Digital Inclusion in Aberavon

Part of 2. Questions to the Leader of the House – in the Senedd at 2:57 pm on 24 January 2018.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:57, 24 January 2018

I think the Member makes an extremely important point. We are very aware of the problems of closing community facilities, and so on. As a result, we've been working with Digital Communities Wales to support organisations that specifically work with excluded groups to engage with specific sets of clients. I'm sure the Member is very well aware of the Get NPT Online partnership, for example, in his own constituency, which encourages people, community groups and enterprises to make the most of technology in Neath Port Talbot. It includes technology taster sessions for social housing tenants and sessions in libraries where they are seeking employment. 

What we've been doing, as that initiative shows, is looking at alternative ways of reaching people who are digitally excluded. So, we've been working, for example, with registered social landlords to make sure that tenants in particular housing communities have access, and we've got a very successful one up in Merthyr, where we introduced a number of refurbished Welsh Government laptops, expecting the demand to be relatively low and the demand was absolutely enormous. We've extended that arrangement there by another 20 or so laptops and two more supporters. But we're heavily reliant as well on volunteers and young people coming forward, so I'm really pleased with the initiative we have, where we have 500 digital heroes who are young volunteers to support older people to get online and to get their skills, and we can do that in a variety of settings, including health settings, because these are very important agendas.

We spend £4 million at the moment in Digital Communities Wales, supporting other organisations—so, a train the trainer model—in order to get some of these skills out there, and we have a variety of different arrangements in place to try and get to people where they are.

But the Member raises a hugely important point and I'll add another to it: one of the difficulties we have is that, sometimes, our volunteers are prevented from volunteering for the hours they want to volunteer because it interferes with their own universal credit arrangements. I've had some very robust discussions with the Department for Work and Pensions about why on earth we're stopping people volunteering because of some of the rather more onerous requirements for job seeking online, and so on, that are imposed upon them. So, I agree that some of the austerity programme is impacting on this agenda, but we are doing our very best to be creative in getting around some of those difficulties.