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Finance (No. 2) Bill

: I welcome today’s announcement by the Government of the digital inclusion team. It is welcome not least because it focuses on the overriding objective of ensuring that all those who are potentially excluded from the benefits of access—everyone who has spoken said that such access was essential—to fast-changing new technologies remain the priority. The emphasis will be on them, not some specific scheme, which, I accept, was relevant when it was introduced and was, incidentally, opposed by Opposition parties at the time. We should focus on the ends, not the means. I therefore greatly welcome the digital inclusion team but I want to ask for reassurance about two matters. First, my right hon. Friend the Paymaster General spoke generally about those who are potentially excluded from the new technologies. I should be grateful for an assurance that one of the key focuses of the new digital inclusion team will be lower paid workers, especially those on the national minimum wage for whom access to new technologies could be crucial to help them upskill and move up the employment ladder, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris) rightly stressed. The second point is more technical. My right hon. Friend referred to digital television. Of course, that could be enormously important. We are about to move to a switchover from analogue to digital television and that will clearly be important in many different ways. However, I hope that she will reassure me that she will not ask the digital inclusion team to rely on digital television as the main passport to literacy in the new technologies. It is important to bear in mind that there will be a plethora of ways in which to access the new technologies and that the computer is likely to remain important for most people, if not everybody, in that regard. I should therefore be grateful for some reassurance on those points.