Digital poverty is getting worse in the UK.

Digital poverty is a culmination of several disparities, including a lack of devices, inadequate connectivity, and deficient digital skills.

According to the Digital Poverty Alliance (DPA), about 13-19 million people over 16 years old are experiencing at least one form of this inequality.

One in two adults are in digital poverty, with one in five severely digitally excluded. Further, around 20% of children are disenfranchised in the digital space.

But what leads to digital poverty, and how can people in the UK escape it? To try and answer this, we interviewed Elizabeth Anderson, the CEO of the DPA, to gain insight into the scale of the issue, and how it can be tackled.

The Never-Ending Cycle

According to Anderson, digital poverty is a vicious cycle perpetuated by three main issues: affordability, the incessant push to online-only services, and a substantial and growing lack of public trust in an increasingly digital world.

Being in poverty is expensive, and digital poverty is but a subsect of socioeconomic inequality waging a war against UK households. The cost-of-living crisis has only exacerbated these issues.

“We often talk about the choices people have to make, choosing between data or dinner,” Anderson said.

These are real choices with real consequences. At the height of the energy crisis, a million UK households cancelled their broadband subscriptions in order to prioritise heating their homes during the winter months.

Connectivity issues are a major driver of digital poverty. Either there is a lack of infrastructure, such as in rural and coastal communities, driving geographic inequalities and digital isolation, or people are priced out of paying for broadband.

“What we often see is people going for broadband and data plans that are the lowest cost, which means that they often run out of data by the middle of the month, and they cannot afford to top up or get more data until their next paycheck,” Anderson said.

With more and more services, including HMRC and unemployment benefits, moving online, people are ever more reliant on digital connection.

“We often think that if something is put online, it is free to access for everyone, but that just isn’t true,” Anderson said. “You need a device, internet access, you need data, to apply for a job, to access benefits, and that costs money. Not everyone has that access.”

92% of jobs are exclusively advertised online, UK government skills training schemes require a stable device and connection to participate in – digital poverty is difficult to break out of without intervention.

A lack of digital skills and media literacy is also leaving people behind, and the demographics are often surprising to managers.

“We get managers expecting young people to be digital natives, but they are missing key digital skills,” Anderson said.

While elder populations are the most disadvantaged when it comes to digital poverty, 16 to 24 year olds are the next most impacted demographic, in terms of age. These young people are leaving home and entering the workforce, often with limited digital skills, the inability to afford a device or to pay monthly connectivity costs as well as rent, electricity, and food.

A lack of digital skills can severely impact confidence in applying for degrees, jobs, and in interacting with the digital world as a whole.

“With advancements in AI, we’ve seen a lot of push back from people who are afraid of fraud, afraid of scams, afraid of what it will mean for their information online,” Anderson mentioned.
“So a lot of people are also opting to not venture into the digital world. It’s an understandable choice, but it can really hurt them in terms of their long term economic stability.”

These three overarching, societally-ingrained issues, creates a vicious cycle of digital poverty affecting millions of people across the UK.

“Within society, and within government, there is this push for families and households to help themselves,” Anderson said. “And whilst there’s a lot to be said for that, if people don’t have the tools to be able to do that, how are they ever going to move themselves out?”

So what can be done? To provide devices, provide connectivity, to drive digital skills and digital literacy?

Direct Action, Advocacy, and Glimmers of Hope

As a charitable organisation, the DPA is taking direct action to combat digital poverty throughout the UK. Their Tech4Schools partnership with Amazon has delivered laptops to 23 schools throughout the UK, and has seen how one device can create a positive ripple effect for household outcomes.

“By just providing one device to a household, an older daughter is able to go home, do her homework from home rather than stay at school into the late hours, and also watch her younger sibling so the parent can get a few extra hours of work,” Anderson said.

This is not a heartwarming story – children should not have to stay at school all day to just complete assignments, and older siblings should not have to be parentified just so a parent can make enough money to support their family. More intervention is clearly necessary, but it does show that a device is key to bettering outcomes.

The Tech4Schools programme has seen better outcomes for students who can now complete coursework on a device other than a mobile phone, which is often ill-equipped to help students complete assignments in primary schools, let alone pass their higher education requirements and apply for university and college.

Providing one device to a household can have transformational effects, but this is only if they can also access broadband.

Broadband initiatives in the UK are controversial in their progress, to say the least. Geographically, rural and coastal communities are suffering the most from poor broadband connectivity – only 80% of rural households in the UK have standard broadband availability compared to 98% of urban households – but lower income families are consistently struggling to pay for connectivity in the form of wifi and data.

Without these connections, the benefits of devices are lost, and the ability for people to work from home, apply for benefits, and contact essential services, are often lost.

“Infrastructure is an incredibly important part of this, particularly in rural areas,” Anderson pointed out.

But infrastructure is not a quick fix – providing connectivity to rural and remote areas is difficult and costly, and these costs often trickle down to consumers.

New innovations, however, are showing promising economic benefits which could contribute to a solution to all broadband woes, without and outwith cities.

“We are particularly excited about initiatives such as opening roaming provisions and mesh networks, which can work incredibly well in small communities,” Anderson said.

OpenRoaming relies on cloud federations of interoperable Wi-Fi networks enabling automatic internet connection, allowing users to connect to multiple compatible networks without needing to select a specific network.

Mesh networks offer a similar solution, allowing multiple nodes to connect forming a ‘mesh’ of wifi connections that devices can connect to, lowering the number of installations necessary.

Both of these installations can lessen infrastructure costs and lower overall connectivity costs – Rochdale Council installed a mesh network, with monthly internet costs average out at 27 pence per household per month.

“So the opportunities that open roaming and mesh networks bring in terms of creating true affordability are actually something truly fantastic that we mustn’t ignore,” Anderson asserted.

Businesses appear to be waking up to this reality, according to Anderson, and once they understand the dire issue of digital poverty, they are keen to help.

But for the government, “there is a sheer lack of awareness around the scale of digital poverty, which is something that we are working to really increase,” Anderson said.

The House of Lords recently lambasted the UK government for its lacklustre approach to digital poverty, saying they simply have “no confidence” that the government is taking digital exclusion seriously.

While the intersectionality of digital poverty has been explained, Anderson says the DPA needs to be practical in their approach.

The cost-of-living crisis has pushed families to the brink, and the government has a mix of priorities to address as far as rising energy, housing, and food costs.

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Anderson is confident that advocacy, and leveraging funding from local authorities, is key to tackling the issue. Providing hubs, access to the internet for lower income families, and devices are key drivers to get families out of poverty.

From a business perspective, the case to lesson digital poverty is quite clear – “if six million people across the UK gained stronger digital skills, that would create a £17 billion earnings premium,” Anderson said

And even to struggling families, the barriers created by digital poverty are apparent.

“Being able to provide food, being able to heat the home, sits at the forefront of people’s minds,” Anderson said.

“However, what we know through the work that we do, talking to families, is that this access and ability, lets people not just be able to live their lives more easily, but actually to forge a future which you can really now only do so through online access.

“It’s one of these differentiations between the urgent and the immediate need, and the long term importance that really ranks incredibly highly in terms of how parents feel about providing for their children,” Anderson explained.

So if the social, moral, and economic case has been made, if industry is keen to participate and emerging technologies are able to help, then what are the next steps in ending digital poverty?

The UK government’s last digital inclusion strategy was published in 2014, and is now a decade old.

The DPA has released their own national delivery plan, which includes six key missions for government, industry, and charities to bring digital poverty to an end by 2030.

Anderson hopes the next government takes positive action and steps toward closing digital exclusion, and sees digital poverty as a perpetuating symptom of overall disparity, a cyclical fever running rampant across the UK, only worsening outcomes.

Interested industries can also get involved via the Industry Forum, where companies can offer old devices, skills training, and industry guidance to close the skills and devices gap.