Ask how many people in the UK are digitally excluded and you will get a different answer from everyone you ask. That is not evasion. Good Things Foundation, the UK’s leading digital inclusion charity and our partner in the National Device Bank, states it outright: there is no single metric.
The Office for National Statistics still estimates the online population by asking whether someone has used the internet in the last three months, on any device, including a phone. By that measure, an 80 year old who once checked a bus time on a borrowed handset is counted as included. Good Things Foundation calls the question an inadequate proxy.
Exclusion is a spectrum, not a status
People move along it constantly. They get a device and lose the data allowance. They have broadband and not the skills. They had the skills and stopped using them, so the skills went. Somebody can be perfectly capable of sending a message and still locked out of the benefits claim, the GP appointment and the job application.
Which is why one clean headline figure has never existed and probably never will. But the issue itself at its core is never in doubt.
The figures that do hold
Good Things Foundation gathers these annually in their Digital Nation Report, drawing on Lloyds Banking Group’s Consumer Digital Index, Ofcom’s affordability research and Nominet’s Digital Youth Index. The picture is consistent even though no two measures ask the same question.
- Around 1.5 million adults do not have a smartphone, tablet or laptop at all.
- Roughly 8.5 million adults lack foundation-level essential digital skills.
- 45% of households with children, about 3.7 million, fall below the Minimum Digital Living Standard.
- 14% of 8 to 25 year olds, around 2 million, have no access to a larger screen device for learning.
- Around 570,000 young people have neither a learning device nor internet at home.
- 23% of young people receiving free school meals have no home broadband.
- Households in social grades DE are 2.1 times less likely to meet the Minimum Digital Living Standard than those in AB.
Look at the shape of that list. Every line measures something slightly different. They all point the same way.
One of those variables can move this quarter
Skills programmes take years to land. Affordability needs regulators, tariffs and political will. Devices are different. Devices already exist. They are sitting in storage rooms and under desks across British business right now, powered off, waiting to be dealt with later.
Good Things Foundation makes the connection directly: affordability and accessibility are the two central device barriers, and they arrive at a moment when e-waste is a rising environmental concern. The National Device Bank exists to tackle both at once. One intervention. Two problems that are usually treated as unrelated.
What that looks like counted rather than estimated
Reconome is the exclusive technology partner of the Good Things Foundation, powering the UK’s National Device Bank. Together we have committed to deliver 85,000 devices to digitally excluded people across the country.
When the Metropolitan Police Service retired its estate, we securely wiped and processed 21,425 devices, prevented 16,243kg of e-waste and avoided 2.7 kilotonnes of CO2e. Those devices went on to support vulnerable people across 32 London boroughs. Nothing in that sentence is an estimate. Every figure is a count, because every device was tracked individually.
Stop waiting for a better statistic
The measurement debate is real and the sector is right to push for better data. It is also, for any business sitting on surplus IT, completely beside the point. You do not need to settle whether the true figure is 1.5 million or 11 million to know that the laptop in your store cupboard works and somebody within a few miles of your office has never owned one.
A jobseeker filling in an application properly instead of thumbing it into a cracked phone. An older person booking a GP appointment rather than waiting on hold. A student writing coursework on a keyboard. That is what a device does. Statistics are just how we describe it afterwards.
Old tech. New beginning.
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