Housing, poverty, and digital exclusion: the multiple ways in which digital inequalities and housing inequalities intersect

Given the importance of digital technologies in shaping everyday life, it is widely accepted that digital exclusion is a key facet of poverty. Relatedly, housing inequalities, and the broader structures of entrenched inequalities of which they are a part, are closely connected with digital exclusion. This paper draws on focus groups with people who have experience or knowledge of digital exclusion and the housing sector in the UK. It highlights how barriers to digital inclusion manifest through the numerous ways in which broader disadvantage is reflected and compounded in housing inequalities. Housing disadvantage intersects with digital exclusion along several lines and at multiple scales simultaneously, from the processes of accessing housing (including in the social housing sector) and the particularities of living in temporary accommodation, to infrastructural barriers at regional and local scales, and inequalities which play out at household level. In an increasingly digitalised housing sector, digital exclusion presents a worrying barrier to securing decent long-term housing, and this paper highlights that housing is an important site of intervention in addressing digital exclusion.