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Examination of witnesses
Jemma Waters, Councillor John Hacking, Owen Barry and Joanna Causon.
Q59 The Chair: This is the Communications and Digital Committee, and today we are continuing our inquiry into digital exclusion. I will invite our four witnesses to introduce themselves. We have two panels today. The first panel is people who are service providers or who have a professional interest in customer service. We will be exploring with them in particular the trends of digitalisation, and in particular what is motivating different businesses and organisations in their transition to digital. Perhaps you could start by saying your name and the organisation you represent.
Councillor John Hacking: I am an elected member of Manchester City Council. I am the executive member for skills, employment and leisure, which also includes digital inclusion.
Jemma Waters: I am the head of customer inclusion, with a focus on digital, at Lloyds Banking Group.
Owen Barry: I am managing director for justice, central government and transport at Capita.
Joanna Causon: I am the CEO of the Institute of Customer Service, which is a professional body.
The Chair: I should declare that before this inquiry started I agreed in principle to become an officer of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Customer Service, which the Institute of Customer Service sponsors. That has not actually happened yet because there has not yet been a meeting that would allow the formalities to be discharged, but I will just put that on the record.
Lord Hall of Birkenhead: I also want to declare an interest: I have a family member who worked for Capita until recently.
Q60 The Lord Bishop of Leeds: When we are talking about the transition to digital services across society, presumably there are a number of motivating factors. Could you say, from your particular sector or organisation’s perspective, what the main motivating forces are behind the transition to digital? For example, where do cost savings and business efficiency sit in the order of priorities?
Jemma Waters: On the motivation, we are seeing a huge amount of interest and uptake across our customer base in digital banking, obviously, but also in a whole range of different digital engagement and services. We have seen a real increase in engagement through some of the data and survey work that we have done through our consumer digital index. We conduct a study every year that we publish and share for the public good which looks at how digital the UK is. We try to understand some of the motivations and drivers.
Ultimately it is about the ease with which they can engage with and access information. They can see and access a whole range of different services beyond banking, and the benefits that we are seeing come through in a range of different ways. In some instances, it is financially beneficial for them. We know, for example, that by using money-saving comparison websites they can access a whole range of different financial savings, which at the moment are more important than ever. We know it is significantly easier to engage with services such as the NHS when thinking about healthcare and the provision of information. We also know that when it comes to finding, securing and getting a job, it is significantly easier now because over 80% of vacancies are now advertised online. So there is a whole range of different benefits and motivations for individuals going online.
Our research and activity extend into understanding what it means for business as well. We do quite a lot of work with small business owners in particular. One of the things that we found through our research, from looking at a blend of their survey data and transactional data more broadly, is that it is really helping them to improve their productivity and to grow and access new markets. It is also helping them to engage with other organisations that are going through similar things that they are, and that kind of peer-to-peer networking, focus on well-being and support is something that we are seeing ever more as a real driver and motivator for them.
Owen Barry: What is driving the move is a really topical and interesting question. A lot of it is driven by user demand and how a lot of people want to consume services. Through the pandemic the digitally disadvantaged cohort has significantly reduced, and when it comes to the way people want to interact, a lot has gone down that digital route. That is a core part of what a lot of our customers use, and we operate a lot of services on behalf of government, so a lot of it is driven by that end-user requirement.
The critical factor in a lot of the way in which we design our services is segmenting all the users. We look at who our user groups are, how they interact with the service and how we can give them what they need. If we look at the digitally disadvantaged across a number of our services, we see a number of contact centre or call centre back-ups as well as written collateral that people can use and operate in that fashion. So having multiple layers where the public can interact with a service to get what they need from it is critical.
The other point, looking at this as a large organisation, is the benefit of digital and how we utilise it. Post pandemic, we can tap into resource pools, where previously there were perhaps difficult-to-find skills, of people all over the UK. Corporately, I think we now employ people in every constituency around the UK.
Employment is a really important driver for this. The complexity of offerings and multiple layers of services are also a large driver for us to deliver high-quality services, and ultimately that is with a view to meeting the expectations of the general public in how they want to consume services.
The Lord Bishop of Leeds: Perhaps we can come back in a minute to those who cannot consume services, for reasons of access or otherwise. I wonder whether in the next two contributions you might just address who ultimately pays for digitisation or a transition to digital. If it is more efficient for the companies or the agencies, there will be implications for the consumers as well.
Joanna Causon: First, on why organisations drive this, there is an intent to support customers. Certainly from our research at the institute—we are pan-sector and work with a range of different organisations—we can see that easier access, speed and efficiency is something that many consumers or customers are particularly interested in. So there is certainly a drive to be more effective and efficient that you will see from a customer point of view.
However, we have always said that this has to be by the choice of the customer or the consumer. Our research shows that around 73% of us as customers are very happy to interact digitally, but there is a small but significant minority, around 15%, who struggle to do that. The challenge therefore in any organisation is to be able to give choice and to serve in a way that the customer actually wants.
In terms of paying for digitalisation, that is obviously the whole balance, from an organisation’s viewpoint, to be able to be more efficient, which should free up their people so that, when they need to deal with more complex issues or problems, they have more people available to do that. So there are significant costs in terms of digitalisation, but for me it is about getting it right and it is about a blend of human interaction and digital.
The Lord Bishop of Leeds: And huge costs for the consumers who have to buy the equipment or have the infrastructure.
Joanna Causon: Yes.
Councillor John Hacking: I do not want to repeat what has already been said. I think that local authorities are in a slightly different position. As a city council, our relationship with our residents is slightly different from our colleagues’ relationship with their customers—not entirely different, but significantly.
I suppose our motivation is not dissimilar. There is an inevitable shift towards digitalisation, which many of our residents and businesses want to see more of. They want to interact with us more digitally, particularly for things such as revenues and benefits, housing applications, applying for schools, employment, work and skills applications and leisure activities—all those things. It will not come as any surprise that as local authorities we are constantly looking to save costs and make things cheaper for our residents, but, bearing in mind the comments about forcing people online, that is not something that we see as part of our strategy or something that we encourage. We want to enable people to become digitally proficient, able to interact and all the rest of it, but we do not want a situation where we have a significant number of digitally excluded residents—I hope I can come back to that later on. We do not want to make that situation worse by making our customer services more online and excluding and isolating more and more people. So that is slightly different from how businesses view it, but not entirely.
The Lord Bishop of Leeds: May I push one thing? Joanna, you used the phrase “by choice of the consumer”. What about where there is no choice? I am reasonably digitally adept but, for many of us, trying to get hold of a human being behind some of the digitised world is impossible and frustrating, so the consumer experience is being damaged all the time.
Joanna Causon: Let me be clear. It is the belief of the institute that a well-run organisation gives a choice to the consumer. Some people cannot interact because of a disability. I often use my mum in this situation: she is 94 and not in a position to want to interact digitally, and she will rely heavily on her family—myself—to do that, so there should be choice in that situation. For essential services, we at the institute believe that there should be a choice on offer. I would say that there is a significant group of customers who are very happy to interact digitally but, where they are not, there should still be choice.
The Chair: Thank you. I have one supplementary before we move on. It is specifically in the context of today’s economic conditions, where people have to pay more for the services that they receive or are in need of, and of the corresponding financial pressures on the organisations that provide those services. How would a business like Lloyds ensure that, in its efforts to reduce costs, it does not accelerate some of its digitalisation and use the cost of living type situation as an excuse to go harder and faster at the expense of its customers? You will understand that, as this is happening, branches are also being closed in towns, so there is an element of cynicism among people about the drivers and how the competing priorities are being handled in an organisation such as a bank. Could you say a bit more about what you as an organisation are doing to make sure that you are maintaining the confidence of your customers at a time when you want to move more things online?
Jemma Waters: At Lloyds Banking Group over the last five or six years we have had a really strong digital inclusion agenda. We recognise that, exactly to Jo’s point, there has been a lot of strong movement and a number of customers are significantly more inclined to do the majority of their banking activity online. None the less, there remain customers and individuals who want either additional help or support, and we need to make sure that they have the choice available to them to engage with us in the way that they need to. I do not think that that commitment changes, but our investment in the digital channel, our investment in what we are doing to digitise processes and services, is to meet the customer need and, also to Jo’s point, to make sure that that is being done in a really inclusive way.
Thinking about this from an inclusive design perspective, we need to make sure that we are engaging communities and specific customer cohort groups in different demographics to understand how and where we can best meet their needs, and how that can then infiltrate across our products, our services, our journeys and the experience that we create for them.
I have seen from the extensive research that we have done that in a number of instances there will be individuals who do not necessarily want to move online more broadly across their whole lives—it is not right for them and not the right thing for them to do—but actually what we often see is that a lot of the barriers are around capability and confidence. We are in an age when lifelong learning, continually having to upskill and engage with new things in new ways, is just part of how life is now in the UK.
The Chair: Interestingly, research that has also been shared with us in the banking context has been around security as opposed to capability or confidence in somebody’s own personal skill.
Jemma Waters: I am very happy to share some of the information that we have on digital capability and confidence more broadly.
That feeling of confidence is definitely a barrier, which is why we have invested in the multichannel digital inclusion approach, providing support with things such as our digital helpline. It is a free service available to everyone, not just our customers. It does what it says on the tin: if you are not able to access the internet, it is a free helpline that people can ring. Acknowledging data poverty and the access and device point, we have a range of partnerships, including one with Vodafone, where we are providing free devices and free data to make sure that that is not a barrier.
Once someone has that, we literally courier it to their home. When they engage with that device, we will help them to onboard it for the first time. So there is a level of care and support in making sure that this is a sustainable activity and they are getting that understanding. Then, while they are engaging with that device, they can call back as many times as they like, whether it is about booking a GP appointment, doing a food shop or logging on to or getting involved in internet banking for the first time, if that is what they would like to do.
For those who are online but have a lower level of confidence, we have an online academy that provides a whole range of different courses. We work with a number of organisations and charities to make sure that we are providing free, accessible information and leveraging some of our corporate learning—things that we provide for our staff—and open-sourcing that more broadly as well.
Where people want face-to-face support, we have branch activity pilots in place to support that. We have our telephony service, which I think is the only one of its kind at the moment, although Vodafone is doing some interesting stuff in that space. We have on-demand and online activities as well to provide support.
The Chair: Thank you. I have one question for Mr Barry about the quality of services that are provided, thinking about it from the perspective of quality. This is an inquiry about digital exclusion, for sure, but there are people who are not necessarily digitally excluded but none the less would question the quality of the customer service experience that they have via a digital route, and are looking for an assurance that businesses such as yours are seeking to provide services or are motivated by the experience of the customer. Is there anything more that you can say that would give us a sense that there is not just a rush to digitalisation and trying to equip people better but that there is a concern about the quality of the service?
Owen Barry: Absolutely not. It is a really good point. A lot of what we do when we design a new service is based on the broad premise that no one gets left behind, so they have multiple voices and options for wherever they are in digital skills capability, access and all those points. As a design principle, firmly putting the user group at the heart of what we do is key to that design.
Lord Foster of Bath: This is just to Jemma. Clearly, one of the things that is really important is trying to identify groups, categories and areas of the country where there is most likely to be problems with digital exclusion. You said earlier that you have very detailed customer demographic information and, I think—I just want you to put on record that you did say it—that you would be prepared to make that data available to the committee.
Jemma Waters: Absolutely. It is available in the public domain at the moment as well, and I can send links after this session.
Q61 Baroness Harding of Winscombe: First, I should apologise. I am sorry, but I have quite an urgent call in about 10 minutes. I am going to ask a question, hopefully get to hear all your answers and then have to run away.
I would like to probe a bit more something that you have all alluded to. As service providers, in both the public and private sectors, as you move public-facing services online, how do you support people who are excluded? What are you learning about how to do that well? What have you got right and got wrong, as you have been moving online and trying not to leave people more excluded as a result? Councillor Hacking, I wondered if you might start from the public sector perspective and then we will move on.
Councillor John Hacking: I am happy to. It is just a given, from our point of view, that people who are digitally excluded are almost certainly excluded from other things as well. They suffer from other types of social exclusion. One thing that we are trying to do in Manchester, where we have a fairly extensive and mature digital inclusion strategy—we love a good strategy in local government, and Manchester is no exception—is to work with partners to develop a plan for those residents, and perhaps those businesses, equally, who are excluded from access to not only our services but wider services that other businesses and public bodies provide.
The first thing to say is an interesting point about data. Whatever we do, it is data driven. It is extremely difficult to identify among a resident cohort like Manchester’s, which has a fairly varied and very diverse population, exactly who is digitally excluded and who is not. Not everybody is digitally excluded all the time and some people are more digitally excluded than others. So we try to use a database, which we call the digital exclusion index. That helps us to identify where in the city and which residents in particular demographic groups are most likely to be digitally excluded from our services and others.
We use quantitative data and all sorts of metrics around how many people pay their council tax digitally—online—what age people are and what their income groups are. We provided quite a detailed written submission to you which details that, so I am not going to repeat it and waste the committee’s time explaining what we have already said.
We do use data and have a capacity to focus in on where we think the digital exclusion is. Basically, we define people as digitally excluded if they do not have access to one or more of three things. One is if they do not have access to what you might say is kit—laptops or smartphones—to be able to get online and use digital services. The second is that they do not have the skills or the capacity to do it. Thirdly and importantly—they are all important but this is very important to us—is motivation: why should people be motivated to pay their council tax by going online? This comes back to the point about why we are digitalising our services, when a number of our residents are quite happy with the situation as it stands. But we know that, in five or 10 years’ time, that will not be the case and that younger people will face digital exclusion in different ways from the current cohort, so we do a number of things.
We are trying to tackle access by literally handing out devices. We have a device policy and have been doing that since 2020—we ramped it up during the Covid pandemic. We have a very complicated eligibility system to ensure that we give it out to the right people. On skills, we have all sorts of layers of activity. We have activity in libraries; all our digital exclusion strategy is delivered through our library service. That is where our team is based because if there is one thing that our residents access, it is our libraries. We have 23 public libraries and during Covid, 25% of the people who visited them did so to use the internet, so it is an important way of engaging with people.
Going back to skills, we do a lot of things: the Manchester Adult Education service provides lots of courses on digital skills—online and not, strangely. You would expect us to do things in libraries but we also do things with other partners, so Manchester Active, our leisure provider, provides weekly access in libraries to people who cannot book sessions in leisure centres online. We also work with a food-bank provider to provide devices and training, which they use.
On motivation, obviously we want to motivate people to use our services where they can, so we try to get residents to engage in digital services. We have developed a programme called Let’s Get Digital, which lots of our partners in the voluntary sector, the private sector and health use as well. We hold a number of drop-in sessions every few weeks, where members of the public come and talk to us. Over 600 have attended those in the last couple of years; we give them training and education on where to get access and more knowledge about how they can become more digitally included.
There are two quick points I would make before I answer the question about what works and what does not. One is that this is a moving target; things change almost monthly. One thing that we identify is that if you are older or disabled, or if you are looking for work or have low literacy skills, you are almost certain to be digitally excluded as well. But there are people who are now data-poor although they have access.
In one example, a young woman who came to the advice bureau of a councillor colleague of mine the other day was trying to access some information about school places. She has a smartphone and knows how to use it, but she’d got no data. We provide a data service with the National Databank, through internet providers and phone companies, so we give out SIM cards. We have given out over a thousand of those, with six months’ access on them, through the libraries, but data poverty is a particular issue.
The other thing I would say is that it is a changing market, as I said, but we are keen to tie the work we do on digital exclusion to the work we do on work and skills. The fact is that people who have not got these skills now are not going to acquire them, unless somebody gives them to them—and if they do not acquire them, they are going to fall further and further behind in the job market. I am not a statistician, but at the moment I think the percentage of entry-level jobs that now require basic technical skills—digital skills—in Greater Manchester is around the 30% mark. That is expected to rise to about 70% in the next five years. If you are not digitally included now, things are not going to get any better unless somebody does something about it.
What works? We do not try to do it on our own. We have a partnership and a digital inclusion group. We work through established respected groups, particularly in demographic groups that are traditionally hard to reach. Those are trusted and sustainable. As a local authority, we have a very small digital inclusion team with four people in it. That will never cover a city the size of Manchester, so we have to work with partners.
We have learned that what works is constant partnerships with the private sector, health, the public sector, and very much the voluntary, community and faith sectors. We have digital champions in all those fields, and digital buddies who will go into community centres and talk to people about how to get access.
A particular challenge at the moment is voter ID. I do not want to go into great detail but that is extremely difficult for us at the moment. We probably have upwards of 100,000 people who will vote in May in the local elections and we have currently issued voter IDs in the low hundreds. On identification, we are holding weekly sessions in libraries to enable people to apply for it—how to upload photographs and so on—but it is very, very concerning at present. I know that is not a matter for this committee but it is for us.
The Chair: You have covered a lot of the next question as well, when we get to it.
Baroness Harding of Winscombe: I have to go—I feel very rude—but I wonder if we can hear a bit from the private sector on what you are doing, as you push into more digital, to support people who are currently digitally excluded: whether to bring them online but also how to support them if they cannot come online.
I am really sorry: I have to go, as I am 10 minutes late for a call, but I promise I will listen to your responses later.
Jemma Waters: Building on what we have just heard, if I reflect first on principles and the things that we have learned worked really well, I will then talk about how they apply to the work we do at Lloyds Banking Group.
The first principle is about meeting people where they need to be met. John Hacking is absolutely spot-on: it is about acknowledging, through things such as library networks, charity partnerships or broader industry partnerships, where the individuals are who need help, what they need help with and how we make sure they get it in the moment where they are. That is really important.
Something like this, as I said at the start, is about people’s lifelong learning. We continually ask people now, as a society and as an economy, to continue to learn, including upskilling and engaging with digital. Therefore, we need to meet them where they need to be met and provide a multichannel range of support. That is certainly something we do at Lloyds Banking Group. I touched on a little of this previously—our blend of face-to-face support, telephony, and online support and embedded activities to help—but as John said, it is the partnerships as well: recognising how and where we can empower and deliver change through and with others.
We are part of the digital inclusion action group in Greater Manchester. We also do quite a bit of work in West Yorks, Scotland and other areas across the UK. A lot of that is about assessing, first, how and where we can really add value. We have a huge amount of capability and skills support; we have the partnerships to speak to the access point. When it comes to motivation, that is where we need to ensure we recognise and partner with what we always say are—this might sound a bit trite—trusted faces in local places. How do we make sure that we support those organisations which support people day in, day out, and amplify their work through the scale, reach and impact that we can contribute from the private sector?
Partnerships are key and, within those, it is about transparency. One of the questions Baroness Harding outlined was, “What works and what does not work well?” If I reflect on initiatives and activities that have gone really well and led to true impact and outcomes for people across the UK, being upfront across the public and private sector meant working together to determine what we are trying to do and saying, “Let’s make sure that we’re transparently working on that plan together”.
There have been a number of examples from Manchester, because John is here, but he is right: setting that strategy from the outset, as a number of local and regional government have done, says, “This is an enabler for so much of what we need to achieve to drive prosperity in different areas”, then bringing different kinds of partners together to play the roles which make most sense for them just leads to a better outcome for everyone.
The Chair: Rather than just going down the line of witnesses, I am going to see whether Baroness Wheatcroft wants to pick up from where Baroness Harding left off or develop this further.
Q62 Baroness Wheatcroft: I would like to start by asking you quite how much more efficient you think the move to digitalisation has made you. Clearly, efficiency is the driver but do you have metrics that tell you, given all the back-up you have to provide for those who cannot fully use it, what the savings are so far?
Jemma Waters: Can you repeat that? What do you mean?
Baroness Wheatcroft: How efficient is digitalisation making you and what is the improvement? Can you give some metrics as to why you are doing it?
Jemma Waters: To be honest, we are doing it because that is the consumer expectation. It is what our customers are increasingly looking to us to provide. We can see, year on year, that the level of customers who engage with the digital activities we have already is significantly increasing. We can see through what I suppose are our own metrics of digital customer behaviour that they are engaging with the channel more and more. They are spending more time engaging more with us. For us, it is about how we as a service continue to respond to that in a way that meets their needs and supports them to engage with our services more broadly.
Baroness Wheatcroft: John, can I ask you the same question? To what extent is this driven by making you more efficient in what you deliver—saving money—and, given that is the driving force, at what stage would you envisage being able to do everything online?
Councillor John Hacking: That is a good question. Let us look into the future, shall we? I do not think that we will ever be in a position where everything is online. We have a problem with digital exclusion which comes from deep-seated and deep-rooted inequalities in society, which are in some senses widening. Until we resolve that, the option of offering our residents only digital access to services that everyone else gets access to is a problem. One of our principles is that we try to have a service that is for everyone, everywhere, every day—it sounds a bit like an Oscar-winning movie.
The Chair: Or a drink.
Councillor John Hacking: Yes, that is a good idea. I do not want to say this, certainly not in front of the Lord Bishop, but I wonder if the digital poor will always be with us, in the sense that there will always be—certainly over the next couple of decades—that group of people who are digitally poor in terms of their relationship to public and private services. They are very difficult and increasingly distanced from services. I cannot speak for the whole of Manchester City Council but I think the possibility of us ever providing all our services that way, in the reasonably near future, is pretty slim.
Baroness Wheatcroft: Owen, what is Capita’s improvement in efficiencies from digitalisation?
Owen Barry: Certainly. It is a difficult question to answer with any real level of precision. I will try to bring it to life with an example of the kind of government contracts for which we would tender. On large-scale contracts, as the channel shifts more towards digital you have certain rising costs in technology, IT and hosting; perhaps the labour costs are less. Over the last number of years, the efficiencies gained pre-technology largely stagnated, so I would roughly quantify the opportunities that there are now as circa 10% in efficiency.
The distinction I would make is that those efficiencies or savings are typically seen when those contracts would be re-let—competitively tendered. They would be built into the design of a new and very different solution that would have a cost up front.
On the point about the drive to digital, though, I agree with both John and Jemma that it is driven by customer and general public expectation rather than getting more for less, or whatever. That is part of an overall government aspiration, of course, but it is very much driven by how people want to interact with services. I mentioned the key design principle earlier: when we generate and design those services, it is very much about being able to service every cohort within the communities that we serve, while encouraging and helping those who need support to access those services more effectively.
This is probably a good example to bring it to life. We operate the personal independence payments service on behalf of DWP, which is a critical service for vulnerable people. It is really sensitive and important, and everything else that comes with that. On the earlier accessibility point, we deliver our communications in that service in large print, audio and braille, with seven types of coloured paper, and video and text services. That is really important in terms of accessibility, but there is a role to play in digital in helping people to engage with those services in a better way.
We talk a lot about the people who are digitally capable and those who are not, but there are actually many on a curve all the way along those journeys. We all have friends and family members in that situation, so we looked at that as a service. Part of the focus is on continuous improvement and how we can continue to build a better service. When we looked at the design of our communications—our technology and so on—we simplified the navigation and design, while providing more guides and user videos and allowing people to customise settings. For example, people with sight difficulties can scale it up. The results from all those sorts of things was a 27% increase in users and remarkably, despite that increase, the contact went down by 13%.
There is a big push around digitisation and a big focus on how we can be digitally inclusive, but there is a really important bit in the middle where designing things in the right way can make a real difference for users. If we can make it easier for people and do that effectively, the people who perhaps have limited digital skills and need to develop them over time with that support, by interacting with the services that we generate, can start to build those skills in a well-supported environment. That is a really good example of how we can get things right and make a real difference.
Baroness Wheatcroft: It is really interesting that so much depends on the design of the product you are offering. If I might go back, you mentioned in an earlier answer how if people are having problems, there are always your call centres, but to maximise the savings some call centres may not be as well staffed as they used to be. I do not mean Capita’s particularly, but most people in this country have had experiences with call centres which leave something to be desired. There was a letter in the Times the other day that said the writer could not understand how they can be getting an above-average number of calls every time, and there is truth in that. Do your call centres meet your expectations?
The Chair: If you can be relatively crisp in your responses that would be great, because we are now running quite a bit behind time.
Owen Barry: I will indeed. The first thing on how we operate our contact centres, and an awful lot of our services supporting government, is that we have all the metrics and measures—KPIs on call-handling abandonment and all that sort of stuff. So, yes, our call centres do operate effectively. We manage those on a daily basis and should there be an event that requires a surge in demand, we can respond and flex to that. As an organisation we pride ourselves on that, but we have to manage it tightly to make sure everyone can get the services they need.
Joanna Causon: I think we are in a transition. To answer your question about productivity, at the institute we track customer service across 13 industry sectors. We have been doing that since 2009. Our latest evidence will show that customer satisfaction in the UK is falling and say that, in terms of the costs to serve or productivity, it is costing us about five days a month to rectify those problems—20% of our time. It is costing in the region of £11 billion every month, so there is a big cost to poor service. That is not necessarily because of digital but about us not being able to serve as well as we can.
Quickly on the previous question, I completely agree with other speakers that we see three groups. We see those who are genuinely—that word—excluded, either financially or through mental health, health, or whatever reason; they do not have access. We see a group that is perhaps more willing but needs greater outreach, education and support. Then we see those who do not wish to. There are different treatments—that is not the right word; maybe different approaches—for each of these groups to help that transition. It goes back to the point about the curve.
On designing and testing, it is about using the right people to do that and make sure it is good, because sometimes we do not, shall we say. John talked earlier about understanding who is genuinely excluded, and that is hard. We sometimes do not know who is excluded, so we need to think about how we reach the people who are.
On involving partnerships, there is a whole host of organisations—the committee will know this better than most—to go to for help on certain types of exclusion. There are brilliant organisations and many of our members do that really well, working in partnership particularly over data sharing.
Something that has not been discussed is the move to digitalisation from a customer service and employee point of view. It actually can be quite positive because it frees them to spend more time on more complex cases. That is really important; it makes for a more interesting job and we are more likely to attract more people into the profession. As far as I am concerned, that is important given how much it takes of our economy. We should therefore make sure we get the right coaching and support for those people who themselves are supporting.
I have tried to answer several questions in one there, but I hope that gives a flavour.
Baroness Wheatcroft: What about call centres?
Joanna Causon: On call centres not being adequately stocked, it is fair to say that, across the UK at the moment, most chief execs who I talk to have a real challenge in resource capability. We definitely see that that is the case but it is improving a little. We should therefore make sure that we train, develop, qualify and keep hold of our people by seeing customer service as a profession, not as, “Something I’ll do until something else comes along”. It is about us investing, and not just organisations; there is a wider piece around investing in the profession.
Q63 Lord Kamall: One group we are talking about as being excluded are those who might be willing to try but do not have enough confidence. What fallback is there when they get stuck the first time they try it online? Are they just told, “Sorry, email this address and you’ll get something back”, or is there human intervention and a number they can call? What human fallback or backstop is there to help these people?
Jemma Waters: That is a good question. This will start off sounding like an unhelpful answer and then, I hope, become a helpful answer. To the point around inclusive design, it largely depends on what motivation that individual or business owner has. We know that the number one driver for improving digital skills and capability is the workplace, by people either improving the circumstances of their current job or finding a new job. In that instance, if we are supporting small, local organisations, and if they have typically undertaken a bit of training with us but the motivation is strong enough, then we have the mechanism of them engaging with us again by coming along to another session.
On emailing the team, we have an open mailbox where we set up and engage sessions or, as I mentioned, because we do a lot of delivery through and with partners—great partners such as Small Business Britain or Digital Boost—they will go back to that partner as a conduit. There is definitely always an onward journey and an onward support mechanism for them.
On the confidence point, interestingly, sometimes there is an assumption that it might be an older cohort that is less confident with digital. Actually, what we really see coming through is that it is younger people who have grown up as digital natives. They are incredibly confident with TikTok but when it comes to engaging with the workplace in a professional environment, or financial capability and managing their money, that is where they need and want intervention—“How do I get the best out of this channel to deliver the thing that I want to achieve for my life?”.
On your point about access, skills and motivation, that is why we are always trying to lead on what the motivator is, what the hook is and making sure that they know that they can ask more questions if they need to.
Q64 Lord Foster of Bath: I am conscious that we are tight for time so I shall ask a very brief question. John, I do not think any of us could fail to be impressed by the work your council is doing in this area—the strategy and the actions that underpin it. You are enormously helped, I suspect, by being a very large council with a population of over 500,000. Many smaller councils may have difficulty replicating what you do. Could you quickly share your understanding of what is happening in this field in the local government world? What are the barriers to those smaller councils being able to do what you are doing?
Councillor John Hacking: That is an interesting question. I am not an expert on local government—or anything, if the truth be told.
Lord Foster of Bath: Nor are any of us.
Councillor John Hacking: I am sure that is not true. I think a lot of what we do is replicable irrespective of scale. Our ask would be that we are able to scale up what we do. We have a large population of well over 500,000, many of whom are digitally excluded by virtually any definition. Certainly, many are excluded by poverty, health inequalities and all that stuff. However, we work very closely with the other nine boroughs in Greater Manchester. We want to develop a Greater Manchester digital inclusion strategy; work is already going on there.
We can share experience and knowledge with each of those boroughs and there are things that we can learn from other local authorities about how they do it. Everyone is different. It is often said, “You can always tell a Mancunian, but you can’t tell him very much”, but we learn from other people. We learn from other sectors in the city. We are a large but very diverse city. We have universities and a variety of industries. Lots of different activities are going on across the city, so there are areas that we can learn from. We can learn from the private sector about how it engages through things such as call centres, customer service and all the rest of it.
I would say that the technique, or tactic, that we use is to engage on the ground with trusted partners that are already sustainable. We work with people already funded by national programmes to do work with digitally excluded people.
I would say to other local authorities, without being presumptuous and lecturing them, that their strategy should be to focus relentlessly on where they think the problem is, to use data to identify those areas, and to use trusted partners in those areas and work honestly and openly with them.
If I had an ask, and if local government had an ask, it would be, “Can we have some sustainable funding into the future that allows us to set targets?” One of the difficulties around this is looking at key outputs. What does digital inclusion success look like? The answer is complicated—and made even more so by the fact that we are using funding that we got during the Covid period, which is due to run out. We will constantly be looking for short-term funding. If we are to have a long-term plan—and it will be a long-term plan because, as I said, those other inequalities of health, poverty and disability are not going away any time soon, as far as we can ascertain—my advice to other local authorities would be to come and talk to us and tell us what they do as well.
Q65 Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill: My question is also to John Hacking. Your strategy is very impressive and I understand that you are using data to assess who is digitally excluded. I know that you have community buses and hubs and are working through the libraries. When you recognise who might be excluded, how do you reach out to them? What is the next stage?
Councillor John Hacking: We do that through community organisations, be that community groups or faith groups. They are a key element of our engagement with local residents. The city council has neighbourhood teams on the ground that engage on all sorts of levels, be that through schools, social services or adult social care, so we are regularly in contact with residents as a local authority. We also use other partners; we are quite happy to work with credit unions or housing associations. It is not something I have mentioned previously but we do a lot of work with housing providers and we are looking for innovative schemes. I believe there is one called mesh, which allows housing providers that have a lot of coverage in social housing in particular to provide single points of access for residents to a single-access internet provider at reasonable cost, based on their tenancy. We are looking to work with that because we have 20-odd housing providers operating across the city region.
There are other things. We put information out when we do mailouts. As the city council, we are always writing to our residents, usually telling them to pay their council tax but also about election issues such as reminding people when the postal votes go out. We use a lot of that and there is lots of information on all our bits of stuff that go out, whether we go into jobcentres, libraries, community centres, churches or mosques. There are barcodes on there that people can use. I know it sounds weird, having barcodes to reach digitally excluded people, but digital exclusion is a complex area. It is not just about devices sometimes, as we have discussed.
We have six community radio stations in Manchester and 12 in Greater Manchester. We use those to communicate with ordinary residents in their homes.
Schools are a very important aspect for us. Younger people obviously tend to be at the bottom end of the digitally excluded, as we all know—to our cost at times—but schools are a good conduit into parents. We use as many methods as we can. We use local elected members to get messages out and to communicate, encouraging them to talk to their community groups and residents about what opportunities there are, be that training through Manchester Adult Education service, the drop-ins, the device scheme, the data programme or whatever it is.
I should also mention an important thing about resources. We would obviously like a big pot of money to spend on our strategy and on rolling it out and delivering it, but we are pragmatic as much as we are anything else. We also have significant contacts. Manchester is a very vibrant city and a growing city. There is lots of investment and significant strategic development going on—building housing, new hospitals and so on. We attach social value contracts to those developments, some of which are related specifically to digital inclusion. One of our social value contracts in recent months stipulated handing out 200 laptops, making 100 available through our device scheme and 100 to voluntary community-sector organisations to do skills training and support themselves. We try everything that we can.
Q66 Lord Hall of Birkenhead: You have all, in different ways, mentioned design this afternoon; it has been really interesting. We all know when we use a service that is well designed—you feel good at the end of it—and we also know, because we are frustrated, when we are using something very badly designed.
The question I am trying to think through is whether there are recommendations—beyond co-creation, which is a process—that you would make around designing and delivering accessible services. It could be to do with design standards that are shared across the piece or ways to incentivise and nudge people through good design.
Jemma Waters: That is a large question. If I think about the benefit of inclusive design and what it leads to, as you said, co-creation is a fundamental point in understanding up front what a specific group’s needs are and how we can best meet them.
Lord Hall of Birkenhead: That is a process, as opposed to a principle, is it not? It is a way of producing something. I just wondered what the principles might be that you, in the work that you have been doing, can point out to say that it ought to be X, Y, Z or whatever.
Jemma Waters: It is about truly challenging yourself to understand the group that you are trying to represent and engage, an element of which will be having co-creation as a principle. It is about assessing the value that you, as an organisation, bring to meeting the need of that group. It comes back to some of the initiatives that have been talked about as well—how do we work best in partnership to deliver an intervention?
I can think of a food bank organisation that we are working with in Greater Manchester and across the broader north. It ultimately has fantastic logistics and supply connections with people who are at a point where they really need help. When they need an intervention, it is best placed to own and engage with that, while we are best placed to work with our partners to provide devices.
Lord Hall of Birkenhead: But would a common set of standards, learning and recommendations be helpful, or is it very much ad hoc according to who you are dealing with and where?
Jemma Waters: Surfacing best practice to get to a common set of standards and learning is always really helpful, although making sure that those design principles are centred around the specific user group and that the partners related to them are the right ones is important too. I know that I am slightly stating the obvious but if I think about, for example, the Digital Poverty Alliance, which I am sure the committee will have heard from, it is a coalition of individuals and organisations focused on meeting a data and digital poverty need gap. Therefore, the principles by which they engage and work across industry are really important—and, importantly, different from an organisation such as FutureDotNow, which we also work with.
There is actually a real challenge in our workforce. The digital capability opportunity, speaking to that confidence and capability bit, really needs to be addressed. How can we, as different industries, come together and share what we are seeing and learning? How do we then turn that into, as you say, principles? There is also a bit of a playbook, so what are some of the artefacts? What are some of the things that an organisation of any size could lift and go, “This is really helpful and clear—I can now apply that”? I imagine that what Lord Hall is getting that is some of the things John has outlined, as a local authority, in getting some of that learning and understanding packaged up in a way that other local authorities—
Lord Hall of Birkenhead: That is precisely the point. Jo, could you comment on this? I know that there were public sector bodies accessibility regulations in 2018. I do not know whether those work or are the answers to that sense of having a unified set of learning recommendations that we could make across the piece.
Joanna Causon: For me, there are learnings but I would slightly challenge or question whether you should regulate or say, “Approach it in this way”. There are two bits to this: there is the design and co-creation, but there is also the testing. Sometimes, not enough stress testing is done. If greater emphasis was put on saying, “We’ve designed it, now we’re genuinely going to test it with the people who are utilising it”, then we would not get some of the issues and challenges that we have. As in Jemma’s point about principles, you can share best practice.
However, as we have said, it is complex and there are different nuances and needs. It is not about having one size fits all, unfortunately, but about having some principles or a framework to ensure that we test and co-create. It is also about ensuring that the right people are in the room when we are co-creating and that we stress-test those things. Those are principles, if you like, that should always be put into play.
Lord Hall of Birkenhead: That is very helpful. Owen, you have provided lots of services so what do you think?
Owen Barry: We design our services in line with GDS—government digital standards—in a lot of typical activity. They talk to the principles that Gemma and Jo outlined of co-creation and user design, but then if you think of websites and the like it gets into page layout and how long they should be. You get a level of consistency so that people get used to operating them in a particular way, but we have all seen that on some websites you cannot find anything. Everything is cluttered in one corner.
I gave the example of personal independence payments: it is about that continual improvement. What do our customer journeys look like and how do we continuously evolve and develop them? But there is a set of standards there, certainly in delivering government services, that we use and adopt. Then you have accessibility standards as well, which we follow.
Lord Hall of Birkenhead: Who determines whether you are doing that? For the Government, do departments come back to you and say, “This is clearly not working”, or is it up to you to determine what is working?
Owen Barry: Typically when we deliver a government service, we will do the design work, engage with the government departments and say, “This is what the user groups are looking for. This is what they need and this is how we design it.” So you are involved with colleagues in government throughout the process until you go live, but then you have that kind of feedback loop. As Jo was saying, there is that kind of continuous improvement and how you develop it. Of course, services start at a certain size but they can scale and evolve. If needs change, you have to be constantly refreshing that but all of it is enshrined within the government guidance under which we operate.
Joanna Causon: I think you could consider, for when we talk about those who are most vulnerable or most excluded, some independent testing as an approach. What does it really feel like on the end-user experience of it? You could have somebody who looks at that independently.
Lord Hall of Birkenhead: That is very useful. John, do you want to add anything briefly?
Councillor John Hacking: We have a set of digital service design principles, which we developed on the basis of thinking about accessibility from the start. Obviously, we have the national guidelines on website design and accessibility—assistive technologies and all the rest of it. But I know that we have developed a resident and business digital experience programme, which is quantitative and qualitative research. We use various people to do that. We ask our residents and our businesses, “What is it like to use our digital services?”, and we have digital design principles based on that. We are data-driven and for everyone; we make things simple, easy and intuitive: we are always learning and we are integrated. Everything that we do is based on that, plus starting from a standpoint of asking “Is it accessible?”.
Lord Hall of Birkenhead: That is really useful, thank you
Q67 Baroness Featherstone: This question is about how you identify and then help individuals who are digitally excluded. I do not know how they come to you or whether you are proactive about finding them, but if a person is in an area and all its banks have closed—they might say, “I used to go in the bank and there was a friendly person in there who did stuff for me”—do you contact that person and say, “Can we help?” How do you deal with it or find those people, and then how do you service their individual needs? Shall we start with the banks?
Jemma Waters: Sure. So across the range of support that we offer, if I think about our helpline, for example, as I mentioned, that is available to our customers. It is promoted to them as something that they use—
Baroness Featherstone: What would I get from a helpline if I rang and said, “My branches have closed. I have a computer and I can send emails, but I have no idea how to do online banking”? What happens then?
Jemma Waters: You would be supported by that person, who is an expert, on the end of the phone. If what you want is to set up an online bank account, that person will spend the time with you to help you do that.
Baroness Featherstone: How would you find me if I did not find you?
Jemma Waters: As in, through the helpline?
Baroness Featherstone: Is that the only way in which people can access it? Do you pick them up in the branches that you have left? I am asking how you identify that need and then how you service it.
Jemma Waters: I will stick with the helpline example. Across our branch estate and footprint, we absolutely promote and talk about the helpline. We signpost to it but, importantly, recognising that it is something we are doing beyond our own customer base, we also work with libraries and charity partners, such as the food bank charities I mentioned before, to signpost to and profile it.
More broadly, to your previous point, it can be quite challenging. Ultimately, as we have talked about, if as an individual you are not online and are not motivated to be online then it can be challenging to find you. It is through other local and community partnerships, or conversations, that we would find those individuals and talk to them about what they might be able to do online. But it comes back to that principle of consumer choice: if they do not want to be there, all we can do is provide the access, the skills, the motivation, the support and the opportunity to see where we get to with that.
Owen Barry: It is a really complicated one to answer for Capita, because we are not a retail business. We are often delivering government services but of course our services touch many, many people, so the answer will be “it depends”, which is not very helpful. If I think about something we operate that supports disabled students, as an example, it will often be a combination of a letter going to someone about eligibility and collateral at campuses and education institutions to say, “Did you know you can apply?”. In that sphere, interestingly, where we did go digital and, of course, there is a younger cohort, digital has been really effective in reducing no-shows and the like.
It really depends on for whom we are operating the service and how they would like us to reach the digitally excluded, but in every instance where we need to reach people, we might receive from a government department something saying, “These are the individuals you need to get in contact with”. It would often commence with a letter saying, “Here are your options—you can access this service through an online application, or by calling into this contact centre, or by post”, and so on. There is very much that layering of services to make sure, as I said earlier, that no one gets left behind.
Lord Lipsey: How long does it take your helpline to answer the average call? I am looking at Jemma.
Jemma Waters: I am going to answer unhelpfully; I am really sorry, but it depends what the call is about and what the individual wants to do.
The Chair: But to pick up and answer it? Is it a helpline for people who are looking for digital help or the more general helpline for the bank that you were asking about, Lord Lipsey?
Lord Lipsey: I am interested in the whole picture. It may be that you want to write to us with some detailed breakdowns of the times. It always seems to me—I am not a Lloyds customer—that the answer should be, “About five hours”.
Jemma Waters: I am very happy to come back with more detail.
The Chair: I think you may have wanted to say something other than five hours.
Lord Lipsey: Sorry, that was a joke.
Jemma Waters: Oh, I know. So on our digital helpline, it is minutes and it depends what you want help with. If it is someone saying, “I’ve never been online before and I’m a bit nervous about it” and a device is needed, there needs to be a follow-up call. We need to arrange for the device to arrive at their home, talk them through unboxing it, setting it up and all of that. Then we would move on to how we are meeting their needs. Versus that would be someone who is pretty confident online with a range of things but is doing something new for the first time. During Covid, when we set it up for things like food shops, for example, if someone had a certain amount of digital confidence and capability but just needed to be walked through that specific journey, it was obviously quite a short call. But yes, we are talking about minutes, not hours.
The Chair: Is your digital helpline number available on your website? Would I be able to find it quite easily?
Jemma Waters: It absolutely is, and you would.
Q68 The Chair: Okay. It would be quite helpful if you could provide written supplementary information on the waiting time for an answer on your digital helpline, and any other stats you want to provide us with that would help to illustrate the kinds of calls that you get, and the length of time that you have to devote to people when supporting them with their different needs. That would be genuinely quite interesting to know. Alongside that, it would also be helpful to have what information is available on people’s experience when they ring Lloyds Bank as a customer for assistance generally—not the digital helpline but customer calls—to see what the comparison is.
Before concluding, my final question would be to Ms Causon. At the Institute of Customer Service, are you approached by your members particularly for assistance in how they develop and design their digital services or do they not see you—the institute—as a way of improving the offer that they have digitally?
Joanna Causon: We would not work with them specifically on their digital platforms but what we provide, and what they will seek out, is research that looks at some of the things we have talked about to ensure that it is properly designed and used—the pitfalls of getting that wrong, if you like, and the challenges around that. So yes, they engage with us—or the enlightened ones do—on using our research to help them think about how they do the customer journey, all the way through their whole organisation. We provide training on customer journeys and, obviously, qualifications as well as part of the support.
The Chair: Anything more you are able to provide to supplement the information that you gave us earlier on the cost to businesses of poor service standards and how those are changing in the current period, or anything that might bring to light any differences and distinctiveness with the digital aspect of it, would be really helpful.
Joanna Causon: I would be more than happy to do that. One final thing, if I may. I started with this about choice, and I would always say that, for those who are most vulnerable, I urge the committee to think very clearly about how that group will always need a choice of channel interface. I think all of us have raised that but it will be really important as we go forward.
The Chair: Thank you very much to all four of you. It has been incredibly helpful.
