Chi Onwurah – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Cabinet Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Chi Onwurah on 2015-10-23.

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what (a) funding his Department is undertaking and (b) projects his Department has planned as part of the Government’s Digital Inclusion Strategy.

Matthew Hancock

Cabinet Office and other government departments currently fund the Digital Inclusion team which works across government and with the private, public and voluntary sectors to ensure that everyone in the UK has the basic digital skills needed to benefit from being online.

The Digital Inclusion Strategy launched in 2014 outlined that by 2016 we will have reduced the number of people who are offline by25% and by 2020 everyone who can be online should be online.

To date 85 organisations have signed up to the Digital Inclusion Charter and collaborate with government to deliver the Digital Inclusion Strategy. The Digital Inclusion team has worked with these stakeholders to develop products such as the cross-sector Digital Inclusion Outcomes Framework and initiatives like Digital Friends which promotes informal sharing of basic digital skills.