Continuing the theme of digital exclusion from the previous issue, we are delighted to report on Coastline Housing’s long-term strategy to improve digital inclusion among its tenants in West Cornwall.
With project objectives stretching ahead to 2014, Coastline has taken a long-term view of how it will bring its tenants online rather than consider short-term ‘quick fixes’. At the start of the project, Coastline carried out a customer-profiling exercise to establish that very few of its tenants were online in any way, with the situation exacerbated by the remote, rural location of many of its tenants with little access to major towns or even public transport, making online access even more of a lifeline.
Beth Lawton, head of ICT, Coastline Housing, said, “I became aware of the digital divide two years ago when I went to a digital government conference. It was clear that with the government committed to moving its services online, people without online access would be left behind. As time goes on, people not on the internet can only lose out further. We needed to work to redress this problem now before it gets too late.”
Coastline acquired £20,000 of Social Enterprise Investment Funding to pay for an external consultant to research Coastline’s tenants’ barriers to online access, to investigate other similar rural communities for solutions to the digital divide, and to develop a business plan for a social enterprise to combat the issue within Coastline’s housing stock.
The housing provider then arranged a meeting between all the major players in Cornwall, including other landlords, local authorities and community organisations, to start work on a multi-agency initiative to deliver projects within the county to help narrow the digital divide.
The next stage of the project was the provision of six PCs to Coastline’s residents associations, with additional support for set-up and training in order to demonstrate the power of the internet to some of its involved tenants. At the same time, increasing the number of its customers with access to the internet has been officially adopted as one of Coastline’s corporate goals.
At the time of writing, Coastline was in the process of applying for grants to open internet cafes in some of its sheltered housing schemes; if successful, the grants will enable the first cafes to open within the next 12 months.
