Mr. James Bryant:

I might comment on the digitisation of Government services, in particular. Generally, digitisation of services that a wide number of people can make use of is a really great opportunity. It can be very cost effective and it can speed up traditionally quite slow bureaucratic services. The two greatest problems we see in other nations' examples are that often there is a motivation, a skills or a usage access barrier. On one hand, one has elements of the labour force who say they have always done it a certain way and who ask why there is a need to improve it, so one really has to prove to people and bring them on the journey of implementing digitisation. That is not just citizens but it is also members of the labour force implementing the systems.

On the usage filter, which is an access issue, it is a bit more obvious but the idea is that the people using and administering the system have to be skilled up and it is not a one-off piece of expenditure. It is a continuous process like upskilling in any other area. It takes a continued investment of both time and resources.

On the second point on how one equitably produces members of society that can contribute in both the algorithms themselves or other elements of digital society, it comes back to that main point of how the more people who are included within and who enjoy the benefits of a network, the more the costs of exclusion will grow, so that any system that is rolled out has to be done across all elements of society. As I said, it is not enough to educate the easy-to-educate in this area. It has to be done equitably.

A great example is the roll-out of computer science in the secondary school curriculum. We saw it rolled out to 40 schools, nine of which were DEIS schools, which is about a representative proportion. I would be very interested to see, as this increases and is rolled out on a wider basis and similar schemes are done, whether a same proportion is represented, because minimising costs should not necessarily be the priority. The priority should be helping citizens to upskill and become digitally literate.