Columnist

It's time to confront the digital poverty crisis

It is no secret that, far too often, the North East comes last.

On average, our life expectancy is lower. So are our wages.

In education, fewer of our A-Level students achieve the top grades, while almost a third of our children live in poverty.

But there is another hidden crisis we still don’t talk about enough: digital poverty.

One in ten North East households currently has no internet access, which is twice the national average.

That may seem inconsequential when there are hungry stomachs to feed, but in an increasingly digital society, it is one of our region's biggest barriers to opportunity.

While food banks do an incredible job supporting vulnerable families, a lack of internet access is leaving far too many people adrift.

And it isn’t just older generations struggling to get online.

Just rewind a few years to the pandemic.

During lockdown, it emerged many children were unable to properly learn from home because their families couldn't afford the technology many of us take for granted.

Children North East reported more than a third of low-income families lacked the digital equipment needed for lockdown learning.

Since then, the cost-of-living crisis has plunged thousands more families into often extreme poverty.

And lacking internet access or equipment is a hammer blow to your prospects.

Just take the job market.

Here at Mobile Rocket, we create mobile recruitment platforms for recruitment agencies.

Applications, interviews, onboarding and communication are now overwhelmingly digital, but if you can’t reliably get online, what chance do you have of competing?

And for many young people in the North East, those prospects are already bleak enough.

A recent report on NEETs – 16 to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training – painted a grim picture.

More than a million young people across the UK now fall into that category, while the wider economic cost is estimated at £125 billion a year.

We must change things.

As a society, we need to start treating digital access as an essential, rather than a luxury.

The business community must step up too.

It is vital all generations – particularly young people – don’t fall through the digital cracks.

With everyone glued to their smartphones, it is easy to assume society is fully connected, yet the statistics tell a different story.

And if we fail to act, digital poverty will become more than an invisible crisis.

It will become another reason why the North East is locked out of opportunity before it even had the chance to compete.

Adam Lee is founder of North East-based digital recruitment platform Mobile Rocket

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