Earlier this week (Thursday), the Westminster eForum held a full-day seminar on the digital divide. I attended most of the event and offer the following headline points:

• Many commentators felt that the issue of the digital divide had slipped down the agenda, partly because politicians have confused availability with actual take-up and partly because most politicians themselves make little use of PCs and the Internet. One brave dissenter from this view was Alex Butler, recently at the Cabinet Office and representing Directgov, who felt that instead the issue had been “mainstreamed”.
• Bill Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute presented the findings of the recently-conducted second Oxford Internet Survey. This suggested that overall connectivity to the Net was plateauing at just over 60% of households with most movement being narrowband users upgrading to broadband. He believed that something similar was happening in the USA at the higher take-up figure of just over 70%. Richard Barrington of Sun Microsystems said that take-up in Scandanavian countries was peaking at between around 65-70% but suggested that this was partly a lifestyle choice
• The OII survey made plain that take-up falls with age and rises with income and there was a fair bit of discussion about how best to promote connectivity to older and poorer citizens. There were several calls for cheaper and simpler computers and for more support for new Net users.
• Stephanie Harland of Age Concern pointed out that 14 million people over the age of 50 do not use the Internet. She argued that there had been many small but successful pilots exploring how to excite the interest of older people, but the scaleability of and funding for such projects were major problems.
• Colette Bowe, Chairman of the Ofcom Consumer Panel, also concentrated on the challenge of older non-users of the Net. She quoted the Panel’s own research to show that, while two in three UK consumers access the Net, the measure for older people stands at one in five. The proportion of older people with broadband access at home is around one-quarter of the measure for the UK as a whole and accounts for only 1 in 20 older people.
• The BT speaker was Company Secretary Larry Stone and he mentioned a number of practical intiatives that BT, in partnership with others, is developing, such as Internet Rangers, the Circuit Rider model, the Everybody Online project and the Alliance for Digital Inclusion.
• The headline speaker at the seminar was the DTI Minister Alun Michael. I would link to his speech if I could, but it is still not on the DTI web site which is not exactly a great advertisement for e-government (if it ever appears, it should be here). The Minister took pride in reminding us of the Government declaration in February 2001 that it wanted the UK to be the most extensive and competitive broadband market in the G7 by 2005 and that we are now 1st in extensiveness and 3rd in competitiveness. However, he conceded that 40% of children still have no home access to the Net and referred to an intiative run by a friend of his called “Computers For The Terrified”. He argued that the Government April 2005 report “Connecting The UK” was moving us from a focus on infrastructure to one on take-up and use, but announced no new intiative or programme.