Digital Inclusion in Stoke-on-Trent: A Guide

Over a third of Stoke-on-Trent households earn below £16,000 a year. The post-industrial economy here means lower average wages than the national figure, a higher proportion of older residents, and significant pockets of deprivation across all six towns. What that translates to in practice is that a meaningful share of the city’s potential workforce and customer base cannot afford reliable home internet, does not own a usable device, and has never been shown how to use either safely.

That is digital poverty. Right now, in 2026, it is a Stoke-on-Trent business problem as much as it is a social one.

Stoke is now nationally recognised for its response. The DigitALL programme, run by Wavemaker CIC and funded by Stoke-on-Trent City Council through over £800,000 in UKSPF money, beat Rightmove and the Bank of England to win the Digital Technology Leaders Award 2026. Beating a FTSE-listed property platform and one of the country’s oldest financial institutions to a national technology award signals that Stoke is being taken seriously at scale, and that the funding and infrastructure to address digital exclusion is already here, not somewhere in a future budget round.

This post is for business owners who want to understand what digital poverty and digital inclusion actually mean for their operation, which local programmes they can engage with, and what they can do this week that costs little or nothing.

What Digital Poverty Actually Looks Like in Stoke-on-Trent (and Why It Matters to Your Business)

Digital poverty is not just about people who struggle with apps. It covers anyone without reliable broadband, a working device, or the confidence to use either. Ofcom’s research consistently documents millions of UK adults without reliable home internet access, with low income and age as the two biggest drivers.

In Stoke-on-Trent, both of those factors are present in concentration. If your workforce is drawn from the local area, a meaningful share of your staff are likely navigating life with a shared household device, a capped mobile data plan, or no home connection at all.

Here is why that matters commercially, not just socially:

• Recruitment pipeline. If your job adverts live entirely online and your application process requires a laptop and email address, you are self-selecting against a large chunk of the available local workforce before they even see the role.
• Staff productivity and training. Employees who cannot access online training materials, payroll portals or shift-management apps outside work are slower to skill up and harder to manage remotely.
• Customer reach. If your business has moved transactions online and your core local customer base includes older or lower-income residents, a digital-only journey loses you sales. Think about the visitor economy around Middleport Pottery, the independent retail strips in Hanley, or the ceramics producers supplying brands like Portmeirion. These are businesses where a significant portion of the customer and community base is not digitally confident.
• CSR and supply chain. National contracts and public sector procurement increasingly score suppliers on social value. A documented commitment to digital inclusion puts points on that board at almost no cost.

The business case for caring about digital inclusion in Stoke-on-Trent is not abstract. It is sitting in your hiring numbers, your training completion rates, and your online conversion data right now.

The Funding and Programmes Already Running in Stoke: DigitALL, WyserASSIST and the Growth Hub

You do not need to build anything from scratch. Several well-funded programmes are already operational in Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire, and most of them have capacity for employer involvement.

DigitALL (Wavemaker CIC)

The headline programme. DigitALL has received £814,992 in UKSPF funding from Stoke-on-Trent City Council across 2024/25 and 2025/26. It has distributed 751 devices to residents who could not afford their own, delivered over 194 hours of guided learning, run more than 400 face-to-face sessions, and reached nearly 2,300 residents across the city.

As an employer, you can engage with DigitALL in a few practical ways: refer employees who need basic digital skills support, donate redundant business devices (more on that below), or ask about partnership opportunities if your premises could host a session. Contact Stoke-on-Trent City Council’s digital inclusion team to find the current referral route.

WyserASSIST

Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire Moorlands is one of the areas that secured a grant from the national Digital Inclusion Innovation Fund, a £9.5 million pot announced by DSIT in August 2025. The WyserASSIST project delivers digital advice sessions covering online banking, job searching, and safe online skills, targeting people who are currently digitally excluded.

For employers, this matters because WyserASSIST is building the digital confidence of the same population you want to hire. If you are struggling to recruit people with even basic digital literacy, this programme is upstream of your hiring problem. Connecting with WyserASSIST as a local employer, willing to offer entry-level roles to programme graduates, is a low-effort way to access a pre-qualified candidate pipeline.

The Growth Hub’s Digital Boost offer

This one is directly for your business rather than your staff. The Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire Growth Hub lists Digital Boost as a free platform connecting small businesses with volunteer digital experts for one-to-one mentoring and masterclasses. If your business’s own digital capability is the gap (not just your employees’), this is the starting point.

The Growth Hub also carries UKSPF-funded Get Started and Grow support for businesses up to five years old. If you are still in your early trading years, contact the Growth Hub directly to see what is currently open.

The national Digital Inclusion Action Plan, published in February 2025, sets the broader policy direction that all of these local programmes sit within. Understanding it helps you speak the right language when approaching councils or funders.

How Stoke Employers Can Help Bridge the Digital Divide (Without Breaking the Budget)

You do not need a budget line labelled “digital inclusion” to make a difference here. The actions that move the needle most are either free or close to it.

Sign the IT Reuse for Good Charter

The IT Reuse for Good Charter was launched by DSIT in June 2025. It encourages businesses and public bodies to donate refurbished devices to digitally excluded individuals rather than sending them to recycling or landfill. If your business refreshes its laptops or tablets on a two or three year cycle, the outgoing devices have a second life with real value.

Signing the charter costs nothing. It documents your contribution, which counts toward social value scoring in procurement. And it gives you something concrete to put in a grant application or impact report.

Action this week: identify when your next device refresh is due, nominate someone to log the outgoing equipment, and register your interest with the IT Reuse for Good Charter.

Tell eligible staff about broadband social tariffs

This is the most underused practical tip in the digital inclusion space for employers. Ofcom data shows that only around 8% of Universal Credit households eligible for a social tariff broadband deal are actually on one. Social tariffs give eligible households (mainly Universal Credit claimants) access to broadband from around £10 to £15 per month from major providers including BT, Sky, Virgin Media and others.

If you have staff on lower wages who are Universal Credit recipients, pointing them toward the Ofcom social tariffs page costs your payroll team five minutes and meaningfully improves their home connectivity. Better home internet means staff can access your rota apps, training materials and HR portals outside work. That is a productivity gain that comes directly from an HR conversation.

Action this week: ask your HR lead or line managers to include social tariff signposting in your next staff communications round or onboarding pack.

Make your own digital customer journey more accessible

If a significant portion of your customer base in the Potteries is older or on a lower income, a digital-only transaction journey is quietly costing you revenue. This does not mean abandoning your website or online booking system. It means running a parallel option: a phone number that works, a simple form that does not require account creation, and staff who are trained to help customers who find digital processes difficult.

Action this week: test your own online booking or purchase journey on a mobile with a slow connection. If it breaks or frustrates, fix it. Then make sure your phone number is visible and staffed.

Turning Inclusion Into Opportunity: Recruiting and Retaining from Stoke’s Digitally Excluded Workforce

The Staffordshire Chambers’ Local Skills Improvement Plan (as reported by the Daily Focus in July 2026, citing plan data) identifies digital technology as a top skills priority for the region through 2027. It also flags that over 133,000 economically inactive working-age residents exist across Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire, and that 60,000 higher-level jobs will be needed by 2035.

Those two data points are connected. A large pool of people who are not currently working, many of whom are digitally excluded, alongside a growing demand for digital skills. The businesses that build hiring pipelines into digitally excluded communities now will have a structural advantage in five years.

The practical steps here are not complicated:

• Post jobs through offline channels as well as online. Jobcentre Plus noticeboards, community centres, and local libraries still reach people who are not online. If you only post on Indeed, you only reach people already digitally included.
• Partner with DigitALL or WyserASSIST as an employer of first resort. Make it known that you are willing to take on people who have just completed a digital skills programme. You get motivated, recently trained candidates; they get a local employment pathway.
• Build basic digital literacy into your induction, not your job spec. If the job genuinely only requires basic computer skills, do not list “must be proficient in Microsoft Office” as a barrier to entry. Train for what you need on the job. The candidate pool you access is much wider.
• Use the Growth Hub’s free digital mentoring for your own team. If your existing staff need to level up their digital skills, Digital Boost through the Growth Hub is the free route to get that done without a training budget.

I have seen this play out from the inside. When I was managing a team at an industrial tool supplier in Stoke-on-Trent, some of the most capable people on the floor struggled with anything digital. Not because they were not smart, but because they had never been shown how and had no reason to learn outside work. The moment we invested in basic on-the-job digital training rather than assuming people came with it, we stopped losing good candidates at the application stage over a skills gap that was a few hours of instruction away from being solved. The drop-off rate at the onboarding stage noticeably fell. That is a real operational result from a real business decision, not a theory.

Your Next Steps: Practical Actions for Stoke Businesses in 2026

1. Contact Stoke-on-Trent City Council’s digital inclusion team and ask how your business can engage with DigitALL as an employer partner or device donor. The council’s digital inclusion news page linked throughout this article is the best starting point for finding the current contact route.
2. Register with the IT Reuse for Good Charter via the DSIT digital inclusion roadmap page and log your next device refresh cycle.
3. Add social tariff signposting to your staff communications. One paragraph in the next email or noticeboard update. Job done.
4. Book a free session with Digital Boost through the Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire Growth Hub if your own business’s digital capability is the gap, not just your staff’s.
5. Review your online customer journey on a slow mobile connection and add a visible phone option if your local customer base includes older or lower-income residents.
6. Connect with WyserASSIST and signal that you are open to employing people who complete the digital skills programme. You are solving a hiring problem while contributing to the city’s economic recovery.

The Staffordshire LSIP is clear that digital skills are the regional priority through to 2027 and beyond. The national government has committed significant investment to broadband rollout and is actively funding local inclusion projects. Stoke-on-Trent is already winning national awards for its approach. The infrastructure is in place, and most Stoke SMEs are not yet engaging with any of these programmes. The businesses that move now are the ones that will have a trained, digitally capable workforce and a broader customer base while their competitors are still posting the same job spec to the same job boards.

Once your team has a baseline of digital capability, the natural next question is what to automate. Plenty of the admin burden that eats into small business margins in Stoke (scheduling, reporting, document processing, customer follow-up) can now be handled by AI systems built on your own business data and processes. That is exactly what I do at Wright Advisory: identifying where AI can cut cost or lift output for a specific Staffordshire business, then building and deploying it. Not software licences, not a training course. Actual systems, running against your own KPIs. If that sounds relevant to where your business is heading, book a free discovery call at Wright Advisory and we can look at what makes sense for your operation.