Trafford Metropolitan Council is leading the way in helping people get connected online, and on 13 March 2025 council staff were celebrating after winning the Sustainability Pioneer Award. This award is a major digital inclusion accolade awarded at the Digital Leaders Impact Awards, which was held in London on 13 March 2025. The award recognises the Local Authority’s Council’s Tech4All campaign which was developed in May 2024 to provide households in Trafford with access to digital services.
Donated equipment is refurbished and re-used
Trafford Council partnered with Community Computers to refurbish and distribute donated IT equipment to families and individuals across the borough.
Over 1,000 people living in the local area have attended the Tech4All events to learn more about internet use, and 265 households have been supplied with refurbished laptops to enable them to use internet services at home, while 325 residents have received free SIM cards. Since the start of Tech4All, a total 2,000 devices have been donated for the scheme.
Council Leader, Councillor Tom Ross in his statement said
Everyone at Trafford Council is delighted that we have won this prestigious award. Tech4All has transformed many, many lives by providing technology, skills, and connectivity while championing sustainability. We are incredibly proud of this achievement and remain committed to making digital access available for all.
Many people in the country still are not connected
The Local Authority deserves praise for its laudable aim of achieving its digital inclusion target under their Digital Strategy from 2025 to 2028, and their award shows they are going in the right direction in this area.
Councils across England are grappling with huge challenges. Not everyone is lucky enough to be able to access the internet. This may be due to a person’s age, health problems, living in an internet black spot where the people residing in the area experience patchy to no internet access.
As Paul James, the Chief Digital Officer and Tom Ross, the Councillor and Leader of Trafford Council, stated in the Local Authority’s Digital Strategy 2025-28,
Despite positive developments in digital use and connectivity in recent years, there are still some challenges to overcome in Trafford’s digital landscape. While many parts of the borough have good digital infrastructure, some areas – especially in the most rural wards – experience gaps in connectivity and slower broadband speeds. The digital divide remains a key issue, with older generations or lower-income residents sometimes facing barriers to full digital participation.
The NCFE found that ‘one of the biggest factors contributing to digital poverty, and enabling the digital divide is financial poverty causing digital poverty’.
And Age UK stated that only ‘7% of people in the United Kingdom aged 65 or over and 3% of the demographic aged 55 to 64 do use a mobile phone’.
Addressing the inequality
Is anything being done to bridge the gap? For the answer to this question the reader needs look no further than the National Device Bank as set up by the Good Things Foundation which provides refurbished laptops, tablets and mobile phones to individuals who don’t already have access to an internet ready device. The Device Bank was originally created during the Covid-19 pandemic, in response to the fact that the internet became a lifeline to stay connected with loved ones.
It should not be underestimated how difficult it is for some people of advancing years or with physical and/or mental disabilities in the United Kingdom. Many people need support with shopping, preparing their meals, doing the laundry, cleaning, maintaining their homes, bathing, dressing, travelling, managing their finances, and sending basic correspondence via the internet to manage doctors appointments, contact utility companies if there is a problem, pay for parking and such (as some carparks now only accepted payment via an app) stay connected to friends and relatives.
Having to use an app on a small mobile phone screen with a very small keyboard, for someone who is unsure about internet language and afraid to hit the wrong key can be extremely stressful. But many companies have now removed the option to talk to a person on the phone, or have a call centre somewhere abroad which can cause people, especially those hard of hearing or with some kind of speech difficulty, to have a lot of trouble understanding the person on the other end and making themselves understood.
It can be very stressful for people who find themselves in a position where they become responsible for the care of the person with difficulty using the internet, as they will find themselves having to do tasks for them that would not have been a problem if services had remained the same as they used to be.
Digital age discrimination
Back in May 2018, Ben Altman of Age UK found the Government guilty of digital age discrimination, and leaving millions of older people at risk of poverty by not being able to claim the help or benefits they are entitled to, as claims need to be done online.
Back then Altman noted that whilst ‘Britain is leading many technological advances’, on the downside ‘this risks older generations being increasingly marginalised by society.
Altman pointed out that:
3.8million older people in Britain today have never used the internet. Many of us are so used to online connections that we are in danger of forgetting how fast the technological developments have been.
