Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Economy – in the Senedd at 1:39 pm on 8 March 2023.

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Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 1:39, 8 March 2023

Tackling digital exclusion is one of the key aims of our strategy, and there's a number of different strands. There's our work with the UK Government on the reserved responsibility for infrastructure. I've had a number of meetings with my officials and, indeed, with the current UK Minister—I think it's Minister Lopez, in the newly rebadged DCMS—and we're looking at how they are going to meet their own obligations, and actually the fact there'll be a gap, because they expect to meet 85 per cent of the population. Now, we have to talk about how we get services and improved services to that extra 15 per cent.

As well as the connectivity and the width, we then have a range of schemes in place actually to deal with practical access, and some of that is attitude. My mother has a connection in her house and I have regularly tried to get her to use it, but that's just one of those things. She doesn't do it, whereas other people are more keen to do it. And actually, this isn't just a point about entertainment. As we all know, there's a point about work, and it's also about access to services as well. Many of our services are moving to a digital-first model, which I think is a good thing, but that does mean we need to constantly be thinking about how we equip users, the people using the service, to be able to do so effectively. That's not just the public, of course; a number of the people who need support to make sure that they're properly enabled and are able to use the system actually are staff as well. So, those are parts of the challenges we're looking to try to resolve, and I'm very keen to see further progress made in the rest of this term.