Digital Departure

It's no good, I can no longer not rant at length on line about this...and it's not related to beer at all.

The company I help run helps people of all ages with digital skills:  from enthusing kids about coding, electronics and 3D printing (to name but a few) to doing Word and Excel with ladies who are looking to return to the workplace...and everything in between.  We also employ young people on a part time basis to deliver our work.  Some of these are students, some of them are young people who are unable to find work for whatever reason (sometimes things like mental and physical health problems).  We're really proud of the work we do, and the slight quirky way we do it.

Quite a lot of the small bits of work we do could be considered "digital odd jobs":  building a PC from old bits to read 3.5" floppy disks and copy the contents onto a USB stick to make sure someone's files could be checked for usefulness...helping an arts organisation plan and deliver a makerspace festival to do some concept testing...setting up some community library PCs with a modicum of security to ensure that library customers didn't lock the staff out of their own PCs...you know...that sort of thing.

We're horribly underfunded (for that, read UNfunded) and most of my time is spent trying to work out who might give us a grant or a contract for doing something useful for the community.

One of our directors recently asked whether it would be feasible for us to take our skills and our kit into the field to help people in one of the most deprived areas in Eastbourne apply for EU settled status.

Thankfully we had secured a small grant to do some outreach work and this project fitted the criteria quite nicely so we were able to start with a minimum of fuss or scrabbling for cash to test the idea.

As far as we can tell the only way to apply for this settled status is to use a smart device with Near Field Communications (NFC) and a camera to scan a biometric passport, take picutres of documents and such like.  There are some publicly available, "self-serve" document scanning machines around the country but no one to help you through the process.

In theory this is quite quick and efficient - if you've been working in the UK for five years or more and you have some basic digital skills then you're laughing and the process takes about 20minutes.

Things get more complicated if you don't work or claim benefits because government records about you can't easily be matched to your other personal details.  In these cases you have to find other ways to prove you've been resident for 5 years.  Women are disproportionately affected by this as they're more likely to have been family care-givers, not external workers, and probably don't have bills in their name.

Now imagine you don't have an NFC device, or your English is sufficient for day to day needs but lacks the subtlty that you need to read government documents, or perhaps you don't have an email address, or a mobile phone at all...each of those things will make the process an order of magnitude harder.

In fact many of those things might be true and each of them adds their own layer of additional difficulty and attendant anxiety.

Now factor in the uncertainty that being apparently unwanted in a country where you've lived an worked for decades brings...

Every time we run one of our sessions to help people we hear of more and more grim stories of people bewildered by a system apparently designed to exclude a large chunk of citizens who ARE LEGALLY ALLOWED TO BE AND STAY HERE.  Our colleagues, our staff, our friends, the people who look after us are being sold a message that we don't think they're important to our society.

Digital by Default is a concept that our society is pushing and although for a large part I think it's quite a good idea to be able to do my business and personal work from my computer but I'm feeling that from a position of priviledge.  I'm relatively affluent, I've been tinkering with computers since Margaret Thatcher put one in my school when she was education secretary, I'm reasonably clever and I'm articulate.  But for significant parts of our communities digital by default excludes, makes things more expensive, makes some things unavailable and generally implies second-class citizen status.

Making things digital by default before ensuring your citizens have proper access to equipment and skills is rather like outlawing privately owned cars without even checking to see which communities do and don't have reasonable quality public transport.

It's almost, almost as if our government really doesn't care one way or another if some of the people who have been affected by this go back to the EU or stay and continue to contribute to our community.  Is it a calculated move, or is it the incompetence that comes from being disconnected from the real world, I wonder?  Actually I'm not sure which is worse...

On a brighter note, our local authority is now paying us to continue these sessions for the time being to ensure that we can help more of our friends and neighbours apply for the status they are entitled to.

I'll stop ranting now, and I'll return to wittering about beer very soon, I promise.