Digital Britain Comes to Scotland
27 April 2009
Digital Britain, in the form of Lord Carter, came to Edinburgh recently for a round-table discussion on the challenges and opportunities for Scotland under the transition to a digital future. The event was attended by around 50 stakeholders from industry, broadcasting, academia and the consumer sector, and ably chaired by the broadcaster, Lesley Riddoch.
The discussion, which centred on Digital Britain’s Interim report, was (loosely) divided into 3 sections – Networks, Content, and Citizens and Media Literacy – the last one being rather shoehorned in at the end, although both Media Lit and consumer issues were interwoven through the whole discussion.
Key areas of interest for the Panel include the proposed 2MB USO - 'how universal is ‘universal’? Lord Carter described the USO ambition as 2MB per sec per household and, yes, this includes rural areas. Funding would be drawn from the Industrial Activism Fund and the DSO Help Scheme mechanism. The intention, we were told, is to pump prime for ‘next generation’ across the country.
The policy driver for this is that once broadband is in universal use, government and local authorities could ‘switch off the analogue delivery of public services’ and move many aspects of delivery on line, resulting in massive savings and greater convenience for service users. Take up on this scale by consumers will need to be driven by both fascinating content and the placing of essential services on line and the government is aware that it is moving ahead of demand in this respect. Some areas will present greater problems than others – for example, Glasgow has the lowest broadband take up rate in Britain and in some deprived parts of the city broadband connection is as low as 17%.
This aspect of Digital Britain has led to a heightened interest in media literacy and a separate media literacy report is running parallel to the Digital Britain consultation. In Scotland, the network of media literacy practitioners (chaired by Ofcom Scotland) will be revising its strategy in line with the recommendations of this report.
Is Lord Carter happy with the level of consumer input to the Digital Britain process so far? Consumer input is increasing with more between January and April than in the previous 3 months and a programme of events between now and the summer. Consumer groups, he said, have been very engaged with the process and the standard of their submissions very high.
The Panel remains on the case, and will be presenting the next phase of its specially commissioned research to Digital Britain shortly. The research seeks to inject a consumer perspective into Digital Britain’s thinking about broadband as an essential and universal service - as discussed by my colleague, Lou Bolch, in the Blog on 24th April below.