Lane Fox: Funding Shortfall No Barrier To Online Push

The government’s “digital champion” and co-founder of Lastminute.com, Martha Lane Fox, has been given no budget to get the last remaining ten million Brits online – a project which she intended to complete before the end of 2012.

Despite this however, Lane Fox remains confident that she can get a large number of people online without any government funding.

“There is no money and we don’t need it to make a big stride forward,” Lane Fox told The Guardian newspaper. “There is a massive amount you can do. You can make big inroads into that 10 million number without having to spend money.”

“Big society”

Lane Fox’s ideas centre around giving web novices education and access to resources, to give them the key skills needed to become part of the online community. She suggests running after-hours crash courses in computing at supermarkets, technology stores and schools.

“The government’s spent billions on technology – they’ve spent it in schools, in GP surgeries, in libraries, in community centres. We’ve got to make it easier for people to find that technology and re-use it and learn about it at a time convenient to them,” she said. “There are 500,000 computers locked up in schools every night. Wouldn’t it be great if they could be opened up at times beyond when the children use them?”

Martha Lane Fox advised the previous Labour government on its “Digital Inclusion” project, which aimed to get poor and elderly people online, in order to close the digital divide in Britain. In June, the coalition government asked Lane Fox to stay on in her “digital champion” role, focussing on ways to save costs by taking services online.

Then in July, Lane Fox’s push to get around ten million of the UK’s poorest households online was announced, with the backing of Prime Minister David Cameron. According to Cameron, the Networked Nation programme will help bring the benefits of the web to those who cannot or are reluctant to access the net, as well as saving millions on paper-based access to government services.

Broadband rollout stunted

However, Lane Fox’s plans could still be foiled due to ongoing difficulties with the rollout of broadband in the UK. Last month, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt announced that the government’s plan to roll out 2Mbps broadband to all British homes by 2012 have been delayed until 2015. Hunt blamed the previous government for setting a target that could not be met with the resources available.

About three million households (mostly in rural areas) still cannot get 2Mbps broadband, and around one percent of the country (160,000 UK homes) cannot get broadband over phone lines at all. Meanwhile, fibre-based superfast broadband will miss about a third of the country under current plans by commercial providers.

And even those that can can access to the Internet may not be getting the speeds they are promised by their service providers. Last week the regulator Ofcom admonished providers for continuing to advertise speeds which consumers were not able to receive. A recent study by content management firm Akamai found that Brits had an average broadband speed of 3.8Mbps.