14
Examination of witnesses
Professor Simeon Yates and Kat Dixon.
Q83 The Chair: This is our second panel today. Our last panel was all about digital skills, but we have a couple of witnesses here with whom we want to discuss how various schemes and interventions are currently operating and get a sense of what is working and their evaluation of these schemes. Some of that will be about skills, but not necessarily all. We are also keen to understand your views on other kinds of interventions and programmes that are being established. Can I first ask you to introduce yourselves and your organisation, if you are representing one?
Professor Simeon Yates: Good afternoon, everyone. I am Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Liverpool. I guess I am here in the context of my research into digital inclusion, which I have been looking at for about two decades, and more broadly my work on the social and political impacts of digital technologies.
Kat Dixon: Good afternoon. I am here as an independent witness. I am drawing on expertise as a research fellow of the Data Poverty Lab and my experience of setting up digital skills and inclusion programmes across the private sector, third sector and government.
Q84 The Chair: Thank you again for being here. I will kick off with the first question to this panel, because unfortunately the Lord Bishop is on duty. He has said prayers already, but he has to stay down there for a short while just to make sure that we really mean it.
You have listened to the previous session. I am quite keen to hear your own views about how the Government are dealing with the issue of digital exclusion and particularly on whether it is joined up. Over the last couple of months, we have heard from a lot of witnesses that this cuts across a lot of government departments. We would be grateful if you could start by giving us your view on how the Government are handling the issue of digital exclusion.
Kat Dixon: The first really important thing to say—I am sure you have heard this a few times—is that UK life exists online. It is absolutely essential to have access to it. That is because our lives and our digital lives intersect in lots of different domains.
I want to draw your attention to something in your briefing pack, which is the periodic table of internet elements. This graphic is here to demonstrate—this is from the research I have done—that our lives intersect across essential services such as housing, health, education and employment, and across things that enable us to live and thrive in the modern world such as social connection, community, civic participation and creativity.
Not having access to these things prevents access to modern life. I wanted to quote from some of the participants I spoke to in my research. People described it as “a human right”. They said, “It’s like a third arm. If you’ve lost that third arm, what do you do?” They said, “For me, having data is as important as having stuff in the fridge for me to eat, because I can’t operate, I can’t live day to day, if I can’t connect”.
To your point about the government response, it tends to be focused on one domain. For example, an NHS trust might give out devices and data to make sure that somebody has access to a medical practitioner. That is great; that is exactly what should be happening. But it is focusing on one domain. The ripple effect of that device and that data goes beyond immediate access to medical care. It means that they can look for work, they can connect with family and friends, they can manage their finances or their bills, their kids can watch Netflix and they are a bit happier at school. All these things contribute to improving someone’s social situation.
For me, it is completely illogical to tackle digital exclusion by focusing on one domain. This is a cross-domain and cross-departmental response. The government response needs to respond to that. Our current digital inclusion strategy is from 2014. That is the one referenced in the current digital strategy that came out last year. That is not serving us. We need a joined-up response across departments and possibly funding from a central pot as well.
Professor Simeon Yates: The previous witnesses stole my favourite line, which is that digital inclusion “is everybody’s problem but nobody owns it”. I have been saying that since the first time we started a project on this, looking at digital inclusion in South Yorkshire. It cuts across everything, as Kat has just said. There is no part of what government looks at and supports, whether it is healthcare, education or even our military, that digital does not cut across.
There was an example earlier about young people. I have to slip this in. I have done work with the MoD and Dstl on digital skills in their workforce. A senior NCO said, “I’ve got all these lads who can Facebook like mad, but when I put them in front of a piece of equipment they cry”. I always joked that it was probably him shouting at them that made them cry, but the point is that there are no digital natives. It cuts across all aspects of our society and all of government’s role.
At the moment, nobody owns this in the UK/England. I would contrast that with the fact that the Welsh and the Scottish have tried to grasp this across government. We are actively involved with the Welsh Government at the moment on the development of the minimum digital living standards project, which we are looking at both nationally and within Wales. Wales is translating that work into policy. The Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act is building in the idea of digital skills as a requirement for young people and for the future of the nation.
At a more devolved level, there are examples in the UK, whether it is Wales, the Connecting Scotland programme or the digital inclusion work in Greater Manchester, where there is more co-ordination across government. Nationally, there is none. As was pointed out by the previous witnesses, I really did expect this to pick up during Covid. I was joint chair of the DCMS digital skills and inclusion research group. That folded during Covid.
Essentially, the civil servants working on it went off to do Covid and Brexit. We had a situation where laptops were being dished out to schools with no co-ordination from DfE, and all the evidence base was sat there in DCMS with nobody responding to it. I am not criticising the civil servants involved; they had various other jobs to do, Covid in particular. But we have not had a co-ordinated digital inclusion strategy for nearly a decade.
Sadly, my answer would be that there is no national co-ordination at the moment. As the previous witnesses said, we need a strategy.
The Chair: That is very clear. Throughout the course of the questions that follow, we will explore some of this in a bit more detail.
Q85 Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie: I recognise that the nature of central government, devolved Administrations, local government and other statutory organisations, such as local authorities and NHS boards, makes interventions very complex, but why are we always focusing on interventions when so much of the other work we do on service design and everything is much more on co-production, people-focused and bottom-up?
Where would we get the best bang for our buck? Should we be concentrating on what interventions work, and, if so, do you have examples of where we would be best placed to concentrate our efforts, or should we be thinking about service design from a slightly different problem-solving point of view?
Professor Simeon Yates: You need both. We need some national co-ordination, because that drives money and resources. Historically, we have had national interventions. If you go back to the 2000s and the early 2010s, there were a number of national interventions, such as UK Online. The focus is sometimes on basic digital skills, but it is often on access and devices, driving broadband connectivity and so on, because infrastructure projects work as national programmes. If you want to support a Bangladeshi community in Leicester to get online, the route towards that might be to engage with something they find interesting or useful, such as presenting their poetry. One of the very first projects I did in this domain was cultural integration through the sharing of culture, using online tools as a way of giving people digital skills.
I always joke about the example, when I was working with some older people in a social housing area in Sheffield, of the gruff old ex-miner saying, “Computers are not for me”, standing by his wife as she learns to use the laptop. In the end, after a cup of tea, I realised he was into fishing and put him on a fishing website. The next week he is pushing the other older people out of the way to get to the laptop. You do not know that at government level. You know that in your local community. You know what the issues are, if you are in a rural Welsh village, in getting connectivity.
So it has to be both. There has to be some top-down policy to set a framework, but that provides the opportunity for people to engage more locally with the strategies that will get people to get the skills. Somewhere between the two is where we need to be. There are good examples of that working both in the UK and elsewhere, but they tend to be transitory. They last for six months (or while the funding lasts) rather than being a consistent approach.
Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie: That is always the problem with initiatives. Ms Dixon, what are your thoughts on this?
Kat Dixon: I agree with Professor Yates. It is both. If we zoom out, this is a complex ecosystem of provision with lots of different agents involved.
From what I have seen on the ground at a local level, communities are the best translators for a lot of these initiatives. They speak the language. They can chat about fishing. They can talk to people. “Do you want to use the internet?” “No, not really”. “What about this iPad? If I could get your grandkids on this iPad right now, would you be interested in that?” “Oh, yes, actually”. Creating the access points through community centres and outreach programmes is best done by community initiatives, but those community initiatives are acting within a much wider ecosystem.
Your point about inclusive design is really important here. We talked earlier about the exponential growth of technology and how we will have to keep learning digital skills. This is a life-long learning piece. The way we access digital platforms, whether that is paying for your parking or getting a menu in a café, is designed by organisations and platforms. It can be designed in a way that is inclusive or it can not. How that happens can be regulated and set by government. That is really important if we will take people with us.
I am answering a question from the previous session, but we will have to continue to relearn the grammar of digital technologies over and over. We did not have smartphones before; we do now. We did not have QR codes; we do now. If we create inclusive design practices, the vocabulary should get smaller. It should get easier for individuals to understand and interact, because those design principles are consistent, inclusive and accessible.
Overall, both community work and the way national policy and those regulatory principles are applied to industry, which then build those platforms, will bridge the digital divide, but focusing on one without the other will not do anything.
Q86 Lord Kamall: I want to follow on from the last question. We have heard from many witnesses about local interventions and how they can be much more powerful in many ways. I did lots of work with local community projects before. Quite often I would talk to them and they would say, “Sometimes we want government intervention, but sometimes we don’t, because they crowd us out or they don’t take the learning and they have their own way of doing things”.
In this particular area, we all know that great work is being done locally, but there could be a lot more. We know that it does not cover everywhere. How do we make sure that government gets involved in a way that is sensitive to local demands without necessarily squeezing it out? We have seen that happen to local civil society in many areas.
Kat Dixon: The regulatory principles that government sets will create the architecture for community groups to do the work on the ground. As I said before, community groups are best placed to do that.
We do not want to see the two elements of the ecosystem working at odds with each other. A good example would be the loyalty penalty, which affects people across the UK. It is £83 a year per person on average for mobile and £61 for broadband. This affects all kinds of people who are gradually paying more and more each year for internet for no really good reason.
There is a community group in Hammersmith and Fulham that works on behalf of elderly residents at Age UK. They ring up telco companies and say, “They’re paying £100 a month. Actually, they’re on pension credit. They should be on £15 a month”, and then they switch. That is enabling someone.
That third-sector resource, where volunteers are ringing up on behalf of residents, is countering a decision in the regulatory ecosystem that loyalty penalties are allowed to flourish. In the insurance industry, the FCA has basically abolished loyalty penalties, which means that cannot happen. In this ecosystem, that is allowed to happen.
Community groups and third-sector groups are counterbalancing these national policy decisions. To me, that is not an effective use of resources. When we look at these, we have to look in the round. Community groups cannot flourish if they do not have the right conditions in which to work.
Lord Kamall: When we make laws, we always worry about unintended consequences. We think we are solving one particular problem. This regulation on loyalty penalties may have been there for good reason, or it may not have, but the unintended consequence is that local community groups are now having to phone up to help pensioners.
As we do this, how can we avoid unintended consequences? Can you never really avoid them? Do you just have to be nimble and react to them as soon as you are aware of them?
Professor Simeon Yates: I do not know whether you can avoid them. This is a domain in which you see multiple examples of those unintended consequences. I will give you an example, and then I will go back to answering your previous question about co-ordination in government.
A classic one would be universal credit. When that rolled out, an awful lot of people had to fill it in who were not online, who did not have the digital skills or who had an inappropriate device. The interface design was not great. There were issues about saving your data as you were going along and so on.
When we were doing fieldwork on digital inclusion issues, we were consistently given the example of people going to their local library or Citizens Advice to do this online because they had access there. Then they put some data in that was wrong. They made a mistake, but, because the system was designed not to cope with mistakes, the policy response was to fine people. You got a £50 fine because you put incorrect data into your universal credit application. They were then going back to Citizens Advice or the library and getting upset with the library people. “I came here to put my data in and it’s gone wrong”. The library people were printing out each page—because you could not print it out—from the screen and making them sign it to make sure that, when it was finished, if there was an error it was their error.
One of the social housing managers we were working with said that the problem is that a lot of digital solutions push the problem down here. Everyone goes, “Wahey, that’s great”, but there is a big balloon over here of other unintended consequences. There is a huge amount of that in digital, because, if you want my opinion, we are still treating the digital delivery of public services a bit like Ryanair. “We’ll make a huge saving. We’ll push the process of administering whatever this social service is on to the client”. Ryanair and banks have a great option. If you are an expensive or complicated customer, they do not have to serve you or they can slap you with loads of costs. If you need extra services to use the airplane, that is an extra £25, et cetera.
We cannot do that with social services. We cannot do it with lots of government stuff. There is an issue, in that the way government goes about delivering services creates lots of those unintended consequences, especially for people who are digitally excluded or marginalised.
To go back to your bigger question, one of the challenges is making sure that the government policy that is set is usable by those delivering interventions, whether it is at local or devolved government level. For instance, as researchers, we have had to tackle an interesting issue in our work with the Welsh Government. We could make a lot of recommendations from what we have heard from stakeholders, for example from Digital Inclusion Alliance Wales or from the work we have done on talking to the households in Wales about minimum digital living standards. We could say, “You should do A, B, C and D”, but A and B are not policy levers that the Welsh Government have the right to manoeuvre. They are policy levers for national government to manoeuvre.
There is a question there about how the different players talk to each other to co-ordinate delivery. Wales can address issues in the curriculum, to the earlier point about putting digital into the curriculum. They have talked about that and they have been implementing things, but they cannot set telecoms policy. There is a thing there about having that bigger, broader strategy and providing the framework so people can then deliver locally, at a meaningful level.
That is the way you deal with the complexity. You set a good framework, hoping that you do not have too many unintended consequences, which local organisations can then be empowered by. If there is an issue with the fee structure or the way social tariffs are working at the moment—they are not—that should be fed back up the system so people can think about change.
Lord Kamall: There seem to be two key words to me. Tell me if I have oversimplified. Clearly I have, with two words. The framework is incredibly important, but so is co-design, for want of a better phrase.
Professor Simeon Yates: Yes.
Q87 Lord Griffiths of Burry Port: Thank you for the word “framework” and for mentioning Wales so many times in your answers. The question I have been allocated raises some questions in my mind. How good is the evidence?
So much of what we talk about at a local level, for example, is anecdotal. We went to East Ham. We had a wonderful experience. I take it there will be blind spots across the country where nothing is happening. We have heard about the lack of a co-ordinated government strategy in this area. I am just wondering how we can have one when we are in a situation where there are so many variables, moving parts and different bits of the country that already are experimenting or moving forward.
“Framework” is the word. We heard about the framework you were in, this Department for Education framework with three levels and so on. How do we get something that is coherent, adequate and based on evidence that will inspire confidence to decide the direction of travel and the first measurable steps towards seeing whether what we think is important is achievable? Would you chair such a commission?
Professor Simeon Yates: We have a challenge that is similar, strangely enough, to arts policy. A lot of arts policy is very locally delivered. You very rarely see an evaluation of an arts intervention that says, “People didn’t enjoy the art. They didn’t get anything educational out of it”, because there are lots of small-scale interventions, and it is the nature of the funding and all those other usual arguments.
There is quite a lot of evidence, in both the UK and other parts of the world, on effective digital inclusion practice. The big players in the third-sector space, such as Good Things Foundation, are not going to throw good money after bad. They have stuff that they know works to one extent or another.
With that said, more work still needs to be done, particularly because lots of interventions, whether they are large or small scale, as Kat was saying, tend to focus on one thing: “This is for healthcare”, “This is about getting more broadband access”, “This is providing a specific set of digital skills”. Within its own box, it is possibly quite successful, and you can see that.
Just to talk about some work we are doing at the moment, which the committee may know about, we are developing a minimum digital living standard measure, which we want to start using to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions and get some consistency in how we measure these things. It is a complex space. If you take the ONS figures, around 90% of people are online. If you take the analysis of Ofcom figures that we do, around 20% of the population are low digital users, including a very large chunk of young people who do not go into higher education.
What should we use? That is why we have worked for two years to build this. We want a tool, and we have been working with the Good Things Foundation, the Welsh Government, Nominet and others to build a tool so that we can say, “This is what it looked like before. This is the intervention. This is what it looks like now”. I agree that we need more evidence on what works as an intervention, but, as we pointed out, things keep changing. You have to be able to evaluate a change in circumstances. So I agree, but there is already enough evidence for us to get going.
On the economic impact assessment type work, people have tried various times to do this on limited resources. We need somebody to do it properly. In the arts sector, again, if you do a proper look at the economic impact of the arts and the creative sector, you end up with some very big numbers, and those are robust numbers. There is a case for that kind of measurement.
Kat Dixon: The best examples I have seen of tackling this well have been with devolved funding. Manchester and Leeds do a great job. Wales has an incredible inclusion strategy. The Scottish Government did an amazing job in their pandemic response.
There are three levels: national policy, devolved local or regional communities, and hyperlocal communities. Hyperlocal communities know how to inspire confidence and how to work with residents, but at this local or regional level there is huge disparity across the UK. Some are really mature and really advanced, and their responses have great leadership and funding—the key thing there is funding—to implement some of those strategies.
Pouring devolved funding into the local and regional ability to address this is key. For me, that national, strategic level is much more about addressing how industry functions, looking at consumer protections and thinking about the loyalty penalty, mid-contract price rises and the poverty premium, in which it costs more to pay as you go than to have a contract. For me, that is where the strategy sits. It is also about inspiring and enabling the industry to work together.
Lord Griffiths of Burry Port: In a report of this kind, I imagine that we will have to put out the feeling that we are acquiring for how to get the necessary framework established and advise government accordingly.
The Chair: Yes, absolutely.
Q88 Lord Foster of Bath: I am fascinated by your point about that intermediate level between the local and the national. Professor Yates, because you were involved in it and we have had evidence from them here, is the Manchester city region the sort of level where this work should be done, if we are coming up with a plan?
Professor Simeon Yates: If you look at population sizes, Wales and the Greater Manchester area are vaguely on the same order of magnitude. The ability to work closely with local communities and local provision is good, but we also need to work upwards. Andy Burnham putting a bunch of ISPs in a room and talking to them quite robustly about how they could work with him to solve this, or the Welsh Government doing the same thing, is quite powerful. We need enough government to have a co-ordinated approach that is locally relevant, but not too much government to become blind to—
Lord Foster of Bath: I am just very conscious that the Government are currently looking at new legislation to find other ways of grouping county councils together and so on, along with all the other structures they have. It may be that they are where we find the basis for the middle tier you are saying is needed.
The Chair: There is one thing that seems to be lacking in all of the different initiatives that exist, whether they are community-led, charitable or whatever. If they are in receipt of some kind of public funding, how is it assessed that they are delivering value for money and actually working? Your comparison with a lot of arts interventions is not lost on me. This is the problem. There is a lot of activity, but is it making much difference? If there is anything you want to send us after today’s session that gives us some real evidence of these initiatives and their genuine impact, that would be incredibly helpful.
Q89 Baroness Wheatcroft: Both of you have raised so many interesting issues that it is quite hard to know which one to pursue hardest. I was certainly intrigued, Professor, to hear about the committee you were involved with being abandoned during Covid. Were it functioning today, what might it be doing and what could it achieve? If you were able to tell us that, it would be really interesting.
As a broader question for both of you, if you would not mind, you have made very clear that being online is essential for all of us. Should it therefore be regulated like a fourth utility? Has the time come for the Government to grasp that? We looked earlier at minimum tariffs, for instance. They are clearly not made available in the way they should be. Could a regulator improve digital inclusion?
Professor Simeon Yates: If I talk about the committee that I used to work on at DCMS it ceased mainly because it was not a number one priority: there was Brexit, Covid and other things. As a number of senior policymakers and politicians I have spoken to along the years have said, because digital inclusion is “everybody’s problem but nobody owns it” it is always number five on the list. When you have to make a cut, you do only numbers one, two and three. It just disappears off the list. When somebody comes through the door and says, “There are a bunch of people in our community who can’t get access to their healthcare”, and you ask, “Why not?”, it is because we cut number five on the list, which was the digital inclusion bit. I am not claiming it was some kind of grand strategy. It may be a sin of omission rather than intent.
What would it be doing if it were operating now? The world has changed. We have DCMS and DSIT; we have different structures. What form they will take in the future we do not know. A group such as that needs to sit across government and ask of government policy in general, whether it is educational policy, business policy, industry policy or whatever, “What are the digital inclusion, digital skills or digital literacy implications or needs that have to be met to make this a success?”
It is too often said that, “If we make this digital, more people will have access and be able to do it. It will be easier. It will save money”. You need some group just to say, “That may be true, but let’s just check”. We need to provide an evidence base, as you were asking for, to make those decisions. The group I was part of was focused on what the research evidence was, what the best practice was and so on. A lot of good work was done under that to feed into DCMS to help it make those kinds of decisions. That is still really pertinent.
On the issue about it being a utility, it is already a utility. It is just not necessarily a utility in law. If you cannot access the NHS without access to broadband, if your child cannot do their homework because you do not have the right device or you cannot upload your CV to get that good job, you have been denied access to some aspects of society.
In the skills discussion, we miss off the critical awareness-type skills. If you do not know that you are leaving a digital footprint behind wherever you go on the internet and that it might be used in one way or another, if you do not understand how advertising works on Facebook, if you do not understand how news is fed to you via TikTok, how do you make good decisions as a citizen?
It has become so integral. Whether you call it a utility or whatever, it is one of the things, along with access to heating, power and transport, et cetera, that are core to being a contemporary citizen. If we are not supporting people to be part of that, we are denying them aspects of life in Britain. For me, whether or not it is regulated as a utility, it needs to be treated with the same importance.
Kat Dixon: I would agree with Professor Yates. It is already functioning like a utility. It already has a regulator. The provisions or regulations that Ofcom has on internet access are not as heavy as other utilities or are not functioning in the same way. That touches on the things we have already covered such as consumer protections around mid-contract price rises and the loyalty penalty.
I would draw your attention to what it is like to buy internet. When you buy electricity and water, you do not have to understand megabits per second; 3G, 4G and 5G; or how much memory, what device structure and what specification you need. It is a very complicated process to buy internet. I spoke to many people who said that they had gone into a phone shop wanting a basic package and had walked out with a tablet, full-fibre broadband and a 24-month contract that they could not afford. They felt persuaded into that. If something is a utility, there is a real question about how ethical that is. Looking at it like a utility could help to shift some of the regulatory frameworks around that.
Having said that, it already functions like a utility and has a regulator, so there is a risk that making it a utility becomes a performative act. In the way the internet has evolved in the UK, we have attracted private investment to lay a lot of the infrastructure that we need around fibre, masts and so on. To recoup some of that investment, the people who have invested that money have to be able to make a return on internet provision. That means that we are functioning in quite a commercial and competitive environment.
Currently, there is a resistance in Ofcom, as I perceive it—and I have chatted to Citizens Advice about this—to come down heavily on regulation because that would reduce potential future investment. It would also kill the good will that is currently floating around. There is a lot of good collaboration between telcos, housing associations, the third sector and so on. If you come down hard with regulation, are you going to destroy some of that really great good will?
It is complicated. It has to be looked at in the round. I do not fully see the argument for a utility right now.
Baroness Wheatcroft: That is reassuring. A lot of people would find that reassuring, so thank you. Something you said, Professor Yates, left me feeling concerned. You suggested that, maybe even subconsciously, the Government think that they can save money—and they clearly need to—by putting services online. There was an insinuation that, if that meant that some people could no longer claim benefits or whatever, it was a saving.
Professor Simeon Yates: I was not implying that it was a saving, but I was implying that the logic that is being applied to the production of digital systems is essentially brought in from industry. You bring in the approach to managing services that they have in banks, in Ryanair or in other forms of service delivery. You are essentially buying the same platforms, the same infrastructure and the same technologies, and then you are delivering a public service through it.
The whole logic to those things was to make them financially efficient for those companies. I have seen this logic used in so many conversations. One of our first digital inclusion projects started with Sheffield council saying, “We’ve been given an opportunity to buy this thing and put this kit in to make this saving”. We said, “Most of the people who you want to use this do not have the ability, so you won’t make the savings. Let’s study it first before you make the decision”.
This goes back to what Kat was saying. A lot of what we get now from government is government by the development of systems to deliver policy. The system and the policy become very close. Quite a few of my colleagues who work in business studies areas are talking a lot about this now. It is policy by software design. Because the software can do X, that is how we implement it. There is a constant two-way conversation.
The underlying assumption that making it digital will make it cheaper drives the business decision, but when it is delivered on the ground it turns out that it does not, because so many people cannot access it, you have to deal with the errors that are made, the data cannot be connected or whatever.
For me, the digital exclusion issue is not just that people do not have enough money to buy the equipment or do not have the necessary skills, et cetera, but that we produce systems that have the unintended consequence of exclusion. I am not saying that is intentional, but maybe we need the opportunity to reflect on that in government a little more than we do.
Q90 Lord Young of Norwood Green: We have touched on this question again and again. To what extent and how can local authority best practice in digital exclusion be replicated across the country? You think, “It’s easy, really”. We have identified best practice, which we can see. We know that is the best practice. It seems to me—I am posing this as my solution; it may not be the right one—that you need to incentivise best practice: “Unless you can show to us you are following what we know delivers, you’re not going to get financial rewards”.
How would we measure that? We usually measure these things on key performance indicators. We identify half a dozen key performance indicators. We know that Manchester and Sheffield are meeting these, so then we say, “Here you are. Here’s your incentive. If you introduce something like this and you show us that you’re delivering it and meeting the key performance indicators, you’ll be rewarded”. Am I being simplistic in my analysis? You can shoot me down in flames.
Professor Simeon Yates: I am not sure. From my experience of places such as Sheffield, Manchester and Wales, it is a little more complicated than that. Not everything works. Part of what we learn from them is what does not work.
I will give you an example. In the social housing work that we have done at various points from the mid-2000s to the present, there have been some really good ideas about delivering digital inclusion. There has been good investment and good practice, and we have got a lot more people online.
An old example is the Go ON ITs Liverpool programme in the late 2000s and early 2010s, which got Liverpool from the worst city for digital inclusion to one of the better ones. They got several hundred thousand more people online and with digital skills over a period of time. Essentially, the funding stopped and it went away again. There are good examples.
I can talk about the fieldwork that we do in social housing areas. Social housing and local authority staff are saying, “Yes, we know this will work, but at the moment we are up to our eyes in a cost of living crisis”. I am not sure about offering them an incentive that says, “This is what happens if you don’t deliver”. We need to sit down and look at what resources and leadership—that word came up earlier—they can be provided with or have to make it happen locally.
The incentive has to be something that works for them, not a blanket approach, if that makes sense. You seem to be implying, “Get on with it this way. If you don’t deliver, we won’t pay”, whereas I think we need to provide them with good practice plans and let them get on with it with some resource to support them.
Lord Young of Norwood Green: Yes, but, having provided them with the good practice plans, you have to have some means of ensuring that they are delivering. That was my point about key performance indicators. I do not want it to be simplistic, because I do understand the complexity. Let me move on to you, Kat, and your reaction.
Kat Dixon: I have interviewed, worked with, written case studies about and implemented programmes with loads of local authorities across the UK from Lancaster to Monmouthshire to Cornwall—you name it. The postcode lottery of digital inclusion is vast. I did some analysis on what I felt were the key success factors for local authority performance in this space. One of them is leadership. People like Andy Burnham make digital inclusion top of the list and they make it feel like it is everyone’s responsibility.
A few years ago it was impossible to think that equality, diversity and inclusion would be something that everyone in charities and the public sector were trained in, and now it is unthinkable that they are not. Digital inclusion will be similar. It is absolutely essential to every part of delivery, yet at the moment it is cordoned off and generally put into a small team with a tiny pot of funding.
You need leadership that really believes and that will help a local authority to understand that this is part of delivering every part of their support to a local area, not just something that sits in a box. That is true and replicable for central government. Whether it is Department of Health aims, Department for Education aims, work or housing—you name it—you need digital access to make this happen.
The key thing is not that we do not know how best practice works. The problem is money. So many of these local authorities have one person with no funding to deliver a programme for an entire area. They cannot do that. With the best inspiration and KPIs in the world, they are not going to be able to deliver. You need leadership, vision and money to deliver on all these things. That works best at a devolved level.
Professor Simeon Yates: I do not know whether you have heard about what they have done in Rochdale. Essentially, they gave up on trying to get broadband into tower blocks for social housing through the usual market mechanisms. They bought a load of commercial broadband pipe, put a big microwave transmitter on top of one of their council buildings and beamed it across.
That took leadership, but the person leading that, who is really enthusiastic and capable, is at the midpoint of the organisation. She has to work up the organisation, across it and down it in lots of different ways to make it happen. We hear that story very often at local government and national government level. The people with the passion and leadership for digital inclusion—
Lord Young of Norwood Green: The imagination, I would say.
Professor Simeon Yates: —are often in, say, adult education or infrastructure. They push the agenda, and they get the visibility and the warrant to get on with it, but they are constantly having to work up, down and across the organisation.
If you had a digital inclusion lead with the support, the warrant and the funding behind them to offer that leadership across the organisation, that would be great. That is also very true of digital leadership in many organisations full stop. Very often an organisation that is focused on the arts, or whatever specific industry domain it might be, will put lots of digital expertise at a certain level in management but not at the senior table. That is getting better, but it is still the case. Therefore, they are always having to work up.
When we are talking about leadership, it is about where the right leadership is, in local government or in a devolved region, to say, “This is important and everybody has to pay attention to it”, and to have the resources to make it happen.
Lord Young of Norwood Green: I cannot thank you enough. You have given a really imaginative response to my probing question, and you have made me think about that. Leadership always counts. If you do not have the right headteacher in a school, it is not going anywhere.
The Chair: Thank you both very much for your evidence this afternoon. Like I said to the first panel, it has been both interesting and very helpful.
There were two things that I thought were particularly powerful. One was the description of systems and processes driving policy rather than policy driving systems and processes. That is a disease in the public sector, which is not just about digital. It is important to understand that, in a practical sense, this is a design or a feature of a lot of our digital services.
The other thing that was important to hear was the description of that trade-off between broadband becoming formally classified as a fourth utility and the potential downsides of that happening. We need to flush that out and make people aware that there is a trade-off going on at the moment around this complexity and the risks to the consumer when they purchase broadband. It is important that we understand that, even if the solution, at least for now, is not necessarily to make it a utility in a formal sense. For me personally, that was very interesting. Thank you very much.
