Black Country victim of 'digital divide' with UK’s lowest rates of internet use

One in five people in Sandwell, Wolverhampton and Dudley had not been online in the past three months or had never used the internet – twice the national average.

They had similar or lower rates of internet use than some remote parts of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland where poor connectivity is principally to blame.

The figures, from the Office of National Statistics(ONS), reveal wide variations between localities across the UK. Worst in terms of internet use were people in Conwy and Denbighshire, north Wales, where 22.8 per cent said they had not been online in the previous three months, followed by Sandwell at 22.7 per cent and the Isle of Wight, with 22.2 per cent.

Other areas of the West Midlands where high numbers of people met the low and non-use criteria include Wolverhampton - 21.6 per cent, Stoke-on-Trent - 20 per cent, and Dudley - 19.8 per cent.

Households without access to the internet are estimated to lose around £560 a year because they cannot shop and pay bills online, according to Digital Divide in the UK, a report published by the Royal Geographical Society. Up to 90 per cent of job applications now require some form of online use.

Comparatively high numbers of elderly and unemployed people in the Black Country may partly explain the figures, as well as their high concentrations of people from ethnic minority backgrounds.

But while Bangladeshis are least likely to use the internet, with 11.3 per cent of UK respondents saying they had never been online, this is unlikely to be a major cause according to researchers. The second highest group of non-users are white people, with 9.6 per cent reporting the same.

Mark Graham, Professor of Internet Geography at the University of Oxford, said it was unclear what factors were at play in explaining the unusually low rates in the Black Country.

He said that as the Government increasingly moves towards an assumption that the entire UK will be 'digital by default', non-users will become further marginalised from society and may find it difficult to access public services.

“The fact that about one in every ten people in the country does not use the internet means that we need to pay more attention to finding ways to not exclude these millions of our fellow citizens from the increasingly digital economic, social, and political practices the rest of us are engaging in,” he said.

The Government has pledged to ensure superfast broadband is available to 97 per cent of UK homes and businesses by 2020. According to an Ofcom report, published last December, 1.4million properties cannot access broadband speeds of more than 10 megabits per second, considered by the regulator to be the minimum necessary to meet a typical household’s digital needs.

The Borough of Wandsworth, in London and the Isle of Anglesey, in Wales, had the highest rates of use in the UK with only 2.2 per cent and 3.4 per cent of people respectively saying they had not been online in the past three months or had never used the internet.