Brown announces broadband for all

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 23 Sep 2008 at 08:29

Gordon Brown is to unveil new proposals under which low-income families will receive vouchers worth up to £700 to get them connected to the internet.

The means-tested vouchers will be worth between £100 and £700 and affect 1.4 million homes. They can be used to pay for broadband charges, software, technical support or even computers should it be necessary.

The scheme will run over the next three years, at an estimated £300 million, and is intended to help ensure all children keep up with the IT revolution in schools, which is increasingly seeing reports, homework and lessons being posted online.

Ministers are also hoping the initiative will help teachers keep in constant contact with parents, rather than the once-a-term teacher/parent meetings that are currently the norm.

"To ensure we are prepared for the times to come, the Government will fund one million more households to get online, enabling parents to link with the teachers at their children's school and helping young people with their homework and coursework," Brown will tell delegates at the Labour Conference in Manchester.

The money has been funded through savings made in other areas of the education budget, according to reports.

The new initiative comes just two years after Brown scrapped the Home Computing Initiative (HCI), a deal which allowed companies to "loan" their employees PC equipment as a tax-free benefit.

The HCI was credited with bringing computers into thousands of low-income households, but was controversially scrapped without warning in the 2006 budget, dealing a terminal blow to British PC manufacturers including Evesham Technology.