Leading her first House of Lords debate yesterday, Martha Lane
Fox challenged the UK government to address its investment and
policies regarding adult training and skills in the face of the
growing digital skills gap.
The Baroness of Soho praised the government for including coding
and computer science in the future national curriculum, saying that
it puts the country in the position of being able to boast the most
visionary policy for educating children in the G8.
It is not enough to focus on educating the young though, she
added, as 90 percent of new jobs require some level of online
skills, and the majority of jobs are now advertised online.
"There are 11 million
adults who lack four basic online skills -- the ability to
communicate, search and share information and to do these things
safely," she said, adding that 50 percent of these adults are over 65, with the other 50 percent being of
The value to the British economy of equipping the adult
population with digital skills has been estimated by the
cross-sector charity that the Baroness chairs at £68 billion. By
2020, there will be nearly one million technology sector jobs in UK
that will need to be filled, something we will be unable to achieve
with our workforce as unskilled in these areas as they currently
are, she said.
Lane Fox also touched briefly on the current decline in the
overall percentage of women working in technology. At the current
rate, she said, by 2040 only one percent of people working in this
sector will be women.
founder also asked the government what its plans were to celebrate
the achievements of Tim
Berners-Lee in this anniversary year of the World Wide Web. She
paid tribute to Berners-Lee, as well as Ada Lovelace and the
Bletchley codebreakers for bringing us the internet. "I find
something magical and remarkable on it every single day," she
"All industries are being disrupted," said Lane Fox, listing
MOOCS, digital healthcare innovations, business solutions for the
developing world and online retail -- the sector with which she is
most personally familiar -- as the areas in which we are starting
to see the most significant changes.
Half of web users worldwide are now online shoppers, she said,
adding that in the UK, the online retail sector now accounts for
nearly 10 percent of the country's total annual GDP. "The British
are the most advanced online shoppers on the planet," she said.
The UK internet sector is now bigger than the education sector,
the health sector and the construction sector, Lane Fox pointed
out. Record numbers of digital startups around the country, along
with hugely successful businesses such as ASOS, Lastminute.com and
Moshi Monsters, put the UK in an extremely strong position to take
advantage of this revolution in retail.
"The UK's relative position on the technology stage is a complex
one. There are many ways in which we lead the world," said Lane
Fox, adding that our location and language put us at a huge
advantage in that they mean we are a vital part of every global web
"Through the Government Digital Service, the UK government is also "leading
the way in terms of open data, open standards and digital
governance," she said. At the same time, she criticised the
government's reactions to the Snowden allegations, describing it as
being "woefully quiet on the subject of liberty versus
There are in fact several ways the UK is falling short in its
adoption of technology beyond the online skills deficiency, she
pointed out. These include average UK broadband speeds, the failure
of UK businesses to scale themselves to compete on a global level
and the lack of understanding about the digital world on behalf of
the country's corporate, public and political elite. "Only four
FTSE 100 businesses have a CTO or digital executive on their PLC
boards and yet all of these businesses are facing potential
upheaval," said Lane Fox.
"The technology landscape is not remotely stable but is changing
at mindboggling speed," she said, suggesting that the 25th birthday
of the web is a "good moment to reflect" on how we react to the
pace of change. The Baroness also repeated Tim Berners Lee's
challenge for us all to take part in open-source-style, local
discussions trying to answer the question: "what kind of web do we
You can read Martha Lane Fox's full speech from the House of
Lords on her website.