Part of 2. Questions to the Leader of the House – in the Senedd at 2:30 pm on 16 May 2018.
Yes. You make a very good point. There have been a number of surveys recently. Unfortunately, it's always a difficulty in Wales, for the size of the survey, so if you extrapolate it out across Wales, we're not absolutely certain how valid the data is, statistically. But, nevertheless, it draws attention to some of the serious problems we have with digital exclusion. And there is definitely a generational issue there. The Member makes a number of points simultaneously. We need people to have the basic digital skills, to be able to access public services, and to stay socially involved and so on, but we also need the higher level digital skills in our working-age workforce, and our youngsters, in order to develop the programmes that allow people to access those skills.
Part of the Tech Valleys initiative, and a number of other initiatives in Merthyr, as I said to Dawn Bowden, in partnership with a number of partners, are to do both of those things together. And we have some very exciting inter-generational projects, where we have young people with very high levels of digital skills assisting in both hospitals and in residential circumstances, to get people who are older, who don't have those skills, to get online, and that's been very successful, and actually very heartening in a number of ways, to see the inter-generational working. So, there are a number of innovative ways that we can assist with that, but I agree that the—well, the sample sizes are a serious problem, so we do need to look at ways of capturing the data more effectively.