Joy’s story: The digital wall pushing Barnsley residents to the edge

Joy highlighted a critical problem: key services are abandoning non-digital options, creating insurmountable barriers for those who lack the skills, devices, or access.

The problem: when access becomes exclusion

Essential services like checking a bank balance or booking a doctor’s appointment are now almost exclusively online:

• Banking: "There's no banks around the area anymore, so it's all online." This forces people to rely on cash machines for basic financial checks, leaving them vulnerable to not noticing unauthorised withdrawals or becoming overdrawn.
• Healthcare: "You've got to call or go online. You can't go in anymore, and that's a big struggle." Joy notes that essential medical communication, like appointment letters, is now only sent via apps with "no text or anything like that offline."
• Welfare & Benefits: The system is exclusively online, demanding complex, 30-page application forms that are difficult to navigate, even for those with digital skills. Joy shared the case of a friend with health issues who could not work and was left with £0.00 after a Work Capability Assessment. "There's no phone number to speak to anybody. There's no app for it… This person cannot get help". 

The consequences are severe, causing a cycle of financial hardship and stress. Joy concluded that for those already struggling, the lack of digital access is the unnecessary final stressor:

"I think the lack of digital access is effectively pushing a lot of people to the edge, right now."

Joy's call for change

Joy believes that a shift in approach from local authorities and service providers is urgently needed to address this digital divide.

• Skills and Access: Local authorities must run free, accessible courses on digital skills. Crucially, these must be advertised using non-digital methods (leaflets, face-to-face contact) so those offline can find them.
• Device and Connectivity Costs: Implement funding for subsidised basic devices that allow access to essential apps. Furthermore, connectivity costs must be addressed by establishing an affordable base-rate internet that prevents service providers from inflating basic internet contract prices.
• Human-First Support: Joy suggests a return to a human element in essential services. This includes face-to-face and phone-based options for welfare and health systems, and continued funding for community support networks, like the Good Things Foundation, to provide the "personal touch" necessary to combat loneliness and provide help.

Joy’s core message for Local Authorities is a simple plea for fundamental access:

"Local authorities should make changes in their area now to put on more courses like this, free, accessible, well-known to people that's not online, to help people get to their internet... and to keep it social, and older people still need that social aspect as well, to combat loneliness as well."