The Big Lottery Fund has announced a £15m funding programme that will be developed in partnership with Go On UK to support community projects that build digital skills.

It will open to applications in the autumn, but BIG said it was making the announcement now to give potential applicants time to forge partnerships ahead of making an application.

Peter Wanless, outgoing chief executive of BIG said: “BIG has £15m available to the organisations who can demonstrate most convincingly to us how they will use the cash to turn the disconnected and disinterested into confident users of online services.”

He added that: “We expect to fund only a handful of significant projects, so competition will be intense.”

The organisations are hoping to build on the Go On Liverpool partnership which reduced the number of people offline by 55 per cent in 18 months and was supported by £100,000 of BIG funding.

BIG was one of the founding partners of the Go On UK initiative, which launched last year to build on the work of Race Online 2012. Baroness Lane-Fox, chair of Go On UK welcomed the funding and called on more organizations to “play their part”.

She also announced that the next step for the Go On UK campaign is a focus on developing partnerships and delivering digital skills in the North East of England, which will begin in October.

Lane-Fox said: “We are confident we will be able to provide further evidence of the impact of partnership working to drive up digital skills and build a replicable partnership model that we can roll out across the nation over the next 18 months.”  

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