Ian Cuddy

So, 2010 has kicked off with a bang, and by bang, I mean possibly the most unfathomable piece of Government ICT policy ever produced. Namely, the latest plans to drag the masses (poor, tired, huddled and anyone else) kicking and screaming into the brave new digital age:  Say hello to the Home Access Scheme.

HAS was launched to great fanfare this week by no greater or lesser personage than Gordon Brown, who first announced this particular pork barrel initiative back in 2008.  The wheeze in question is a £300m plan to hand out  free laptops and broadband to more than a quarter of a million households.  The scheme represents the latest in a long line of government attempts to close the 'digital divide' - a form of social experiment to test whether home access to ICT could improve education, employment and social cohesion.  As Stephen Crowne, Chief Exec of the Government’s schools ICT body Becta, commented at the launch this week:

“The benefits of technology are clear, but it is vital that children are not excluded from access to technology – whether at school or, just as importantly, in the home. The Home Access programme seeks to support this aspiration, by offering this opportunity to more families.”

Which is A Good Thing, except that a) the Government has already spent a significant amount of money on trying to get families online, b) the country is in debt to the tune of hundreds of billions of pounds and c) unfortunately the Government’s record on offering ’opportunities’ such as this isn’t exactly pristine. Let’s quickly jog our memories:

Computers Within Reach (2000-1)
A £15m Government pilot initiative, led by David Blunkett, to give 100,000 low-cost, refurbished computers to low-income families in the poorest neighbourhoods. Following a rash of bad publicity and horror-story complaints from those fortunate enough to get a PC, the scheme was shelved in 2001, after reports that the PCs were being sold onto the black market and having delivered only 24,000 computers at a cost of £7.1m.

Wired Up Communities (2000-3)
A £15m Department for Education and Skills initiative which provided new and recycled PCs and internet connections to 12,000 homes in disadvantaged communities.  Months after the launch, the project ran into the first of many difficulties due to logistics, insuring computers and contractual problems with suppliers. A survey of 200 participants found "very few (four)" had changed their employment situation, with only one of them suggesting the WUC technology had contributed to the change.  The DfES subsequently abandoned a national roll-out.

Individual Learning Accounts (2000-1)
A £260m flagship project to provide subsidised adult learning in skills such as ICT, which ran £93m over budget before being suddenly shut down a year later due to widescale criminal fraud.

NHS Direct Kiosks (1999-2005)
Announced by the-then PM Tony Blair, this initiative aimed to extend NHS Direct through 620 touch-screen public information points, positioned in supermarkets, libraries, sport centres, pharmacies and hospital waiting rooms. Only 180 were ever installed, with evaluations putting take-up at 7%. In 2005 NHS Direct scrapped the kiosks to landfill.

Home Computing Initiative (2004-6)
A successful national PC leasing scheme designed to give families the opportunity to access ICT at home.  Suddenly scrapped overnight by Gordon Brown in March 2006 without warning or consultation with industry, resulting in hundreds of job losses across the nascent HCI sector.

Now fast forward to the latest initiative. The Home Access Scheme has been allocated £300m to help around 270,000 families up to 2011, though the original objective, stated back in 2008, was to help one million children.

Denise Athow at ITProPortal has done the math, and her calculations show this works out at £1,111 per unit (or, say, policy intervention), making these altogether rather expensive publicly-funded laptops (and before anyone asks, they're not even Macs.)  Like Mark Taylor, CEO of Sirius Corporation who warned Becta, the Government’s schools ICT body, 2008 about the scheme’s costs back in 2008, Denise reckons a laptop with a year's worth of broadband thrown in doesn't need to cost more than £275 plus VAT and delivery.  A public sector purchasing power fail?

On closer inspection, it appears the  HAS scheme works by giving parents a prepaid payment card, worth up to £528, to use towards the retail cost of a laptop and/or internet access. Thus at least 50% of the £300m budget for HAS is expected to be swallowed up by supplier mark-up, management, administration (HAS is being run by Capita) and consultants‘ fees.

The prospect of this seems to have set off alarm bells at Becta, which in June last year wrote to every English council encouraging them to set up schemes to bulk buy laptops on behalf of parents.  Strangely, only three local authorities  - Durham, Hull and Shropshire - took up the offer.

I'm also indebted to @watfordgap who points out here that the PCs offered by the six HAS 'approved suppliers' are all Microsoft and all new kit.  Whatever happened to the Government's commitment to the open source and Green ICT agendas?

Furthermore, despite the Government presenting this as a ‘free laptops and broadband’ scheme, there’s actually nothing to stop parents buying desktop PCs instead, even though the plan is for children to bring their portable computer into school.

TalkTalk, the Carphone Warehouse ISP, has criticised the scheme as ‘muddled thinking’, highlighting that while trying to encourage disadvantaged families to get online, the Government has decided to introduce a regressive ’Phone tax’ which will hit the poorest families the hardest.

In a further little twist, although Becta regards council support and engagement as important to help families get the most from HAS, it transpires, according to this information note to councils [PDF], there's no cash left in the kitty for this.   'There is no direct funding allocated for the administration or promotion of the scheme', says the note. 'Local authorities will need to look to existing structures to coordinate this work.'

Doubtless To Be Continued...

UPDATE - 14 Jan 2010

The national expansion of the Home Access Scheme followed six-month trials in Oldham and Suffolk, which saw over 11,500 grants and were hailed by Becta as a 'success'.

I tried to track down any evaluation reports or studies published about these pilots. I found none. However in a triumph for Google journalism, I did manage to unearth some interesting findings buried away in the December 2009 issue of Oldham Council's 'New Deal for Communities' newsletter. And I quote:

"Lifelong Learning in Oldham asked the NDC to evaluate the scheme through a questionnaire.... The Oldham evaluation throws up some very positive and valuable statistics, highlights some gaps in existing services, and teaches some valuable lessons for the national scheme."

Namely...

"67% of respondents stated that their whole family are benefitting from using the new computers.
33% state that it is the children who are using the computers.
86% of children whose families received a computer through the scheme stated that the equipment was used by their children to do their homework."

Given the Government's primary objective for HAS is for children to use the PC for homework, this seems to show the scheme has a one-in-7 failure rate. Extrapolting these findings to the national scheme, this suggests nearly 40,000 PCs, costing over £2 million, will not be used for the purpose intended.