Government digital divide strategy in disarray
By Jane Wakefield
Fri, 04 May 2001 13:47:31 GMT
URL: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2001/17/ns-22643.html
The strategy to get disadvantaged parts of the country online is
suffering from a serious lack of planning
The government's plan to combat the digital divide by giving away 100,000
recycled PCs to the poorest families in Britain has gone awry as it
admitted today that it has so far distributed just 6,000 since October.
The PC giveaway was part of a £10m initiative to wire up communities,
announced (http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2000/40/ns-18381.html) by
chancellor Gordon Brown in October last year. At the current rate of
distribution some homes earmarked for a free PC would have to wait until
February 2009 to receive their computers. Speaking to ZDNet UK, a
government spokesman blamed "problems with contractors" for the slow
hand-out.
And the PC distribution programme is not the only digital divide-busting
scheme that is facing problems. The government is also running a scheme
(http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2001/15/ns-22288.html) to give away digital
interactive TVs. Villagers in Brampton Bierlow in Rotherham are one group
that have been selected to receive free set-top boxes as part of an
access via digital interactive TV scheme, but say they do not like what
they have seen so far.
The people of Brampton Bierlow say they are unhappy with the way the way
the scheme has been planned and question how free it is. "The free system
is not as free as people thought," said villager Michael Fitzgibbons.
With ONdigtal only providing one free channel and not offering to
subsidise the phone bill, he said, the service smacks more of a way for
the company to increase its customer base.
Think-tank Demos believes the government will have its work cut out to
bridge the digital divide with hardware alone. "They will find it
difficult to pursue a hardware strategy. How do you find the right
100,000 people for example? Where do you get the kit and how do you
transport it?" asked a spokesman. He also questions the motivation of PC
manufacturers and software companies getting involved in such schemes.
More worrying still, Demos suggests, is the fact that the government is
pursuing the wrong policy; if it really wants to tackle the digital
divide it should look at what businesses are doing with data. "We think
that over time the cost of computers and access will come down and so
access to hardware is not the real problem," said the spokesman. "The
biggest problem is companies using digital data to exclude particular
individuals."
Back in April a Trade and Industry select committee condemned
(http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2001/12/ns-21881.html) government attempts
to bridge the digital divide as "futile gestures". "The initiative
centres and development programmes do not amount to a strategy to
overcome the digital divide between old and young, rich and poor, urban
and rural," the committee concluded in its report. "In the context of the
scale of the digital divide, they look like woefully inadequate gestures.
Millions of people are excluded, not the thousands reached so far by
these initiatives."
Colin Jenkins, director of special projects at Energis, is currently on
secondment (http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2001/14/ns-22190.html) to the GLC
to look at ebusiness across the capital. He believes the government has
put the cart before the horse with its digital divide policies and needs
first to assess and identify the problem. "Those that are identified as
being part of the digital divide has mobile telephones, access to TV and
gaming machines and have got the nous to use these technologies," he
said. "The digital divide is not like the literacy divide and we have to
figure out what we are trying to achieve here."
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