Read MLF’s more personal thoughts about her role

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Created on Friday, 27 November 2009

It is now five months since I took up the challenge of championing ‘the use of technology to improve the life chances of those people who are most disadvantaged’ in our country.

One of my first aims was to get the issue out into the wider public while making sure I kept true to exactly what I had been asked to do. Contrary to some commentators, I was not asked to ‘deliver digital Britain’ or ‘ensure the take up of broadband’. I was asked to look at how government, the private sector and the charitable sector can work together to try and prevent the digital divide becoming any more of a gaping chasm than it is already. And most crucially to keep a relentless focus on the most economically disadvantaged.

From the start, I have been hyperconscious that I am the person least like my target group. I come from a privileged background with all the opportunities you could wish for in my life. I have no particular traction with the people I had been asked to help and for some must therefore have been a strange choice. I decided early on not to worry about this and just try to do the best job possible – and to get out and about meeting people very quickly.

It has been inspiring and humbling to visit some of the amazing projects working hard to spread the use of technology. Occasionally wonder I how many of the digital inclusion pundits have actually talked to people who have had transformative experiences with technology as you learn so much from each story and it seems to me to make the solutions fairly simple. I am lucky enough to have been to about 15 different places and met a huge mixture of people from all ages, and with many complex sets of problems. What has been heartening is that while technology is no panacea it can have an incredible impact in people’s lives.

Two stories stick with me – Mil Lusk in Knowle West, Bristol and Nick Blacker in Leeds. Mil is a fantastic Bristol community environmentalist Green Footprints. A single mother of two who has developed and managed a social enterprise through a gardening website with skills learnt by attending a digital workshop. Meanwhile Nick was in and out of care and prison, and then he started learning music on a PC. He goes to the Leeds Central Library every day, a UK Online Centre and is now training others whilst doing a teaching qualification.

There have been four main areas of focus for me over the last few months – building a team and network of advisors, building the economic case for digital inclusion, raising awareness in Westminster and beyond and developing our detailed action plan for the next crucial year.

PWC did a piece of work pinning down the numbers for my office. They showed that there are 10m people who have never used the web and 4m who fall into the lowest socio-economic group. Of those 4m 39% are over 65, 38% are unemployed and 19% are families with children.

I believe there is a social and moral imperative to help each of those groups online but PWC showed there is an economic case too. You can read about it here.

When I took this role I thought I might have to invent new ideas or solutions but actually everything is happening already whether it is the UK online centre network or the home access programme or the DC10 initiative or one of the countless charities working in the area. I think that we just need more co-ordination, some more noise and an amplification of effort.

It has been an extraordinary ride as I become used to the highs and lows of doing a more public facing role – and I have to confess I have sometimes felt like shouting at my computer ‘this is hard and its taking up six days a week and I have another job and I am not a politician and and and and’ but then I think about Mil and Nick and all of my other new friends on facebook and my resolve is strengthened.