What makes the world go round? Some people would say money, others love, but after more than 25 years working with the community and voluntary sectors, I’m pretty certain it’s actually volunteers. It’s certainly true for the UK online centres network.

I see all the time the amazing work volunteers do in their communities (more on that soon), so I think it’s only right that volunteers get not only a day, but a whole week to celebrate their contribution. And that week is this week – I hope you’ve had a great National Volunteers’ Week – whether as a volunteer or someone who’s had the good fortune to meet a volunteer this week.

If you’re in any doubt as to the impact volunteers have on this country, you only need to look at the statistics. It’s estimated that 20 million people give their time to their communities every year, totalling 100 million hours a week and contributing £40 billion a year to the British economy.

And that’s only the ones that identify themselves as volunteers. After that you’ve got the unpaid child carers (lots of grannies and grandads), helpful neighbours, self-started community group leaders, and many, many others.

Last year saw volunteers take centre stage, as the Games Makers were rightfully celebrated for their contribution to a hugely successful London Olympics – something I wrote about at the time – but I believe that this year, volunteers are if anything, even more important.

Budgets across the voluntary and community sector have continued to be squeezed as we work through a period of austerity. Just as the services the sector provides are becoming more valuable to communities in need, they’re becoming more difficult to sustain. And it’s volunteers that are keeping so many of these services alive – and even kicking.

OCF manages a network of around 3,000 UK online centres, and we estimate there are around 25,000 active volunteers support their work, helping more than 1,000,000 people make the most of online life in the last three years. Their backgrounds vary – from retirees giving back to their communities, job seekers increasing skills and even young people gaining working experience.

Cheryl from my hometown of Sheffield is just one fantastic example. She first visited her local UK online centre more than three years ago to gain online skills, but soon had enough confidence to support other learners. She’s been volunteering at the centre ever since, gaining further IT and teaching qualifications along the way – you can read more of Cheryl’s inspiring story here.

OCF has been very happy this week, to join the Volunteers’ Week celebrations by offering  a volunteer-only training grant, and FREE online training opportunities to any volunteer anywhere! It’s great to know that dozens of volunteers have had the chance to get a few more skills as part of this.

I know lots of other organisations have been getting involved and showing their appreciation to their volunteers and I want to add my voice to the chorus by saying a huge THANK YOU to every single volunteer out there – digital skills supporters and beyond.

You don’t just make the world go round – you also make it a better place to live.

Yesterday was that time of year again – the release of the ONS’s quarterly statistics on internet access. I was really pleased to see the announcement getting lots of media coverage, which I think shows digital inclusion really is back on the agenda – always a positive thing!

The headline figure released yesterday is that there are still 7.1 million people – or 14% of UK adults – who have never been online before. This represents a decrease of a million over the past year, but is still a pretty big figure. As you might expect, 99% of people aged 16 – 24 have been online before, but this decreases to just 35% among the over 75s. Even more shockingly, 53% of the 7.1 million people who are offline have a disability – a figure that is rising with every quarterly release from the ONS. I hope at Online Centres Foundation we’re beginning to provide a solution to these figures, establishing specialist Disability and Older People’s networks that can offer the tailored support these groups need, but this kind of support doesn’t come cheap, and significant investment will be needed to scale it up to address anything like the size of groups detailed yesterday.  

As I say everytime I see the ONS release pop up, the figures are definitely moving in the right direction – but they’re not moving fast enough. I’ve blogged a lot recently about investment for digital inclusion – and I want to avoid sounding like a stuck record – but I think yesterday’s announcement just goes to show we need to do more and more quickly. Let’s not forget about the size about the prize here. Investment in supporting these hard to reach groups will not just lead to significant cost savings for the government, but will be an investment for the good of the nation, for a competitive advantage for companies big and micro, and most importantly, for people – who will be able to save money, who will be able to better access information and who will feel more connected, all as a result of their new digital skills. This is why I’m still impatient for bigger and quicker results.  

This morning, I attended Go ON’s Digital Skills summit, alongside a number of high profile digital leaders, as well as Skills Minister Matthew Hancock, and Danny Alexander – Chief Secretary to the Treasury. One of the things that impressed me most was the commitment from private sector organisations who really want to be part of the solution. As not-for-profits, we need to work out what we should be asking for in order to have the biggest impact possible, and working closely alongside these partners to ensure we can all achieve our shared goals.

One exciting things to come out of the event was the announcement by the Big Lottery Fund that they are making £15 million available for digital skills as part of a fund that will open in the Autumn. The fund will support a small number of large projects, and they are really keen to support partnerships that can have a massive impact in their communities.

The news comes neatly on the heels of my blog last week where I said that funding is vital to ensuring we can support the final 7.4 million people in the UK who have still never been online before, as well as upskilling the 8.5 million who don’t have the skills to get any benefits from the internet, so I’m really pleased the Big Lottery Fund are getting behind digital inclusion in a serious way. Since I wrote last week’s blog and heard the announcement, I’ve been thinking about what the right co-ordinated plan is – what would it do? And what would it cost if we’re aiming to get 95% of the population online? I’ll admit that I don’t have all the answers, but we know that the lowest-hanging fruit is getting higher and higher up the tree and that inspiring and persuading people that the internet could be for them is a really tough job. To be successful, this new programme has to be about targeting the very hardest to reach people in local communities, as well as collecting robust evidence on the impact the activity has had.

I’ll certainly be keeping a keen eye out for more announcements from Go ON UK and the Big Lottery Fund about this fund, and I’m sure the UK online centres network will have a key role to play in ensuring its success – and I hope that this investment will have a huge impact on finally closing the digital divide.

As a (some would say) tireless campaigner for digital inclusion, I was pleased to hear  Helen Goodman MP announce yesterday (9 May) that, if they were to be elected, Labour will invest £75 million in a new digital skills programme, funded by halving the size of the current super-connected cities programme.  I’m well known for being on the side of the people in the pipes vs people debate, and so while I can see the economic argument for investing in these ten cities, I actually think the economic benefit of supporting the hardest to reach to access services online can have an equal – if not far greater – impact. Those in the most deprived communities are least likely to be online as well as being the most likely to be the heaviest users of public services.

Helen Goodman MP said in her announcement: “A Labour government would invest £75 million to ensure that people in Britain are able to get online and are able to perform basic tasks like sending an email. The Conservative-led government has done virtually nothing to help these people and instead has focused on using public money to subsidise ultra-fast broadband in areas that already have very high broadband speeds. This is yet another example of the government getting its economic priorities wrong. A One Nation Labour government would be about ensuring everyone was able to benefit from the advantages online access can bring.”

It’s good to have some more ‘skin in the game’ or another ‘voice in the debate’ on digital inclusion. The support that Online Centres Foundation receives from the current Government is fantastic and enables us and the UK online centres network to help over 100,000 people a year. However there isn’t a debate at the moment on how much money needs to be invested to help the final 16 million people to get the motivation and skills they need to take part in a fully digital Britain, and accelerate growth with a better skilled nation. Helen Goodman seems to be kicking off that very conversation.

Last night we reached a major milestone – we registered our thousandth member on the Digital Housing Hub. The rate of new members registering on the site is gathering apace, and I like to think it isn’t just because the new Digital Deal Challenge Fund opportunity is on the site. Digital inclusion has never been a hotter topic.

On Monday the roll out of Universal Credit (UC) reaches a major milestone with Wigan, Warrington, Tameside and Oldham becoming the first areas to start UC ‘for real’. At the back end of last year we saw a new group of people coming into UK online centres as they were being urged to do their job searching online using DWP’s Universal Jobmatch. People phoning up to start claiming Jobseekers Allowance (JSA) are being told to go away and do it online, unless they can prove that they really really can’t do it online. And yesterday I was talking to housing providers who know that people affected by the “bedroom tax” who want to move will find it much easier to find a smaller property and apply for the move using online housing transfer tools. It’s never been more critical for social housing providers to prioritise their digital inclusion activity, and of course many of them are doing just that. I get great feedback daily that shows that the people working in the social housing sector who are on the hub find it is a useful place to ask each other questions and find useful resources to help them turn their priorities around digital inclusion into the practical next step.

I won’t go on for too long about how great the Digital Housing Hub is, but I will say that if you’re working in social housing and have any interest in digital inclusion, it’s worth taking a look to meet others who are in the same boat, share your expertise and ask any pressing questions. You can also find out more about the Digital Deal Challenge Fund while you’re there. Take a look here. 

What with the long Easter weekend and the beginning of a new delivery year (plus the launch of the great Digital Deal funding opportunity) I feel like I’ve barely had the chance to look at Digital Britain 2, a report published by the National Audit Office at the end of March. But with the dust settling here, I thought I’d now share my thoughts with you – and I think the report is significantly underestimating the digital divide, and needs to look harder at support for those who are offline and who have low digital skills if we are to avoid creating a two-tier public services system.

Digital by default service delivery is a bold policy move, set to improve customer service and responsiveness while simultaneously saving money.  It has the potential to help millions of people – but only if done properly.  It has to be met and matched with equally bold support strategies if we are to avoid a ‘them and us’ approach to service delivery.

I don’t think the report is being bold enough in recognising both the potential issues and the potential benefits of online public service delivery.

>Digital by default service delivery should be seen as a great opportunity to move more people online, by providing them the motivation to improve their skills –  as well as to upskill the people that we call “the littles” – those that can do a bit online, but wouldn’t be confident enough to complete online transactions.

The report calls for GDS to increase behavioural research to see what prevents capable internet users from using online public services more, but I think a huge opportunity will be missed if we don’t carry this research out with less capable users too, so we can see what level of support and encouragement they will need to use online services. We already know there’s a world of difference between using Facebook on a smartphone and filling in a complex form online which could affect your benefits, and there needs to be support to help bridge this gap and ensure people aren’t left behind.

The Digital Britain 2 report estimated that there will be 4 million people who will need support to access services through the assisted digital programmes, but without a clear programme to help people to improve their digital skills, I’m sure the number will be much greater. With almost 16 million people in the UK lacking the skills to use computers and the internet – and many of these being the highest users of public services – we’re still underestimating the problem. Proxy users (like friends or family, or even UK online centres) can’t fill this gap, and so we (the people and the Government) need to make a real commitment to supporting them. These proxy users will just mask the issue of digital exclusion, putting extra burden on friends and family members without addressing the skills gap.

One of the most interesting – and perhaps worrying – statistics in the report is that 70% of people who are offline do not intend to go online in the next 12 months, but for the eternal optimist in me this surely means that online service delivery presents a huge opportunity to providing a motivation for them to go online. Three of the report’s five recommendations are about the support the government should provide to those who are offline, and how this should be publicised, but not one mentions the need to support these people to improve their skills. The nearest the report comes is in recognising the huge support provided by friends and family members in acting as proxy users, but filling in a form online for a friend or family member is very different from supporting them to become a confident internet user. By not addressing this skills gap between the capable, the not-so-capable and the offline groups means we will be doing exactly what the report warns again – consigning people with low or no digital skills to second rate public services. Only by supporting everyone to have the skills they need will we avoid there being a “them and us” approach to public service delivery.

Digital by default service delivery is a bold policy move. and so we need bold support strategies to support this. Without putting these in place, I fear that we will just be widening the digital divide.

Social housing has rarely been out of the news in the last few weeks with the introduction this week of a host of new welfare reforms and the impending Universal Credit pilot. The sector can seem a bit beleaguered at times, but I regularly get the chance to see some fantastic, inspiring digital inclusion work by social housing providers all over the country, and today I’m delighted to announce we’re part of the newly launched cross Government £400,000 challenge fund to improve tenant’s online skills.

The Digital Deal – which has been jointly funded by the Department for Work and Pensions, and the Department for Communities and Local Government – will be managed by OCF and will support bids for innovative projects to improve the digital skills of social housing tenants.

Best of luck with your application.

It’s always nice to be able to share good news, and today I have something very exciting to share with you. The NHS Commissioning Board has announced today that  – to support their aims for an inclusive NHS for all – they’ll be funding us at Online Centres Foundation (and more importantly, the UK online centres network) to support people to improve their skills, and in turn to improve their health.

This partnership will ensure that those who are digitally excluded won’t be excluded in other ways too – like the chance to take control of their own health and wellbeing, and make informed choices that are right for them. I’m really excited about it – it’s good for the UK online centres network and for the nation as a whole.