Articles

In pursuit of Digital Inclusion

What price happiness?  The question is of course rhetorical.  How can you put a price on something so intangible, or calculate the cause and effect of wealth to well-being?  How can you, in short, quantify the unquantifiable?  But that’s exactly what UK online centres have set out to explore in new research.  What price, then, digital inclusion? 

When such a question moves from the poetic to the practical, the next questions it inevitably begs are Who pays? followed eventually by Who benefits?  We can be fairly certain that, on the whole, technology adds value to our lives and to the economy.  How much value it can add is the focus of the research, written by FreshMinds, and due to launch at the end of April.  It attempts to break down the benefits and associated costs of digital inclusion for five core groups - individual people, private sector organisations, the government, society and the wider economy. 

The flipside of our increasing reliance on ICT - in public, economic and social life - is that the digitally excluded, by default, also become excluded from public services, modern working life and society itself.  Digital inclusion is at the heart of the debate not just around skills and the knowledge economy, but around social justice and personal well-being.  The new research is a continuation of UK online centres work in this area, and stems from a previous report which examined the links between digital and social exclusion.  It found 75% of those counted as being socially excluded were also digitally excluded*.  Those already at a social, educational or financial disadvantage are therefore three times more likely to be off-line, and missing out on the potential benefits, conveniences, opportunities and savings computers and the internet can provide. 

The Guardian newspaper recently calculated the cost of dealing with the 1.3 million most disadvantaged people in the UK at a staggering £44,538 per person**.  That’s £57.9 billion a year.  The well-being agenda is gaining momentum, as is the need to cost out its economic costs and impacts.  I firmly believe digital inclusion must be part of this equation.  Connecting people to ICT skills can connect them to new or better jobs, to new forms of communication and social interaction, to community infrastructures and government services, to new information, consumer power and convenience. 

The pursuit of happiness in policy development may be a growing theme, but it needs to be evidenced.  The problem is the benefits of digital inclusion are often as intangible as happiness itself.  The cause and effect relationship between digital and social inclusion is often portrayed through project-level, qualitative case studies.  At this level, the myriad benefits of digital inclusion are indisputable. 

Take Liz, somewhere in her 80s, who is a regular at a UK online centre in the South West.  She keeps in touch with family, friends and community services by email, maintains her independence by getting groceries and prescriptions delivered to her door, and finds pension, health and other information at the click of an adapted mouse.  She’s also made innumerable friends at the centre, follows hobbies on the internet and reads large text books online.  But how far can digital inclusion be said to have contributed to her well-being, how much has it saved the state in her care or in face-to-face transactions?  What, ultimately, has it added to society or to the economy?  And how can we possibly put a price on it, count it up in measureable units or extrapolate Liz’s experiences?  The calculations remain at best indefinable, at worst impossible. 

Make no mistake – the digital ‘divide’ is not an easy sum.  But just because the maths is difficult doesn’t mean we should throw down our calculators and retreat.  Our new research does not try to establish cause and effect, but where possible aims to gather measurable data to establish a financial value for some of the soft or intangible impacts of digital inclusion.  There is in fact a wealth of quantifiable data demonstrating the varied benefits of digital inclusion across the five main impact groups.  For example:

• Digitally included individuals are likely to perform better academically (increase of ¼ GCSE grade per subject).
• Computer/internet use commands salary premiums (3-10%).
• Government services can make significant savings through mediated interactions. For instance, one of the online NHS initiatives is predicted to save it £68 million in 2008.
• Companies can increase customer base and sales volumes (online spend is on average 20 percent higher than offline).
• UK economy can feel a positive impact on GDP (upwards of 1.54% over three years).

While the research results are both encouraging and interesting, the report itself is necessarily limited by gaps and inconsistencies in evidence.  Its findings are therefore based on the collation of existing material and assumption-based calculations.  It is not intended as a comprehensive review, nor a systematic cost-benefit analysis, but rather an initial piece aiming to establish effective framework models and stimulate further discussion and future analysis.  There is hard evidence out there that digital inclusion is capable of enhancing opportunity, cutting costs, and ultimately improving society.  The sum total of the cost-savings calculated in our research tops £2.6 billion, a conservative estimate extrapolated only on the examples explored.  Financially, it’s clear digital inclusion pays dividends - and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Some of the major challenges facing the UK over the next ten years include our ageing and increasingly multi-cultural society, the transformation of government services, the promotion of social justice and maintenance of economic competitiveness in a global marketplace.  Digital inclusion and digital skills will be key in addressing them all. 

The ‘e’ in e-government, e-commerce, e-mail and e-retail has long stood for ‘electronic’ – but it could equally stand for ‘economic’.  By establishing a monetary value for digital inclusion, we can highlight its true impact and relevance, and maybe even secure its due recognition and investment.  Whether we like it or not, money talks.  I want it to talk about digital inclusion, and build a solid business case for its potential in improving skills, life chances, social cohesion, and economic growth. 

Helen Milner

Managing Director

UK online centres

The UK online centres and FreshMinds research – ‘Economic Benefits of Digital Inclusion, a research summary’ – can be found in the Reading Room at www.ukonlinecentres.com/corporate from the end of April. 

*  Understanding Digital Inclusion - A Research Summary, UK online centres and Freshminds, April 2007

**  'One 'problem family' costs £250,000 a year‘ , by Denis Campbell and Ned Temko, (Observer, 3 September 2006), briefed by the Social Exclusion Task Force (Cabinet Office)