In 2021, the Scottish Government pledged £200m to get 300,000 households online by 2026. That deadline has now passed. The money was never spent. There is still no strategy, no plan, and no named person responsible.
Five years ago, the Scottish Government made a specific, costed commitment. The 2021 Programme for Government pledged £200 million to get 300,000 households online by 2026. That deadline has now passed. The money was never spent. The target was never met.
There was no announcement. No revised plan. No explanation of what happened to the ambition or the funding. The commitment simply disappeared from government communications while the number of digitally excluded households in Scotland remained largely unchanged.
In the 2025–26 Scottish budget, there is no dedicated line for tackling digital exclusion. The only digital inclusion funding currently deployed by the Scottish Government — around £764,000 — comes from the UK Government's Digital Inclusion Innovation Fund, passed through as a Barnett consequential. That compares to £50 million invested at the pandemic peak in 2020, when the urgency of digital exclusion briefly made it a political priority.
The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations has tracked this decline closely. In a piece titled "The long wait for action", SCVO sets out how commitments have repeatedly been made and not followed through — a pattern of convening, consulting, and publishing without delivering.
"No leadership, no momentum."
Third Force News, 2025
The people who were meant to benefit from that £200m commitment are still waiting. Around one in six Scottish adults lacks the foundational digital skills needed for everyday life. 9% of Scottish households have no internet connection at all. These are not abstract statistics — they represent people unable to access Universal Credit online, book a GP appointment through an app, or apply for jobs through portals that assume you have an account and know how to use one.
The Audit Scotland report of August 2024 — which found no action plan and no named accountable lead for digital inclusion — described a situation that has since got worse, not better. The Public Audit Committee closed its scrutiny in January 2025 without the Scottish Government producing the plan that was requested.
The Scottish Government needs to say, plainly, what happened to the £200m commitment and what replaces it. Not a consultation. Not a new body. A funded plan, a named minister responsible for delivery, and a published timetable — the same things that have been asked for repeatedly since 2021.
WIRES is writing to COSLA and to the Scottish Government to ask directly: where is the plan, who is responsible, and when will it be published? You can write to your own councillor asking the same questions.
Vodafone withdrew its £12/month Essentials tariff, raising its entry price to £20. Virgin Media's Essential Broadband at £12.50 is now the lowest verified social tariff on the market — a reminder that these deals and their prices shift, so it's worth checking before you apply.
The government-backed Shared Rural Network has switched on its 140th mobile mast, with 49 now live in Scotland — including a second site on Islay that restores signal from all four networks to an area that previously had none.
The government-backed Shared Rural Network switched on its 50th mobile mast in Scotland on the remote Ardnamurchan peninsula, extending all-four-operator 4G coverage across more than 1,900 square kilometres of rural Scotland — an area larger than Edinburgh and Glasgow combined.
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