scte long read
Emma Stone is Director of Evidence and Engagement at the Good Things Foundation, a charity committed to digital inclusion, supplying reconditioned laptops, SIM cards and training courses. “The fact that five Secretaries of State signed it is saying this is a priority. Just a couple of weeks ago, the Financial Inclusion Strategy from the Treasury Department, recognises the importance of digital inclusion, because so much money is going online now.”
retire.” Ironically the disconnect between younger, oblivious decision-makers and the older adults they are barely aware of is not helped by the fact we are all living longer, healthier lives. 80 years old is a long way off when you’re 30. In a 2019 survey conducted by Nottingham University on the Citizens’ Juries: When Older Adults Deliberate on the Benefits and Risks of Smart Health and Smart Homes, it noted “divergence between the views and experience of older people who are being asked to use technology and younger adults who are more likely to be designing and making decisions about implementation of digital technology”, which is labelled as the “digital divide”. We see this in real time in the smart television user interfaces our friend Richard Lindsay-Davies talked about, It is clear a lot needs to change and a lot of cohesion across media and entertainment to ensure we bring everyone along with us. Patronising attitudes emanating from Westminster also illustrate the scale of the disconnect. Anderson smiled ruefully. “I still meet MPs who turn to me and say, but didn’t we sort this out during the pandemic? Weren’t lots of laptops given out?” It is also clear that well- heeled parliamentarians’ have a limited understanding of digital poverty, that in their view “we need to tackle real poverty before we tackle digital poverty,” as if this refers to dishing out 55” flatscreen televisions rather than broadband access,
pandemic? How can the government communicate with the public about what’s happening?” Not this again Recent government proposals for a digital ID card are a concern for this reason; the UK has a long, shameful history of botched digital upgrades across government departments. Who can forget Track & Trace, the £37bn digital folly intended to keep us safe but just made us angry? Over the last 15 years there is a shocking litany of failures from the Justice department to DBS checks (described as ‘a masterclass in incompetency’ by the Public Accounts Committee), projects that all went overbudget and under-delivered. Others did both and never even made it to fruition, costing the taxpayer millions. None of this inspires confidence. The government, in its defence, seems aware of its own shabby record and the risks involved in getting it wrong. In its recently published Digital Inclusion Action Plan, a joint ministerial effort by the Departments for Science, Innovation and Technology, Health & Social Care, Education, Work & Pensions and Housing, Communities & Local Government, it admits, “As consultation on digital ID begins, one principle should be clear: efficiency must not come at the cost of fairness. Unless inclusion is built in from the start, digital ID risks deepening the very inequalities it aims to overcome.”
The Human Factor
Once again, we come up against generational attitudes hindering progress, a running theme in these Long Reads. In the past we have seen disconnected senior management seldom realising the expensive missteps they are making, whether it concerns cybersecurity or sustainable data centres, and the unwitting impact their world view has on their environments, staff, reputation, even their share price. By contrast, the short-termist thinking in digital exclusion comes from the younger generation who are disconnected, not realising they too will be old one day, if they’re lucky enough to get there, and the problems they are keen to dismiss will one day be theirs to grapple with. Reed referenced the current trend in politics to refer to pensions as benefits and the populist chat about doing away with them altogether. “Don’t they realise they will be old one day too? They might want that pension when they
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DECEMBER 2025 Volume 47 No.4
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