Groups and Committees

Markets around the social agenda are becoming more attractive to the private sector, for example, there is a real and significant market growth opportunity amongst older people. The Digital Inclusion Team recently met with Intellect members and provided an overview of the e-inclusion landscape; helping attendees understand the role of ICT in preventing social exclusion and future trends and opportunities for the industry.

Digital inclusion relates to both application and benefit. It does not necessarily just imply access to PC and broadband. It can be also be a support structure that uses technology to help the socially excluded e.g. effective benefit systems, real time job search data bases.

The digital inclusion agenda is fragmented across Government, but it is growing in importance across all departments. There is an opportunity for industry to reach previous untapped sections of society with digital products and services.

The Digital Inclusion Team have been working to map the digital inclusion landscape and have found that:

• projects most commonly focus on the largest digitally disengaged groups, such as the elderly and the disabled –not necessarily socially excluded or seriously disadvantaged
• at least £424m is currently invested in live digital inclusion projects. These are dominated by: digital switchover, preventative technologies grant, large scale telecare pilots and computers for pupils
• below these major initiatives is a fairly fragmented landscape of many projects with relatively low funding
• 25% of projects have funding issues
• sustainability is an major issue
• there are many opportunities for joining-up: 5 projects found that could benefit from IBM reading companion project; more partnering/ bundling could increase effectiveness of projects
• it is estimate that only 25% of potential linkages between initiatives have been made
• ownership and governance of the digital inclusion agenda is relatively fragmented –government, industry and the third sector included
• there are specific opportunities to gain leverage from the major resourced projects, such as digital switchover.

Following a presentation from the Digital Inclusion Team, the discussion was opened to the floor. Discussion points included:

More dialogue is needed between the constituents. Public, private and voluntary sectors must engage and work together in order to move forward on the digital inclusion agenda.

There is still a gap between commercial business case and public policy objective.  Economy of scale is key – the private sector can only work where there is competitive returns and a business case. Government needs to ensure that relevant targets and objectives are built into public sector bids, this is the only way to ensure that they will filter into the commercial environment.

There is waste and repetition in digital inclusion activities. There are too many pilots, taking much money, diverting money from small organisations which hold the real expertise. Due to fragmentation of the market there is a long tail of smaller projects, which suffer from burden of costs for same things i.e. people looking at same problems, set up costs, administration overheads. We have to crack this repetition to allow funds reach the problems rather than paying for headcounts.

There is also a lack of long term funding. When dealing with digital inclusion, partner organisations e.g. the voluntary sector, are always fundamentally under funded– they can not afford to innovate/take risks.  Successful initiatives are often hampered from delivering on the ground as they have to focus on getting next funding stream organised. There is a role for central funding to mitigate these problems.

A major challenge is explaining the social benefit of technology to the citizen and potential partners. Digital inclusion is low down list of priorities of third sector organisations. It is essential to stop talking about technology, and start talking about benefits. In addition, people must not think technology substitutes social interaction. Intellect members need to understand the problems in excluded groups to provide effective solutions.

Next Steps

The Digital Strategy is one of the key government policy initiatives for implementing digital inclusion. It is now 18 months old. This strategy was assembled quickly and some gaps are now obvious. This has been recognised and strategy is now under review.

There is mass fragmentation in the digital inclusion landscape which hampers progress. There needs to be an industry forum to bring together public, private and voluntary partners to discuss these issues and give all parties focus. The Digital Strategy review provides a forum for Intellect to put forward this requirement.

For further information contact:
Melissa Frewin
T 020 7331 2169
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