Digital inclusion push to get at least £550m investment

At a London conference, Timms detailed how Labour is still determined to invest some £250m to extend "up to 2Mbps" access to the final 10% of UK homes without such access, the selling off of 800MHz and 2.6GHz radio frequencies and a £300m roll-out of PCs, combined with a year's free Internet access, to some 270,000 low-income households with Key Stage 2 and 3 school children.

 

The controversial 50p a month “broadband tax” on fixed line phones to fund the £1bn acceleration of broadband speeds by 2017 is also still going ahead, he added.

 

Around 7.5 million Britons have never been online, said Timms, who promised them all an online experience, while former dot com entrepreneur Martha Lane-Fox, now the national champion for digital inclusion, said she was aiming a B2B programme, Race Online 2012, at getting the four million most disadvantaged people in the country online by 2012.

 

At the conference employment minister Jim Knight said a new JobCentre app for the iPhone and Android mobile phones has been launched, set to be expanded to include further mobile phone platforms and functions. People could look up jobs, have new jobs in their areas pushed to them, and manage their benefits claims, he told the audience, adding the JobCentre database will be opened up via an application program interface to third-party developers so that they could develop new uses for the information.

 

Greater online delivery of services is being positioned as central to government efforts to save money and cut the £178bn budget deficit.