Latest ONS Figures

Details

Created on Monday, 23 May 2011

A big THANK YOU to ONS for their pledge to provide regular stats with a more representative sample size. The latest stats gives us much more information than we have ever had before and show that in the first quarter of 2011 8.71 million adults had never used the Internet. This represents 17.5% of the adult population with further breakdowns available by age, sex, disability, region and legal marital status.

Age
The largest proportion of Internet users are in the 16 to 24 age group, where penetration is at 98.7%. Only 69,000 adults in the youngest age group have never used the Internet. The proportion of Internet users declined with each successively older age group. While 57.0% of those aged 65 to 74 had used the Internet, only 23.8% of those aged 75 or more had done so.

Sex
58% of those that have never used the internet are women.

Disability
There were 4.20 million disabled adults who had never used the Internet, almost half of all those who had never used the Internet. This represented 35.9% of those who were disabled. Of those adults who reported no disability, 11.9% of adults had never used the Internet.

Region
The region where people were least likely to have used the Internet was Northern Ireland, where 28.6% had never done so (399,000 Internet non-users). Merseyside had the second highest rate of Internet non-users, at 23.8% @ 262,000. The region where adults were most likely to have used the Internet was Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, with 89.5% of adults having used it.

Nations
In England, 16.9% of adults had not used the Internet, while in Scotland this was 19.1 per cent and in Wales the estimate was 19.5%. As noted above, the rate of Internet non-use in Northern Ireland was 28.6%.

Legal marital status
Adults who were single or who had never married were most likely to have used the Internet at 92.8%. There were 15.4 million adults in this group of Internet users. By contrast, only 32.5% of widowed adults had used the Internet, which represented 1.06 million adults.

For me these latest stats show that we have made some small progress but there is still a lot to do. Partnerships will be vital in enabling us to reach the 8.7 million still offline, this is especially true for those that are affected by a disability as well as the elderly or those that live alone - It is here where health professionals, specialist organisations and the community can work alongside each other so that there is successful delivery of technological solutions on the ground.