Why Digital Inclusion Will Only Be Solved Through Genuine Cross-Sector Collaboration.

Published: 2023  |  Perspective updated: 2025

A couple of years ago I was honoured to attend the House of Lords Dinner for Digital Inclusion, hosted by Good Things Foundation, Vodafone, and Baroness Dido Harding. It was one of those evenings where you leave feeling both energised and slightly sobered — energised by the passion and expertise in the room, sobered by the reminder of how persistent and deep the problem remains.

What struck me most was a point that came up repeatedly, in different conversations, across different sectors: digital inclusion is not a problem that any one organisation, or any one government department, or any one type of intervention, is going to solve on its own. It will only be fixed through genuine cross-sector collaboration, sustained over time, with shared accountability for outcomes.

That is easy to say. It is considerably harder to do.

The scale of what is still unresolved

Without further intervention, an estimated 5.8 million people are projected to remain digitally excluded by the end of 2032. That is not a projection from a period of government inaction — it reflects the current trajectory even as significant investment has gone into infrastructure, devices, and skills programmes.

A House of Lords report into digital exclusion found an estimated £63 billion cost to the UK economy from digital skills shortages, and called for a unified cross-Whitehall strategy rather than a fragmented set of departmental policies. The report recognised that much had been done — on connectivity infrastructure, on device access, on digital skills — but that without coordination, the pieces were not adding up to enough.

The reason the problem persists despite real investment is that digital exclusion is not a single problem. It is several interlocking problems: lack of affordable connectivity, lack of suitable devices, lack of digital skills, and lack of confidence. Addressing one without the others does not get people online in any meaningful sense. And the people who face all four barriers simultaneously are typically those with the fewest resources to bridge the gaps themselves.

What cross-sector collaboration actually requires

The dinner was notable for bringing together people from different worlds — government, civil society, private sector, technology — who do not always share a table. That matters. Not because a dinner changes anything on its own, but because the relationships and shared understanding that come from those conversations are the precondition for the kind of collaboration that does change things.

Good Things Foundation has been explicit that no single government department, organisation, sector, or region can deliver digital inclusion alone — and that the solutions need to be co-created, drawing on the expertise and experience of many stakeholders, delivered across the whole of government and co-funded alongside the private sector.

That model — national coordination with hyperlocal delivery — is what the evidence supports. Good Things Foundation's approach tackles the pillars of digital exclusion through action that is both local, delivered by community organisations embedded in their neighbourhoods, and national, removing the inefficiency of reinventing the wheel across thousands of separate initiatives.

The private sector role in this is not peripheral. Companies providing data through the National Databank, device manufacturers donating refurbished hardware, and large employers running digital skills programmes in their communities — these are not acts of corporate philanthropy sitting alongside the real work. They are part of the infrastructure of digital inclusion.

The circular electronics dimension

The dinner also focused on circular electronics — the idea that devices should be refurbished and redistributed rather than discarded, both for environmental reasons and because access to a suitable device remains one of the most concrete barriers to getting people online.

Good Things Foundation's National Device Bank has distributed nearly 10,000 devices to people who could not afford their own. That is a significant number — and a model that shows what is possible when private sector device donation is channelled through organisations with the community relationships to reach the people who need them most.

The circular economy argument and the digital inclusion argument point in the same direction: devices that are thrown away when they still work are a wasted resource, both environmentally and socially. Getting good-quality refurbished devices into the hands of digitally excluded people at low or no cost is one of the most direct interventions available. It is also one that requires corporate participation to work at scale.

What comes after the dinner

Events like the House of Lords Dinner are valuable for the conversations they start and the connections they enable. They are not, on their own, a plan.

Good Things Foundation has described the cross-sector roundtable discussions they convened with government in 2024 as the start of a conversation — a foundation for a national response to digital inclusion that draws on expertise from across sectors and from communities directly experiencing the problem.

That framing — a start, not a solution — feels right to me. The UK has the infrastructure, the expertise, and the cross-sector goodwill to make serious progress on digital inclusion. What has been missing is the sustained political will and the coordinating structures to bring it together.

Sir Chris Bryant, Minister for Digital Inclusion, has been direct that government needs to take responsibility for binding everyone into the digital future — that the community-level work happening across the country is vital, but that government needs to take an active role, not just celebrate what civil society is already doing.

The evening at the House of Lords was a reminder of what genuine cross-sector commitment to this problem looks like when it is in the same room. The task is keeping that commitment alive and translating it into structures and resources that outlast any single event or administration.