The first time Kalpana went to Skills Enterprise – a digital training hub run out of a community centre in Newham, East London – she hadn’t used a laptop before.
That made finding a job pretty difficult.
She’d been out of work for some time, and had never browsed a job site, uploaded a CV or sent a professional email.
After weekly training, Kalpana has gradually grown in confidence using the internet to find work.
And she’s been given her own laptop.
It’s become an asset for the whole family – a means to help her son do homework or pick GCSE options.
In her words, the help she received in Newham “changed everything”.
Painting the problem
There are 1.6 million people in the UK who, like Kalpana did, live largely offline.
It’s a kind of exclusion that’s hard to spot.
If you don’t live exiled from the digital world, how do you understand what it looks like?
It looks like a family of 5 sharing one laptop, judging whose homework is most important that night.
An elderly woman who can’t apply for a disabled parking permit, because she’s not given options to do it offline.
A jobseeker in a rural area travelling miles for public WiFi to send off a CV.
Or a young man experiencing homelessness, who uses his phone to find a safe place to stay.
When he runs out of money for data, he faces another night where he hopes to get lucky by sleeping on the bus.
When a laptop plus an internet connection equals a train ticket, a doctor’s appointment or a conversation with a loved one, not having those things means being locked out of a world of opportunity.
Locked out of life itself.
The economic case
That’s a problem for all of us.
We should care about digital exclusion for its own sake – in the same way society comes together to help people shut out of housing, of work.
But we should also care because we can’t afford not to.
In a week when you’ll hear a lot about the massive opportunity for economic growth technology brings – fundamental to our Plan for Change – we can’t afford to miss out on the growth we’ll see if we close the digital divide.
For every £1 spent on digital skills training, our economy gets £9.48 back.
And if everyone in the workforce could do all 20 essential digital tasks, the country could be £23 billion better off each year, in Gross Value Added.
Whole nation task
A problem for the whole nation, then.
And one the whole nation has a hand in solving.
For too long, this work has been left to the sterling efforts of industry, local government and charities, with central government at worst, absent – at best, standing on the sidelines calling on businesses to do more.
Well, no longer.
This is the year that government stepped up to play our part.
Digital Inclusion Action Plan
In February, we published a Digital Inclusion Action Plan.
It’s the first time a British government has proposed a plan on this since 2014. In that same timespan, Taylor Swift has released 11 albums.
The Plan makes up for lost time, setting out the first 5 actions we’re taking.
And today I can announce that, next year alone, we’ll back local digital inclusion initiatives with £6 million of new funding.
The money will support programmes up and down the country where so much good work is done, including through our Digital Inclusion Innovation Fund.
It could be used to get laptops into schools that kids can take home, so no child falls behind on learning because they don’t have the tech.
To give councils the power to trial innovative ways of running digital skills training for people anxious about getting online.
Or to build up our evidence base on why digital exclusion happens.
This funding will focus our efforts where they work best: in the communities people live and work in.
To meet this challenge, we’ll also need a concerted national effort on skills.
Keeping up is a lifelong pursuit, as any of us who have ever scratched our heads at a new operating system or helped a parent share a photo can attest to.
Education doesn’t stop the day you turn 18. Digital education is no different.
On Monday, the PM announced that we’ll partner with industry to give 7.5 million workers essential AI skills by the end of the decade.
So that the AI revolution is one everybody gets to be a part of.
And, as part of the Digital Inclusion Action Plan, we’ll give employers targeted support to upskill teams.
We’ve also kicked off a project with the Digital Poverty Alliance to donate refurbished government laptops and phones to people in need.
I hope this scheme inspires more like it.
Because it makes no sense to live in a world where, every day, stacks of old devices are carted off to landfill…
… while 1.5 million people in this country don’t have a laptop or smartphone.
Soon, I’ll launch an ‘IT Reuse for Good’ charter, alongside Deloitte, Vodafone and the Good Things Foundation – where businesses can pledge to donate unneeded tech.
I hope many of you will sign up.
Cross-government
This is work happening in the round in government.
The Action Plan is co-signed by 5 Secretaries of State, and a Ministerial Group brings together Health, Education, Work and Pensions and more.
Because digital exclusion hinders people in every facet of life – dimmer job prospects; shorter life expectancy. So we’ve got to bust the usual silos to fix it.
We must also be guided by those who’ve led on this for years.
Our Digital Inclusion Action Committee – chaired by Baroness Hilary Armstrong – has now been appointed, to make sure our work is informed by experts as well as the people we’re here to help.
Business support
I know how many businesses have put a great deal of time and money into this.
Ten companies pledged commitments alongside our Action Plan; I am immensely grateful to them all.
From Virgin Media O2, connecting 1 million excluded people by the end of the year.
To BT, giving free WiFi to families and communities across the country.
I also want to thank everyone offering social tariffs, connecting low-income households to broadband and data that would otherwise be out of reach.
And huge thanks to all of you finding ways to connect the unconnected – tariffs or tech, skills or speedier connections.
Call to action and wrap-up
What we’ve done so far is just the start.
We’ll keep pushing ourselves to go further, and I want to see industry go with us:
Partner with local digital inclusion charities.
Sign up to the device donation charter.
Keep investing in your employees’ digital learning.
For years at London Tech Week, you’ve heard successive governments talk about the transformative power of technology.
I believe what has to define this government’s approach is that we’ll make this a transformation that leaves nobody behind.
That makes society more equal, not less.
And that reaps the economic rewards equality brings.
Back in Newham, Kalpana is now a digital skills volunteer.
She’s gone from being someone who’d barely used the internet to someone who teaches others to work a smartphone, or set up online banking.
That’s the return that investing in digital inclusion gives us.
Connecting just one person can connect a family, a workplace, a community.
In the end, we’ll reach the 1.6 million unconnected that way. If we keep at it, together.