Broadband News

Two studies released today are highlighting the scale of the economic and social impact Internet access can have in the UK. New research commissioned by the country's Digital Inclusion Champion shows that getting the poorest households online could significantly improve their bank balances. At the same time, another study's revealed people increasingly feel "anxious" when cut-off from the web.

In Britain, seventeen per cent of the population has never been online - and, of those ten million people, it's emerged that four million of them come from socially and economically excluded backgrounds. Our champion, Martha Lane Fox, asked PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) to look into what they're missing out on by being "digitally excluded" - and apparently it's quite a lot. The average family who falls into this category could save as much as £560 each year if it was able to shop around online for things like energy, insurance and domestic items, with the average saving per household being around £300 (when you multiply that saving by the total of digitally excluded people, that's £1.2 billion that could be spent elsewhere). And that's not all:-

• 1.8 million children are growing up in digitally excluded households. That means they'll each earn around £8,000 less than their web-savvy peers across their lifetimes; collectively, £10.8 billion less


• Of the four million people who are digitally excluded, thirty-nine per cent are over 65, thirty-eight per cent are unemployed people living without children and nineteen per cent are families with kids


• The Government could annually save at least £900 million if they were all online and made just one "electronic contact" per month

"As a consumer, you are missing out on great savings if you don't shop online, let alone the fact that more and more Government services are going to become digitised," Ms. Lane Fox told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4. However, despite all the figures, she says it's not just about money. "If you look at the recent swine flu scare, think about how much information was online and how much more quickly and timely you got the information. I think it is worth fighting for the rights of people to have the same choices and access to the same benefits as all of us who are web-enabled."

In championing her cause, Ms. Lane Fox is aiming to lobby politicians while at the same time building up a "people's taskforce" to revolutionise the proletariat. "Over half of MPs don't think digital exclusion is an issue and one of my roles is to keep up the pressure on government," she told the BBC. It's worth noting here there was a Digital Inclusion Minister up until fair recently but, now the post has been demolished, those responsibilities have been added to the debris Digital Britain minister Stephen Timms has been charged with dealing with.

When it comes to putting together her "people's taskforce" - which actually sounds like a Communist initiative - she's faced with similar problems to revolutionaries everywhere: she's not of the social and economic status, or background, of the people she's trying to reach out to. So, in moving towards her goal, she's going to be taking baby-steps. "We will have to build this up person by person," she says. "It is worth having a big ambition and if I can get a thousand people to volunteer and have an impact on another thousand, then that's a start."

While PWC was doing its research, analysts at Future Laboratory were undertaking their own on behalf of Virgin Media - and it included data on people who know a lot about baby-steps: full-time mothers. It turns out that eighty-five per cent of full-time mums always have the Internet on at home - and that more people feel "anxious" when disconnected from the net than feel "liberated:-"

• When being disconnected means they're unable to keep in touch with their family, thirty-six per cent of people are anxious while twenty-nine per cent feel more free


• In terms of work, twenty-nine per cent of people fret while twenty-eight per cent feel liberated


• A third of people no longer feel guilty about leaving their web devices and mobile phone always switched on

The media-friendly spin Virgin Media has put on all this is that people are choosing to "switch on to switch off. "Particularly for new mums, you are confined to the house for quite long periods, and it really is a link to the outside world," says Siobhan Freegard, co-founder of online parenting network Netmums. "It's about reconnecting and more mums are using the internet to bring the community together and, in doing so, switching on to switch off, or feel less anxious." Maybe Martha Lane Fox should take note and start her revolution with new mums.