Chloe McDermott

Written: 07/04/2022

A few nights ago, I was getting ready to head out to work after shoveling my dinner down my throat. My mum halted me before I made my move to leave and had to spit something out. She wanted to cut down costs. In her mind the answer was the TV and internet package. I nearly choked a little on the last mouthful of Irn Bru. I argued this down as nonsense. How did she expect us to seriously cope in the modern world without the internet?  She argued I could use my data. However, that also has a price tag. A very costly price tag if I go over the limit. We settled the argument when I made my point that I could simply contribute more to the house every month.

I do see her point though. With broadband prices going up by around 9 – 10% on average since March on top of a rising inflation (currently at 6.2%) it might seem logical to save the broadband and TV costs.

A lot of issues that arose during this argument felt like it had to do with a generation gap. Technology was analogue when mum was growing up and she was a young adult when the internet was born. For our generation however we went from playing snake on an old Nokia to I-Pod shuffles and your first smartphone when you were a teenager. More and more of my education became reliant on the use of the internet too. This was especially true during the pandemic when starting university. Even when hunting for jobs, if I didn’t have the internet it would have been almost impossible.

The most recent figures from the Office for National Statistics on digital exclusion in the UK show that in 2018 that roughly 10% of the adult population did not use the internet. 5.3 million adults not using the internet across the UK.  Though it is unfortunately unclear if this number has declined again during the pandemic or is likely to rise again due to people being unable to afford their broadband anymore. One thing is clear unless the number declines rapidly, which seems unlikely giving the steep rise in broadband. People will continue to be excluded from this increasingly digital world. 

The Canary reported in February this year that people have already been struggling to pay their broadband bills before the 10% rise was announced. 1.1m households (5%) are struggling with the affordability of their broadband. This included people cancelling services, missing payments, or cutting back on food to pay for it.  Ofcom said that 11% of them were struggling with the affordability of broadband with 3% of low-income households cancelling services because they couldn’t afford them. If broadband was already un-affordable before it seems reasonable to me to conclude that the rising cost of living has the potential push more people to consider cancelling services.

The pandemic has surely highlighted the benefit of having a more digitally connected UK. With the UK government providing 1.3 million laptops and tablets in the academic years 2019/2020 and 2020/21. Providing a further 600,000 devices over the course of this academic year to schools, colleges, academy trusts and local authorities to help disadvantaged families to something as basic as homework. You would have thought that this same government would think to itself. Hang on a wee minute, what good are laptops and tablet without an internet connection. Even when looking at the government website’s page drearily called on a programme called “Get help with technology programme”.  Offering guidance on how schools and college can maybe, help their poorer students connect to the internet if they can qualify for a grant. I think to myself while reading this that there must be an easier way of everyone to connect to the internet nowadays. Living without the internet is more difficult than people who take it for granted could imagine. Thus, during a cost of living crisis, a government that cared about keeping people connected should offer more universal support to everyone to connect to the internet. On reflection looking back at Corbyn’s promise to nationalise broadband seems more grounded in reality than ever.