8.43 Million UK Adults Have Never Used The Internet

The Office of National Statistics (ONS) has revealed that 8.43 million adults in the UK have never used the internet.

The Internet Access Quarterly Update revealed that although 299,000 more people had used the web since Q2, 16.8 percent of adults have still never accessed it.

Barriers To Entry Persist

Unsurprisingly, the highest proportion of users was in the 16-24 category, with 98.6 percent, but in every other age group except the over 75sw, the majority have used the Internet

Mre people are coming online in all age groups with the fastest decline in non-users coming in the 75 and over group, which had 164,000 fewer non-users than it did in the last quarter.

Men are more likely to use the web than women, with 85.6 percent of males using it compared to 80.6 percent of women. Income is also a factor with 8.3 percent of those earning less than £200 being non-users compared to none of those earning over £1,000.

Disability continues to be a barrier to entry, with 4.25m of disabled adults being users, accounting for just over half of the 8.43m total.

Last year it was estimated that the number of internet users worldwide had doubled during the previous five years and that the number of users would reach two billion by the end of 2010.

This trend has also been seen in the UK, where internet traffic has increased seven-fold over the last five years and the typical domestic broadband connection now averages 17GB of data every month. In addition, over half of British adults use social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.