13
Examination of witnesses
Professor Hamish Laing, Sally Dyson and Róisín Wood.
Q48 The Chair: The Communications and Digital Committee is continuing its inquiry into digital inclusion. For the benefit of those in the room, I should say that we are now transmitting live on the internet. A recording of today’s proceedings will be made available on our website later, as will a written transcript.
We have two panels today. We hope to conclude the first panel in about 45 minutes. We will do a quick handover to the next panel because we are expecting Divisions in the House this afternoon and we do not want them to disrupt proceedings.
The main purpose of today’s session—we have, first, colleagues from Scotland Wales and Northern Ireland—is to understand the differences in digital inclusion around the UK and what is driving the progress in the respective nations. I ask you to introduce yourselves.
Sally Dyson: I am head of digital and development at the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, the umbrella organisation for all charities in Scotland.
Professor Hamish Laing: I am chair of the Digital Inclusion Alliance Wales, which comprises 90 third-sector, public-sector and private-sector organisations working to make Wales a truly digitally inclusive nation.
Róisín Wood: I am CEO of the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland, which has been around for about 42 years. We are one of the biggest independent philanthropic grant-makers in Northern Ireland and work across the community and voluntary sector.
The Chair: Thank you all very much for being here.
Q49 Baroness Harding of Winscombe: If you will forgive me, I will start off with quite a direct question. We had a detailed briefing from our excellent clerks that basically showed us—I will caricature a little—that we have almost a perfect control study of the four nations tackling digital inclusion in four different ways.
Scotland—I caricature—has a strategy and has put quite a lot of money and effort behind it. Wales has a strategy, has not put quite as much money behind it, and is much more third sector. Northern Ireland and England do not have a strategy—or did not have a strategy for quite a long time, if I am fair.
What is really striking in the statistics that I have seen is that there does not look to be any difference in the actual degree of digital inclusion in the four nations, yet we have three different approaches. If you forgive the quite blunt caricature, will you describe how you see digital exclusion in your nation, what you are focused on, what you see as the biggest challenge, and why your approach is the right one? Sally, perhaps you could start off with Scotland.
Sally Dyson: I will give that a whirl. One of the really important things for Scotland to have as the underpinning is that there has been a partnership for the past 10 or 12 years of public, private and charity organisations that have been looking to combine their talents and expertise to work to combat digital exclusion.
There have been four strategies to date, all of which have had digital inclusion, or digital participation as we have called it, at the heart, and we have very much gone with, “It’s everyone’s job to help to combat digital exclusion”. When we first started 10 years ago, we were looking at 800,000 people who were not online, and one of the things that is really important to think about over the last 10 years is that digital inclusion/exclusion is no longer binary; there are many aspects of digital exclusion where, for some form of activity, people could be included. If somebody has a smartphone and has sufficient data, and can do what they need to do entirely on that smartphone, that is okay, but at the point at which they run out of data or there is a service that they want to interact with that is not quite as advanced, they are digitally excluded from that.
There is a whole journey that we have been on, and we have been able to dig into those barriers, see those differences and start to work on some of those intricacies so that we make sure that everybody has the choice to be online to do the things that they want to do, whether as an individual or as a family.
Baroness Harding of Winscombe: That is helpful.
Professor Hamish Laing: In Wales, the approach has been much more about co-production. There is a very clear view that this is not something that only government can fix; it needs to be everybody’s business to fix it, so the approach that is taken in Wales is very much about engaging, as you correctly said, with the third sector and small community organisations, with government playing the part that it can play. There is obviously a distinction between the devolved nations.
There are four key elements to digital inclusion: broadband access, affordable data, skills, and confidence. Some of that is reserved matters. A lot of the broadband infrastructure is essentially a reserved matter with the UK Government, whereas the bits that are devolved—skills, confidence and an element of data poverty—are the things that we have tried to tackle in Wales ourselves, so that partly reflects why there has been a different approach.
One of the other distinctive things in Wales is that in government it is both the Minister for Social Justice and the Minister for Health and Social Services who have funded the national programme, Digital Communities Wales, which is seeking to improve skills and confidence. We see that there is a very important link to health and social care, and not just social justice and economic development.
Where the Welsh Government have chosen to invest in some of the broadband infrastructure to fill in the gaps for the reserved elements, they have done that on the basis of economic development, but primarily the culture and the philosophy is about social justice and health and well-being, which translates into the way things have developed in Wales.
Baroness Harding of Winscombe: That is very interesting.
Róisín Wood: It is difficult for Northern Ireland. As you know, we do not have a working Government at the moment.
You mentioned the lack of a digital strategy for Northern Ireland. That is a really difficult thing for us. At present, digital inclusion is funded by a number of departments—the Department for Communities and the Department of Education—which makes it difficult to work. We do not have one digital strategy that promotes cross-sectoral working, cross-department working or working across the set targets with accountability, which is why we have actively asked for that.
We commissioned a piece of research called Wired Up? in which we asked the voluntary and community sector what they thought the biggest digital obstacles were. We convened an innovation lab, and a number of things clearly came through. There is a lack of a digital strategy; there is a lack of funding for the infrastructure for digital, particularly for the voluntary and community sector; and there is a lack of skills. One of my colleagues in the private sector said to me, “Look, Róisín, for every seven jobs we have one person”. You can imagine what it will be like for the voluntary and community sector trying to go into competition against the private sector.
We have a big issue with trying to get people with digital skills into the voluntary and community sector and embed them into it. We know that, in the voluntary and community sector, volunteering is at an all-time low. We know that recruitment and retaining staff is very difficult. We know that it needs to digitalise and we are behind. In Northern Ireland, we are behind a lot when it comes to digital. We have some brilliant alliances—the Software Alliance and the work we are doing with Catalyst—but there is still that lack of joined-up thinking. There are lots of really good pieces of work in different places, but they are not connected.
For Northern Ireland, particularly being a rural country, that rural connectivity is critical. At least 17% of premises do not have decent broadband, and that has such an impact on every part of someone’s life and for their voices to be heard. We and the Funders Forum for Northern Ireland believe that one of the biggest things is connectivity and their voices being heard.
I spoke to my grants director before we came. At her house, she has to pay £300 for a survey and £2,000 to get the internet. You put that unto the cost of living and say to somebody, “Are you going to pay your bills or are you going to pay £2,000 to get connected?”, and I am not sure what the answer would be. We know from our research that this disadvantages even more the people who are already excluded—people with disability, people who are not working, people from an ethnic-minority background who are already disadvantaged—because, for anybody, £2,000 is a lot of money to find to get connected.
There are other issues such as education. The number of people who are planning to do ICT and skills in universities is down 43% and the number of people doing A-levels and GCSEs has been down between 17% and 30%, so we know that there is a lack of skills. We know that there are issues with connectivity in rural areas. We know that there is a lack of funding in the infrastructure and a lack of joined-up thinking. That is not helped by a lack of a digital strategy or a lack of a Government.
Q50 Lord Lipsey: Professor Laing, I live half way up a mountain in Wales, and until recently I had very poor broadband connectivity. Eventually, when we were in Covid and not coming here to work the whole time, I found out that it was available. I found out, greatly to my astonishment, that the Welsh Government would put in a link to my house that cost £800. I got that for free. That is very nice for me, of course, but I cannot quite see how it fits with the aims of the policy. I do not need support from the Government to put in broadband. I can get it done anywhere. I was not running a business here, just the odd committee like this. It is not clear to me what the logic is of subsidising broadband in Wales, as we do.
Professor Hamish Laing: I do not speak for the Government.
Lord Lipsey: Sorry, I should have said that.
Professor Hamish Laing: However, I am delighted that they got you connected.
I do not know the circumstances that you describe, but there is a need to get our rural communities connected in Wales. We know that there is a particular problem in rural communities. Some urban communities are not well connected, but it is really the rural communities where there is a need. The geography of Wales is a challenge, as you will know.
We have been doing work with colleagues on a minimum digital living standard, in parallel with a UK piece of work. One of the differences that has come from the stakeholder events and discussions has been that connectivity appears to be a greater problem in Wales than it has been across the rest of the UK, so it is right that there should be an attempt to get broadband to everyone in Wales, and, indeed, the further you live from an urban situation the more likely you are to benefit from it.
If you take health, there is a concept called the inverse care law, which was described up a mountain in Wales 50 years ago, which is essentially that the people who most need healthcare are those who find it hardest to access it. There is a real danger that we will create a digital inverse care law by excluding the people who need and would benefit from it. We need to get people connected, and that is technically a reserved matter for the UK Government, but the Welsh Government have stepped in to address communities such as the one you live in to try to fill in some of the gaps.
I would not want to talk about your particular circumstances, but the community in which you live needs to be connected, as does everybody else, and if it is not happening at a UK level it is right that the Welsh Government use economic development funding to try to fill in the gaps. Whether it makes particular sense in your personal circumstances, I would not want to comment.
Lord Lipsey: Does anyone want to add anything on Scotland or Northern Ireland to that question that Professor Laing has answered so well?
The Chair: Can either of you from Scotland and Northern Ireland say anything more about the driving force of the action that is being taken? It sounds from what Professor Laing has said that in Wales it is a social justice-type case that motivates a lot of the policies that are being adopted in Wales on digital exclusion. Is that the same in Scotland and Northern Ireland, or is it more of an economic prosperity-type case?
Sally Dyson: In Scotland, we see this as a continuum. That starts and is underpinned by the social justice case. People need to be socially included. Part of social inclusion is about digital inclusion. That drives the benefits through into economic motivation and the ability for everybody in Scotland to participate in civil society and maximise their economic strength and well-being, and that runs through into health and well-being. They are all interconnected, but it starts with the social justice/social inclusion element.
Róisín Wood: For us, it started off with Project Stratum, which is a £245 million programme from the Department for the Economy. It was looking at the public and making sure that they were trying to change their services. It was initially thought to be very good, and it is a great initiative. However, our colleagues in the Rural Community Network would say that it comes back to rural connectivity when it will not impact any houses that are built after 2010, so it comes back to the people who are excluded again.
Like my colleague Sally said, it covers a lot of different areas. What is very clear from speaking to colleagues who are funders is that, if we want to hear that civic voice from people who feel excluded, we have to make sure that they have access to digital, because that is often how it democratises that and gives them a voice. We are very keen in Northern Ireland to hear the civic voice. As the Community Foundation, we are behind empowering that civic voice to make sure that voices that are not naturally the loudest are still heard and contribute, and, for me, that is totally about social inclusion.
We have seen rural isolation during Covid, particularly for older people, and we are very worried that some of the older people who took time out during Covid are not reintegrating into the communities. If they are digitally excluded, that adds another layer and one that we are very concerned about, because we feel very strongly that we need to be able to do that. If people in rural areas cannot access broadband, they cannot access the variety of employment that is out there. Therefore, they often have to travel towards more urban areas because they cannot access employment that is locally based or home-based, which is an added expense.
For us, there are so many different elements of it. From talking to some of my colleagues who are also funders in Northern Ireland, the question is how we as grant-makers make our services more equitable and more digitally open to make sure that we are maximising the amount of money that we give out as funders to Northern Ireland. There are lots of different elements for us around the whole digital inclusion agenda.
Q51 Baroness Wheatcroft: We have heard a lot from the UK Government and volunteers about how much we rely on voluntary organisations and charities to deal with digital exclusion, but it seems that particularly in Scotland, but also in Wales and Ireland, the Governments have wanted to get involved and have seen the problem. In Scotland particularly, you have been very active.
Will all three of you say which programmes you believe have been most effective, and say a bit about what value for money they have delivered? It is expensive, as Scotland found, to just hand out laptops and so on to everybody who would like one. Are there other programmes that have been surprisingly effective—things that you might recommend for others to do?
Sally Dyson: Connecting Scotland, I want to be really clear, was a pandemic response and was enabled by a network of over 500 organisations that had been working for the past eight years on digital inclusion, so we had a fantastic partnership to build on. Lots of small things went on during the pandemic to embed and help people to understand initially why they needed to be digitally included, and then how. That was done in really small nudges so that it became relevant and central to someone’s life. It was not just a fancy add-on. It was not about TikTok, WhatsApp or Facebook. Actually, it was integral to things that they needed to do.
The pandemic hit and the Scottish Government decided in the end—and I applaud them for it—to distribute over 61,000 devices across Scotland through a systematic approach looking at how people could be supported during the pandemic. That was done through a partnership of over 1,000 organisations, and that work is ongoing. SCVO was the lead distributor working with those organisations logistically to get all of that out and about and across Scotland along with the skills and the confidence to be able to do it. At first, that was just over a telephone. That was not an easy thing to do, and it was a challenge that has set us in good stead for thinking about sustainability and how we can ensure that over time we address all the smaller digital devices that I talked about initially.
It was a lot of money, but it is about embedding and about everybody being aware of the real value to an individual that being online can bring, and putting sustainability at the heart of everything that we do. We know that tech changes rapidly, and building people’s confidence and motivation to continue on their journeys and to be curious and really understand the value to their lives is really important.
Baroness Wheatcroft: You are working with 1,000 organisations. Nevertheless, buying 61,000 devices should bring discounts.
Sally Dyson: Yes.
Baroness Wheatcroft: Did you get good deals and donations from the suppliers?
Sally Dyson: We have had big discounts and donations. Vodafone was one of the partners that provided connectivity through MiFi devices. Once it had extended the initial amount of wi-fi, it continued to work over and above. When the first Ukrainian refugees came to Scotland, it was on the phone to us immediately asking, “What can we do? How can we work with you to make sure that people who are arriving have some connectivity as soon as they land in Edinburgh, Glasgow and the other reception areas?” Those relationships are invaluable.
Those in the charity sector cannot do that alone; nor should they do that alone. They have a role to play, in that many people who are not digitally included are working with charities daily, so you have that real trust there. We need private sector organisations for their skills and for what they can support, and we need public sector bodies to drive this through their strategies.
Baroness Wheatcroft: Given that it is about altering the way in which people engage with life in general, it is very hard to have metrics to measure the cost-effectiveness of a scheme like that, but have you come up with any?
Sally Dyson: The whole programme is being evaluated at the moment, independently and with colleagues in the Scottish Government and across the partnerships. We are publishing those evaluations as they finish.
Baroness Wheatcroft: Wonderful. Thank you very much. Hamish, will you say the same about Wales—without the same budget, presumably?
Professor Hamish Laing: Yes. In Wales, there is a formal programme that is funded by the Welsh Government called Digital Communities Wales: Digital Confidence, Health and Well-being. It is quite modestly funded. It is £2 million a year, half from social justice and half from health in government. In the last three years, that has allowed the programme to work with just under 2,000 organisations across Wales. They have skilled up 6,200 staff, given them basic digital skills and knowledge, and supported over 127,000 citizens with the motivation and skills they need to get online. That programme has also distributed SIM cards. I think I am right in saying that it is nearly 2,000 SIMs since October 2021. That is 95 terabytes of data that have been distributed through a network of local organisations—people who are very close to the communities.
We have 59 digital hubs, connected to the National Databank, which, as you know, is a UK-wide arrangement to share data led by the Good Things Foundation, with which we work. Over 7,000 SIMs have been distributed in Wales through that programme.
Those are very practical things that make a huge difference to individuals’ ability to get online, because the cost of data is a challenge. I think 19% of people told us that in 2021 they cut or stopped their broadband access because they could not afford it any more. There is that national approach.
Digital Communities Wales does active work and cascades learning. You need to have a method of disseminating knowledge; you cannot just do it with a small number of people.
The local organisations that we represent in the alliance are also doing fantastic stuff in communities. You can have metrics. The widening participation programme run by the NHS in England demonstrated reduced activity in that people are less likely to go to the GP and to the emergency department, so there are some things that you can measure, but this is also very much about individuals and those individuals’ stories.
Getting people online and getting people connected makes a huge difference at a very personal level. You need a method of capturing the high-level metrics but also the very individual metrics—people who now find that they can engage with a general practitioner online because that is the way a lot of it is happening. We distributed over 1,000 iPads and tablets to care homes during Covid. That allowed care home residents to get their healthcare advice because it was then all online, and to stay connected to their families. You could have metrics for that, but actually it is just so obvious why that was the right thing to do. A direct grant from the Welsh Government allowed that to happen, and we got a good deal on those 1,000 devices.
It is a mixture of people with lived experience really understanding what the digitally excluded want and need and a nationally funded programme. It would be lovely if it was as well resourced as the Scottish programme, but even that £2 million is making a huge difference, and it would be good to see it continue and, of course, grow.
Baroness Wheatcroft: Thank you very much. That is helpful. Róisín, what has been most cost-effective in Northern Ireland?
Róisín Wood: That is a difficult question to answer. I have mentioned Project Stratum. That was a really good use of money.
A bit like my colleagues, it is a bit of a mixture, to be fair. I think the Belfast Region City Deal is £850 million, as some of the other city deals are, to try to change the infrastructure of some cities in Northern Ireland to make them smarter and to make sure that the civic voice is imperative in how the programmes are co-designed. There is no point designing a programme for the citizen if the citizen does not know how to use it or what it is for. We have been involved in the innovation labs in Belfast City Council.
The Software Alliance, as I said, is a lobbying not-for-profit organisation, and that is very much about the private and the public sector. You also need to think about the voluntary and community sector. It just does not work in the two sectors. An awful lot of innovation comes from the voluntary and community sector in Northern Ireland. During Covid, it was that sector that stood up. In the cost of living crisis, it will be that sector that will have to stand up again, so we have to recognise that.
We have been working very closely with the Northern Ireland Civil Service, which has given us a number of devices that we have given out and made sure went to different organisations. What is good about that going forward is that it has built social value into its contract, as many of the public service contracts are, and making sure that, as everybody goes forward, the computers that are used in the Civil Service, which cost millions every year to update and clean, are reused in some way in the voluntary and community sector and are really good value for money. That is for free at the moment. We are almost like the convener of that.
In our own programme called Techies in Residence we matched community and voluntary organisations with techies, and co-designed things that were addressed a need when the voluntary and community sector said, “We have a need for this. Now you need to help us design that”. That was really good. It was really powerful. It was a small programme, but it had a really big impact.
We will know the impact particularly when we see, post Brexit, the ESF money that came into Northern Ireland not being there. The UK’s Shared Prosperity fund and Levelling Up will not fill that gap, nor will we as independent funders fill that gap. We are very concerned about the impact of that, because we know that it will impact at least 1,700 jobs in this sector and at least 20,000 beneficiaries. We have issues there that we want to try to address.
For us, working with the Civil Service and brokering between private companies that are going for public service contracts, and building in the social value bit of that—making sure that there is significant impact in the social value bit of it—is really important, as well as the constant lobbying that we do. We are funders, so we want to build a digital inclusion fund.
We commissioned research to see what the issues were. As a funder—many funders will tell you this now—we are trying to be much more agile, much more transparent and less bureaucratic, because that is what the sector needs: more looking at unrestricted, long-term core funding, and trusting that the sector knows what it needs. It is not our job to say, “We’ll tell you what you need”. Our job is to listen to them and say, “What do you need in the voluntary and community sector in Northern Ireland to service Northern Ireland?”
So we, the National Lottery and many funders are now working to be much more agile and much more responsive, and to be not a transactional funder but a relational funder that has relationships for a long time and that absolutely has the maximum impact, whether that be private, public or charitable and philanthropic money.
The fund that we would like to grow would be cross-sector. I would like to think that we can get some private money in. We would be surprised if the philanthropists of the future did not come from the tech business. Can we put that public money and charitable money together and give it out in the way the sector needs it the most, not in a way it has been done in the past? We are constantly trying to challenge government to look at how it funds so that it is much more impactful.
Baroness Wheatcroft: Listening to the people who know seems like a jolly good idea.
Róisín Wood: I think so.
Q52 Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie: I need to declare an interest. I am chief executive of Cerebral Palsy Scotland, which is a member of SCVO. I, clearly, have looked at all of this through a Scottish lens. Róisín, everything you have just said about trying to build relationships with funders certainly chimes with how I would like the world to be.
I want to ask all of you about long-term, sustainable solutions. When the public money runs out—we have had a lot of money because of Covid—and when the crisis runs out, what happens then? I am keen for you to speak a little bit about devolved versus reserved responsibilities. Each nation has chosen a different way to look at the issues in its own space. What has helped and what has hindered in that devolved versus reserved space?
Sally Dyson: Prior to Covid, the Scottish Government were investing less in the digital inclusion agenda than my Welsh colleagues were, but they were investing consistently and supporting to develop partnership. The core is about building a sustainable partnership where everyone can play to their strengths and influence where they can influence, listening to people on the ground who choose not to be digitally included or would absolutely love to be digitally included but do not have the skills, the means, or whatever their barrier is, and focusing on how we can start to break down those barriers.
We have Connecting Scotland to ride on the back of and to maximise now, and we are doing that through a range of other programmes with colleagues across the private and public sectors. We speak to each other a lot across the nations. We are partners in the UK minimum digital living standard. Understanding what it means for an individual or a family to engage in society and looking at how we can bring everyone together in helping that agenda is really important. I will leave it there.
Róisín Wood: I will talk a wee bit about sustainability. For me, one of the key findings from our research was the need to build the infrastructure for the voluntary and community sector, and that is not about giving somebody just a laptop if they cannot afford the licences or the upkeep. That is okay for some of the bigger charities in Northern Ireland, but for some of the smaller ones it certainly is not.
Sometimes, you do not know what you do not know. If somebody is trying to get a service, they might not know the right questions to ask, or whether something is good value for money or is ridiculously expensive. I include myself in that, because I am really bad at digital. It is about being able to educate and inform the sector about what is good value for money, and that leads to sustainability.
It comes back to skills. We recognise that we do not have enough digital skills in the sector or people with those digital skills in the sector, and the biggest question is how we attract people into the sector. I spoke about the fall in education. I spoke to the head of Microsoft Learning, who happens to be from Northern Ireland—it is not just because I have great access to the head of Microsoft Learning—and he said to me, “Róisín, the problem we have is that you really need to be having primary school kids coding”. I asked, “Is that not too much”? He said, “No, it’s not, because they’re not afraid to fail. They don’t see it as failing. They see it as an educational journey. If you don’t have it in that stage, you do not have the pathway into the secondary schools and you do not have the pathway into universities”.
For Northern Ireland, we want to be a real hub. We have some big tech companies that are crying out for skills, as are we in the sector. If we are going to make it sustainable, we need to have those pathways coming in all the time. I would love to see really cool kids talking to me in a language that I do not understand, because I do not understand coding. I am happy to be ignorant. I would love to see that all the time and see kids moving from primary school and secondary school without the fear of failing because they see it as exciting and creative.
For me, it is about sustainability. If we want to make any of the sector sustainable, it is about the cross-collaboration, working together, and particularly with departments. There is not one specific organisation or department that deals with digital inclusion; it is spread across three or four. That brings its own issues about how we get departments to talk to and influence other departments, and how we get them to influence about how they fund. Seventy per cent of the voluntary and community sector in Northern Ireland is funded by government. It is a lot of money. We have the ability to talk about a flexible, agile, relational funder. I totally recognise that sometimes for a department that is definitely a challenge, but we are trying to say, “Well, look, work with us, and we’ll show you the impact of what you do if you fund this”.
Sustainability is about skills, funding, ways to fund, and building the infrastructure in the sector that will naturally bring people with digital skills to it. If I am going for a job and I can get £50,000 in the private sector, or I start at £30,000 on a short-term contract in the VCSE sector, I know which job I am going for. We need to think about whether there is something like digital apprenticeships for the voluntary and community sector. I am so passionate about such a brilliant sector.
Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie: That is one of the challenges of the sector, regardless of digital. Your point about there not being one sector, one Minister and one department is well made.
Professor Hamish Laing: I would build on that. One of the things that we call for as an alliance is that it should be cross-government. We have managed to get our colleagues in the Department of Health and Social Services to understand why it is important to them, and we would like to be able to do the same across the whole of government. That is a way of getting a more sustainable funding approach from a government level.
Health is investing hugely in digital at the moment in patient-facing, or public-facing, digital applications and digital services. The business case for those does not stack up if people cannot use them. We know that people who use health are disproportionately more likely to be digitally excluded—people with long-term conditions, people who are older, people who are poorer. They are the users of the health service.
We have successfully helped colleagues in health to understand that when they are thinking of big investments in digital technologies they need to be thinking about how people will be supported to use them; otherwise, their case will not stack up. It is a financial and moral responsibility, too. If we can do the same with other bits of government, we can get that sustained, albeit modest, investment.
Digital Communities Wales has now had six years of funding. That certainty of funding is very helpful, because when working with communities it takes time to build relationships and to get things in place. You will know that third and voluntary sector funding is very intermittent, which makes it really hard, yet it spends those pounds very well. Giving certainty of funding is really important, because then you do not have the problem of when the money runs out. You do not have big dollops of money that then disappear. Yes, the capital investments may be one-offs, but there will be sustained revenue investment to support this.
Seven per cent of the population in Wales are still digitally excluded. That is roughly 200,000 people. We have to get online all those people who wish to be online, and we will find that will be most of them.
It is great to think about the high-end digital skills that will give us a vibrant tech sector, and we would love to see that too, but we have to get everybody to a position where they are able to be online and engaging in what is an increasingly digital world.
Sustained investment without the big peaks and troughs is helpful. Bringing together all the organisations into a network so that they can share learning, get good practice and work with each other will give you more bang for your buck out in the sector. Those are the key things. If there is additional money on top, that is fantastic.
Q53 Lord Foster of Bath: Thank you very much for being here, thank you for sharing your experience, and, not least, thank you for drawing our attention to the vital importance of having sustainable partnerships between public, private and voluntary sector, the vital importance of co-ordination between the nations and regions, and the importance of co-ordination between government departments, whether it is in the devolved nations or at the UK level.
We will produce a report at the end of our inquiry that will share examples of good practice but also make recommendations to a number of bodies, not least to the UK Government. This is your opportunity to do our work for us. In the short few minutes that we have, will you make a key recommendation that you desperately hope will be included in our report?
While you are doing that, will you think about whether one of those should be a new UK Government digital inclusion strategy, bearing in mind that we have not had one since 2014 and your comments about Northern Ireland’s failure to have one?
Sally Dyson: Start with sustainability and think about this for the long term, because digital inclusion is dynamic and nuanced. Should there be a UK digital inclusion strategy? Maybe not a strategy, maybe a framework. There are brilliant things happening in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. Let us look at a framework that brings all those together and is better than the sum of all its parts.
Róisín Wood: I will say a digital strategy for Northern Ireland, as you can imagine, with specific funds allocated to it and specific targets for skills—I do not mean skills just for universities but for those who do not consider digital as a career—so that we can actually attract people into the sector who are not in work and want to create change. If we were able to do that, every sector in Northern Ireland would be really happy and supportive.
Professor Hamish Laing: We have a digital strategy in Wales. One of its missions is digital inclusion, which is helpful. It would be very helpful to have a UK-wide way of bringing together the activities in the four nations. There are, as we have heard, distinctive differences, so we do not want to lose those.
I think a framework is the solution. I would like it to be talking about the importance of partnership and developing capacity throughout the whole system. This cannot just be government’s job; it has to be everybody’s job. The way to do that is to build capacity through the cascading of learning and skills and so on. I would hope that anything that was produced would recommend that way of working.
Lord Foster of Bath: Thank you very much. I know that the Chair wants us to end very quickly, so I will leave you with a thought that if you have further ideas or specific proposals that you want in the report please share them with us.
The Chair: Thank you very much, Lord Foster. Hear, hear to that request. That is one fewer thing for me to say. I want to thank all three of you again for being here and for your time and your testimony, and particularly for travelling all the way here, or across the water, to see us today. I am really grateful to you.
