Why we must get everyone online

Details

Created on Friday, 7 May 2010

As I write this, somewhat bleary eyed after a long election night with David Dimbleby, I feel more sure than ever that half of the BBC’s news team must be on some kind of non prescription drugs to have kept going all day and night. The political backdrop is still complex, however, and despite hours of live debate and comment on every channel, it is still too hard to predict for sure how the situation will resolve. Whatever negotiations take place between now and when you read this column, one thing is clear – any government is going to face some very tough choices about the macro climate and some very difficult decisions about cost cutting within Whitehall.

As the UK’s digital champion, a role that I took on last year, I have been looking at how the increasing use of digital technologies in the mainstream of business and private life has affected those who are still non users. I have been considering the impact of this digital divide both for UK PLC and

particularly the government itself. Not many people are aware of the scale of the problem – amongst adults 10m people have never used the internet and an additional 5m have only used the web once. These numbers mean that over 25% of the adult population has hardly any or no engagement with a tool and a world that the rest of us now take for granted.

Perhaps more troublesome still is the breakdown of non users by socio-economic group – 4m of the 10m suffer from a minimum of three or more measures on the multiple deprivation index. 39% of the people that are in this category are over 65, 38% are unemployed and 19% are families with children. I believe that the individual benefits are so compelling that government should intervene to help bring everyone online – but even if you disagree with me the economic case for government is so compelling that I think no future government will be able to ignore it.

We commissioned some work from PWC that looked at the cost of the interactions that this group of non-users has with government. Because the lowest income adults are also the heaviest users of government services, there is much to gain. If one interaction a month that the 10m have with government were to become an electronic transaction – rather than paper, phone or face to face then the savings are upwards of £1billion a year. With such dramatic savings on offer, I am making the case in government that bringing more people up the digital curve is essential in this tough climate. It seems to me that this is a very similar dynamic to that which many retailers have been through over the course of the last decade. Government faces the same juggling act between channels that industry has been grappling with – how do you promote the web without destabilising stores? How do you manage the transition from face to face complaints handling to more automated systems? How do you work out what is the best for customers in each situation? Some of these fundamental decisions are hitting Westminster as hard as they have hit the commercial sector.

I feel strongly that if government is to make the necessary cost cutting initiatives it must look at our sector and see what it can learn. Equally important it must also work hard to close the digital divide or the cost savings will never be achieved.

Please follow me via twitter @marthalanefox to see how the work is progressing.