Interesting times for the government’s digital by default agenda with the publication of the NAO report covered with clarity on the BBC today and the Early Day Motion ‘Internet Take Up Amongst Vulnerable Groups’ simmering in the back ground - which when I looked this morning had 52 MPs signed up to it already. (More on what EDMs are here .)
Digital Unite has long argued that while the aspiration to bring government services online is logical and appropriate, care must be taken – and support must be given – to help those who can’t use them. And attention must be paid to the ‘why’ as there are various reasons including practical, economic, physical, cognitive and emotional. And it’s not to my mind as black and white as people online, people offline. Just because you can go online, it does not necessarily follow you have the skills to use the internet extensively. In fact, Go ON asserts that 16 million people lack basic online skills. Some of the other headline numbers around online/offline were summarised in a recent presentation by Go ON’s Clive Richardson at our Digifest last month (you can download it here ).
In short: 15% of adult population - 7.4 million people -– have never been online; only 44% of those aged over 65 have ever been online; a third of all disabled adults have never used the internet.
The response to the very big question - how do we support, encourage and teach all these people well enough so they can use government services online – is not answered in the statement from Francis Maude (quoted in that BBC article above), the Cabinet Office Minister who oversees Government Digital Services (GDS) . His comment that “We are developing digital services that are so good people will prefer to use them” is, in my opinion, the answer to a completely different question.
Nor is the question answered in the second part of that statement when he talks about “ensuring that those who are not able to go online are given the support they need to do so.” Because at the moment, that means there will be phone support and some other ‘appropriate mechanism’ that means the citizen who cannot or does not want to use online can still get the government service in question. The Assisted Digital team within Government Digital Services is making sure that government departments give people another way of accessing the services they each put online if they can’t do it online. (You can read all about what they are about here .)
But the Assisted Digital Team (who are great people and only doing the job they have been given after all) has (currently) washed its hands of the responsibility to get people online or support people who can’t use these services online by actually teaching them how to.
Has no one at GDS heard the ‘teach a man to fish’ adage? Would it not make much more sense strategically and for the long term to build the skills of the citizens to use the services themselves, rather than just direct them in a sticking plaster way to a phone service. Of course building an excellent online platform that works and is accessible – making the services ‘so good you’ll want to use them’ - is also very important, but it matters not a jot how excellent the platform is if millions of people don’t have the skills or confidence to use it.
There is also of course the attendant issue of access: what about people who don’t have the kit and connectivity (fixed, mobile, any which way)? But at DU our passion is skills, so that’s the bit we are most interested in - without diminishing the importance of that part of the digital by default puzzle.
In the meantime, all is not lost, because over the Easter weekend, even as you munch an egg or two, YOU too can do something to help the nation inch towards digital by default in three simple steps:
1. Get a cup of tea, a smart phone, a tablet or any old internet enabled device and browse the Digital Unite Guides with someone you love but who knows less than you about digistuff.
2. Run a digital taster session for older people in your community by joining in the Spring Online campaign at the end of April.
3. Get your MP to sign up to the EDM .
Happy Easter folks!