be done for the broadband social tariff. The estimate at the moment of the unclaimed broadband tariff in the north-east is about £36 million per year—so there is something the Government can get on to straight away that will transform the lives of a lot of people in our region.
So the Government do have a role to play. The Government have a role to play themselves, but they also have a role to play with others in the marketplace. I give the Government the example of the Trussell Trust, which has identified that one in six people who attend food banks regularly has no access to the internet. They cannot afford wifi. I ask the Minister to think about what that meant for children in Covid when, even if they were given a laptop, they could not get access to what was needed, and it refers to lots of other things. The Trussell Trust has done a deal with Tesco where, by 2025, Tesco Mobile will connect 50,000 people facing hardship through the Trussell Trust network. That is the sort of thing the Government should be encouraging, that is the sort of thing we need in a plan and that is the sort of action that will make sure that everybody is able to live by the new era of digital inclusion.
Fast forward again to 2023: I am proud president of the British Chambers of Commerce. I was at a round table in Doncaster with a bunch of businesses—big and small, all kinds of things. The boss of one very impressive insurance company looked at me and said, “My company is going to be completely different in 18 months. I’m going to deploy GPT technology to take out half my workforce”. Another, a founder of their business, sitting next door to me said, “I haven’t got any digital software in my company at all”. Digital exclusion is a hugely knotty problem and I really welcome the committee’s work on it, including in trying to put parameters around it.
It is not just about individuals; it is also about businesses. We know that 20% of small and medium-sized businesses, which make up 85% of our economy, do not use basic digital skills. We know that it affects people hideously if they do not have access, as many noble Lords have documented this afternoon, and I really welcome the suggestions that the committee has made. I would just like to double-click on one of them: community interaction and how you bring community groups together.
Everything happens in this country, in my experience, and I do not think we need to invent anything new. As the committee has said, we should double down on the things that are going well. There are many community groups that know how to solve this problem, but they are not co-ordinated. They are not joined up or sharing best practice and the Government are not aware of all of them. Yet every time I travel to somewhere, I have found another amazing little project—in a post office or a care home, wherever it might be. I really urge the Government to think about how we can lift up all these amazing projects, exploit the best of them and maybe help some of the less good to slowly come to an end, and to have much more community-based innovation at a very local level. That is how this next wave of the issue will be solved.
I want to finish with a more macro point, which is how we pose this question. I have been thinking about this a lot over the past decade and it is framed completely wrong. We will never make the progress that all noble Lords clearly want if we do not reframe the question. This is about the economy: “It’s the economy, stupid”. I have tried with the human stories. I have told that story about the young man in Leeds literally thousands of times but that does not seem to have worked. We will not be able to level up, as the noble Lord, Lord Foster, mentioned, we will certainly not be able to build back better and I do not believe we will build a country that works for everyone unless we put a deep understanding of connectivity and internet access and skills, and the ability to afford them, at the heart of how we do that. It is not that complicated; it just needs to be a priority.
I have sat next to multiple Culture Secretaries. They shall remain nameless but one of them looked at me once with incredulity when I got on my soapbox again about this issue. They said to me, “No, we’ve got over 95% of people in this country on the internet. This is not a priority for me”. Therein lies the rub: 95% sounds pretty good, does it not? I aspire to getting that mark sometimes—my children certainly do not give me anything much above a 50%—but 95% is not good enough. It does not unpick the problem well enough.
I heard the noble Baroness on a “Money Box” podcast. It is not one I often listen to but I caught it when she was talking about this report that she had done. The response from the Government, as part of that “Money Box Live” special on the digital divide, was, “But 95% of people have access to some kind of broadband infrastructure”. That was completely missing the point. We need politicians to prioritise this but to do so in the right way. We need one of the next 200 Culture Secretaries to appreciate that this will make their life easier. We also need a plan, as everybody here has rightly said. Most of all, we need to remember that it is impossible to function right now in our country if you do not have these basic skills, and the ability to afford them in your life. You can save £1,000, you can get work and it is unacceptable that, in a country which aspires to be one of the most digital in the world, we have not put this as a core ambition.
Like others, I have been trying to answer the question of why this is a Cinderella issue. Why does it not capture the imagination of not just the current Government but every leadership of this country in the last 14 years? I, too, have sat beside many Secretaries of State who have not shown much interest in this issue—why? One reason is that this is actually quite a wicked issue to solve. When you really address it, this is about delving deep into the underlying causes for exclusion—full stop. Many of the people who are digitally excluded are excluded on other dimensions as well. These are complex problems to solve, and the awful truth is that digital exclusion exacerbates existing inequalities. The only way to address it is locally—bottom up, rather than by top-down fiat, as the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, set out—and central government finds that hard to do.
This is an issue not about money but about leadership. We will spend a lot of time this afternoon discussing the absence of a strategy, but I would like to raise that one level and talk about the absence of leadership. I will describe this in the context of an oft-vaunted example of leadership in this country: the Vaccine Taskforce. We achieved some extraordinary things during Covid, and the Vaccine Taskforce is often, quite rightly, pointed to as one of the greatest things that the country has done in recent times. Obviously, somewhat selfishly, I would like to think that there are some other things that we did at scale during Covid that also moved some mountains, but let us look at the Vaccine Taskforce. It had a strategy, and it published its plan. I have yet to find any leadership textbook that says that not having a strategy is a great start in a leadership journey. But it is not the end of the journey.
The task force had really clear top-down sponsorship from the then Prime Minister, the Cabinet and all of us in society. It was properly resourced, it had clear milestones and the people working on it were held to account every day, and at least every week by the then Prime Minister himself. That is how you lead change in society on complex and wicked issues, even though the delivery of the vaccine was done by local groups. The real success of the vaccine delivery in the UK was through the national leadership and genuinely local delivery. It was small community groups reaching into parts of society that are most scared of getting vaccinated where we did so brilliantly as a country.
There is a huge amount that we as a country can learn from that experience in respect of digital inclusion. The sad truth, comparing where we are now with the past 14 years, is that we have a Government who genuinely insist that a strategy is not necessary, and a body looking to oversee that non-strategy which, according to its own terms of reference, is going to meet twice a year. I do not know how you can ever really monitor the implementation of something as complex as this by meeting twice a year. Earlier this week, in front of our committee, the Secretary of State not only argued vehemently that a strategy was not necessary but did not know when the next meeting of the oversight group was, and does not have a dedicated team focused on delivering it—let alone any time with the Prime Minister and Cabinet leadership to really drive change. So, there is a stark contrast. We will not really address this issue unless we address the leadership gap.
The next question to ask is why the leadership is not interested in this. Partly, it may be because it is not a sexy issue; it is about really difficult, on-the-ground, inch-by-inch improvement—the sort of operational delivery that national policymakers do not particularly enjoy. But it does not need to be like this. The noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, talked about it being “the economy, stupid”. I would add that this would make political good sense, which is why I am so baffled that no one has taken it up. The Good Things Foundation conducted a poll just after Christmas; sadly, it was an online poll, like every other poll. It found that 76% of people think that the Government should invest in fixing the digital divide, and 21% of people—who were online—feel left behind by technology.
This is an issue that makes economic and social good sense—and political good sense. How are the Government going to turn this around and show us the leadership we need to fix it?
I was very taken by the comment from the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, that we have never been so connected but not included. It has a lovely shade of meaning and nuance that bears thinking about—indeed, it could initiate a debate in its own right. It is wonderful to have my noble friend Lady Armstrong here. Not only did she recognise the need when she was in government, but she saw that something was done to address the need. Her words—that things can be done—also need to enter our soul and change our way of thinking and approach to these things. Technology is going to change at a terrible rate, and our legislation will never keep up with it, but we must be able to act in such a way that greater attention is given to the people who will be excluded by the very advances we will all praise.
When we were meeting, I was surrounded on the committee by people whose brains are not like mine and who can handle the intricacies of technology in a way that my poor Plato and Aristotle brain cannot. I have spent my whole life not running things, not organising corporations, nor being a political leader, but just being a pastor to people who live on ordinary streets and have their problems and so on. The most important part for me was the visit that we undertook to Newham, when we went to Skills Enterprise. We sat with people in a little hub as they talked to each other about their problems and showed each other how to manage a particular problem that each was faced with.
It has been mentioned that libraries offer hubs of that kind. Churches also offer hubs of that kind. It is very important that they use their space in this way. Ordinary people, dealing with ordinary problems, who feel more and more distant from the ability to solve, or even address, their problems, are helped through these street-level initiatives. Would that our corporations and the great institutions in our national life never lose sight of the plight of the ordinary person in this particular field.
I am delighted to step down from my membership of the committee—I know they will miss me terribly—and, with this blast from the past, I say: keep focused; this has to be done. I say to the Minister: please get a sense of the urgency of this and give us a little hope.
It is not just fraud that makes people fearful of going online. I happened to see one of our national newspaper consumer champions addressing the case of a pensioner who was left without any money over Christmas because, using telephone payment, she had accidentally pressed one extra zero and paid £1,000 instead of £100 for a service. That got fixed only when a national newspaper champion got involved. People are fearful of engaging with these services, with good cause, and there is an urgent need for much more to be done, to have regulation and protection, to ensure that companies react very promptly and rightly and do their absolute best to set up systems that do not go wrong in that manner.
I slightly disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell. We want everyone to have access. The noble Baroness said there should be no digital exclusion, but I am with the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, in acknowledging that this is not something we are going to miraculously make disappear. At different stages in our life, we will have different levels of capacity to engage with digital. Many of us, at some point in our life, might find ourselves without the skills to deal with digital. This is where I pick up the point of the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, about libraries. I put to your Lordships that we will always need to have everyone able to access a facility where they can go and say, “I have a real problem; can you help me sort this out?”. Libraries are a very obvious place, and the collapse in the provision of libraries is a huge tragedy. It is a logical place. The noble Lord identified other places as well, such as churches, but we need libraries as a place that people can go when their digital skills are not adequate for the task at hand. I stress too that many voluntary groups do great work. I know many people who have learned their digital skills through the University of the Third Age, but lots of those groups need a bit of government funding to enable them to function.
I want to pick up some points about digital exclusion because of poverty. Figures from Ofcom show that 7% of households now do not have internet provision, and 20% said it is because of the cost. Also, currently 23% of people, 12.2 million people, are looking for cheaper data plans because of the cost. Perhaps we need to coin a new phrase here. Because of the cost, people are going to see their data flows squeezed down; they might maintain a trickle of data but they will have data starvation. We all know that digital provision is using more bandwidth all the time. We need to think about whether there are low-bandwidth options available that people are actually able to afford.
Good things are happening, but they urgently need to. As noble Lords may know, the UK is the second-largest producer of electronic waste in the world per capita. This is a huge environmental issue but also a huge prospect in solving some of the problems we are talking about. Liverpool City Region has just signed up to the National Device Bank, a recycling network run by the Good Things Foundation that is looking to take some of what could go into electronic waste, repurpose it and give it to people who cannot afford to buy computers and high-tech mobile phones. It also operates a national data bank, which is like a food bank but for mobile data. These are very good things that the Government, with a bit of funding, could help enhance.
We need to look at austerity. I declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. Local government has to be at the core of providing and funding these services, but its lack of funding means that it is struggling to do so. The head of 100% Digital Leeds has recently been focusing on it, and Leeds is leading the way. Many others would like to follow but simply do not have the funding to do so.