Ms Celine Clarke:

On the point about digital inclusion, the State definitely needs to do more to assist people to acquire digital skills across all age cohorts but particularly older people in terms of accessing services and fully participating in society. The State needs to protect people from a digital-only approach. So a digital-first approach and then a digital-only approach will exclude people, especially the people that we are talking about here today. The State also provides loads of opportunities, as we have talked about.

On the specific point about ETBs, the Adult Literacy for All strategy recognises digital literacy as one of the areas that need to be targeted. The strategy identifies various methods of providing access to digital training skills, including ETBs. Age Action has developed a curriculum to reach a Digicom standard at EU level to provide digital training skills to older people, which is learner led, so it needs to be particularly tailored to how the person learns and training is usually done face to face. Therefore, it is important to have enough space to do so. Unfortunately, the digital skills for citizens fund finished in 2019 and it has not had any newer additional moneys. There is no channel to access additional funding for organisations like ourselves that have developed ways to manage and deliver training.

There are also cost barriers for people who have an inadequate income. For example, 50% of people aged over 65 years depend on the State pension for most of their income and when that pension is inadequate things like digital skills, having a tablet or a digital device become secondary and not a priority. A multitude of things must be in place to support all of us to be digitally included and that includes protecting the offline channels.