Research: Digital

We provide robust research to inform the development of strategy and policy to firmly establish Greater Manchester as the UK’s number one digital city region. We help to understand issues like digital exclusion, connectivity and infrastructure, and new and expanding sectors such are our AI and cyber sectors.

Examples of our work include:

• Creating and updating the Digital Exclusion Risk Index (external website)
• Collating and analysing information on where digital skills support is provided through the Digital Skills Map

Case Study: Digital Inclusion

Digital inclusion has risen in prominence over the last year, with services like health, education, information and shopping being provided digitally due to the pandemic. Those who are ‘digitally excluded’ are at risk of missing out on opportunities for education and a good start in life, or may suffer with poorer health. Because of this, there are questions as to whether digital inclusion should now be considered as a human right and connectivity as a basic utility.

As a research team, we have a role in defining, monitoring and evaluating progress in digital inclusion. We are also tasked with identifying and scaling local work, and connecting people and information. Our work has to help policy officers and front-line workers to support individuals who are not digitally included, and to target resources appropriately for maximum impact. We need to provide an understanding of who is most at risk of not being digitally included, where digital exclusion is more likely to occur, and what actions have the biggest impact.

As part of this role, we looked at Salford City Council’s Digital Exclusion Risk Index, which shows the areas within Salford at greatest risk of digital exclusion. We connected with the team behind this model to understand their methodology, and then sought to recreate the model at a national scale. We are now working with partners from the public, private and third sector to improve the model and provide a consistent methodology across England and Wales.

This led to the production of our Digital Exclusion Risk Index (DERI) tool (external website). The tool brings together a series of indicators of digital exclusion. Each indicator is given a score between 0 and 10, with 0 being low risk and 10 being high risk. These indicators are weighted to form overall scores for three components: age, deprivation and broadband. The three components are then weighted to produce a final overall DERI score for each LSOA in England and Wales. Users are able to view the Local Authority areas that they are interested in and can amend the weightings of the individual indicators and components within the tool. Alongside this, we documented our data sources and methodology (external website) on GitHub. This provides the opportunity for other regions to reproduce their own version of the model that could potentially incorporate local factors too.