Leeds City Council Moot FREE Home Broadband for Disadvantaged Adults

The Leeds City Council in Yorkshire (England) has proposed a new scheme that could generate £45m for the local economy over the next 10 years and help “thousands” of “digitally excluded” adults by giving them access to free home broadband connections, wifi and Tablet computers.

Last week’s meeting of the council’s Scrutiny Board (City Development) included an update on their inquiry into Digital Inclusion that has been running since June 2015, which revealed that there are about 90,000 adults in Leeds who are “offline and/or lack basic digital skills.”

The inquiry points to a report commissioned by the Tinder Foundation last year, which outlined the economic benefits of investing in a 100% digitally included UK population. With digital inclusion leading to higher earnings, more people in employment, time and cost savings, savings to the NHS and social care, the total economic benefits would amount to over £14 billion set against an investment of £1.6 billion.

Naturally the council has seen this and proposed a series of recommendations that could help to solve the perceived problem, several of which include improvements to local Internet connectivity and digital infrastructure.

Highlights from the Recommendations

* Recommendation 2 – That the Director of City Development in consultation with the Chief Digital Officer utilise the intelligence gathered to facilitate better infrastructure planning and enable smaller commercial providers to identify and deliver services to provide greater choice and opportunities for internet access in areas where choice is limited.

In an urban area like Leeds over 90% of premises have access to superfast broadband, most of which has been provided by commercial investment. The council continues to support the WY & York Broadband programme which aims to provide access to superfast broadband to 98% of premises in the designated assistance areas by 2019. To reach “the final 2%” the programme team are currently bidding for a phase 3 programme utilising Local Growth Funding and European funds.

A phase 3 programme will involve a new procurement which will provide opportunities to a range of broadband infrastructure providers to get involved in the delivery of superfast broadband too hard to reach communities. In addition, there is a developing idea around connectivity for Social Housing which provides a low cost broadband service to tenants.

Leeds City Council wishes to invite suppliers to provide digital connectivity to its social housing tenants on a trial basis. The digital connectivity shall be provided free of charge to the end user (i.e. the Social Housing tenants) and free of charge to Leeds City Council.

It is envisaged that as part of this trial, the residents within the tower blocks which house the rooftop equipment shall be offered free connectivity, as well as a range of housing types around the perimeter of the block. Leeds City Council would like around 800 residential dwellings to be provided for, for a period of at least 18 months. These dwellings should be a mix of houses, low rise blocks and high rise blocks, and should aim to cover a wide demographic, reflective of Leeds’ current social housing tenant mix.

Leeds City Council will work closely with the provider to identify which sites are most appropriate to target as part of this trial. We expect this offer to be supplemented by our proposed tablet lending scheme.

* Recommendation 3 – That the Director of City Development and the Chief Digital Officer work collaboratively to:

A) Oversee the provision of information to aql in order to identify the areas that would maximise investment for free wifi in Leeds.

B) Update the Scrutiny Board on progress of the concession agreement with aql and the roll out of free wifi in areas of high need in Leeds.

Leeds City Council currently has two concessions contracts that provide for free public Wi-Fi. One contract with Virgin Medial Business Ltd covers the City Centre and another with AQL (Wireless) Ltd covers the reminder of the city. Both contracts are non-exclusive.

The two concession contracts have failed to gain inertia in the roll out and are unlikely to be expanded further. A number of alternative providers have expressed an interested in operating similar concession contracts and it is our intention to re-tender the requirements this financial year.

Many of the other recommendations tend to focus on improving digital skills and awareness of related support options. As for the idea of free tablet computers, this is actually more of a “lending” scheme and a full pilot with up to 100 tablets is only just getting started.

Under this approach the library service would take responsibility for administering the tablets and “detailed discussions” are currently taking place with O2 UK concerning which tablets to use, device management (security, content filtering etc.) and Mobile Broadband connectivity (4G etc.). In theory this scheme could eventually be expanded to include thousands of Tablets, but the model is still a work-in-progress.

The effort to get more people online and improve digital skills is certainly praiseworthy, although it’s worth remembering that not everybody wants to go online and a fair number of elderly people in particular tend to shun the digital world.