The digital front door to adult social care
If an older resident in Grantham or one of South Kesteven's villages wants help finding a befriending service, a meals delivery, or support with a home adaptation, Lincolnshire County Council's own adult social care page offers a clear steer: visit Connect to Support Lincolnshire. What they find there is not a helpline but a searchable online directory — a catalogue of local community groups, activities, and care services that residents are expected to browse, filter, and act on themselves.
Connect to Support Lincolnshire operates as the council's delegated digital gateway for adult social care. It lists everything from day centre timetables to voluntary driving schemes, and is the platform the council explicitly names when signposting adults who need help living independently. For South Kesteven residents, this is largely where the council's guidance ends: the district's own support pages route people toward this directory rather than offering a substantive alternative for those who cannot or will not use the internet.
A small detail on the platform's front page is worth noting. Alongside the directory listings sits a warning about telephone scammers who have been impersonating Age UK Lincolnshire — cold-calling residents and asking for bank details. The notice is routine in one sense, but it also signals something about the trust environment older users are already navigating: knowing who is legitimate, and who to call for help in the first place, is not a given.
The direction of travel nationally points the same way. The NHS 10 Year Plan places the NHS App at the centre of how people will access health and care services — making digital-first access less a local council choice than a settling national default.
How many older people in Lincolnshire are actually online
The scale of the problem becomes clearer when national data is read alongside what is known about Lincolnshire specifically. Age UK's July 2025 analysis found that 2.4 million older people in the UK — roughly 19%, or nearly one in five — have very limited internet use, defined as going online less than once a month or not at all. Among those who are offline, 31% cite poor IT skills as the reason, and 12% do not use any mobile phone.
These are national figures, but Lincolnshire gives them local weight. The county's own Health and Care Digital Inclusion Strategy, published by Lincolnshire ICB in 2025, acknowledges higher rates of digital exclusion in its most deprived areas — with Boston identified as the most digitally excluded district. More broadly, 43% of Lincolnshire's population is already over 50, a proportion the Centre for Ageing Better notes reflects the demographic profile England as a whole is not expected to reach until the 2040s. Digital exclusion among older people is therefore a structural feature of Lincolnshire's population, not an edge case.
For South Kesteven specifically, the rural geography adds a further layer. NHS England's digital inclusion framework notes that people in rural and coastal areas face heightened exclusion risk due to poor broadband coverage — a direct fit for a district where villages are dispersed and connectivity is uneven. None of this makes the Connect to Support platform the wrong tool; it means the question of who can realistically use it is one the county cannot afford to leave unanswered.
Why distrust is not the same as lack of skills
Twenty-two per cent of older people who do not go online cite lack of trust in the internet as their reason — not poor IT skills, not absent devices, not patchy broadband. This figure, from Age UK's July 2025 analysis, sits alongside the skills and access data but does not reduce to it. It describes a structurally different problem.
Distrust is not a gap in technical knowledge that a course can fill. A person who knows roughly how to use a tablet but does not believe the internet is a safe place to seek help with care needs is not going to be reached by a six-to-eight-week loan and a Digital Champions session. What they have concluded — often rationally, given the landscape they inhabit — is that the risk is not worth taking. The scam warning on Connect to Support's own homepage is a small illustration of this environment: the platform designed to be a trusted front door for adult social care must open with a notice that impersonators have been cold-calling older Lincolnshire residents while posing as Age UK. Trust, here, is not a background condition — it is the active question.
There is a further dimension that skills training cannot straightforwardly address: the experience of being helped online by someone else is not the same as choosing to use a service yourself. Research on digital exclusion in healthcare settings identifies what one study terms a 'double burden' — practical exclusion from services alongside an identity cost, as older people shift from being knowledgeable, capable community members to being perceived (and sometimes perceiving themselves) as dependent. Even well-intentioned assistance from a family member can quietly reinforce that shift.
The February 2025 Digital Inclusion Action Plan acknowledged that human intermediaries are structurally necessary for many people — but it did not resolve the underlying tension: being routed through a trusted person and independently navigating a service are not equivalent experiences, and they do not carry the same consequences for dignity or self-perception.
For a platform like Connect to Support, the distinction matters. Better broadband, more devices, and more training sessions address real problems for some of the people who are offline. For others, the limiting factor is something older, more personal, and considerably harder to fix with infrastructure.
What local help exists — and where the gaps are
Three organisations are doing substantive work on this in Lincolnshire. Age UK Lincolnshire's Digital Champions project — listed on Connect to Support itself — offers free one-to-one sessions, computer classes at £5 per hour, and a six-to-eight-week tablet loan service with internet access and ongoing support. Lincs Digital takes a different approach: rather than waiting for people to come to a session, its outreach model goes to day centres, care homes, residents' associations, and people's own homes — directly addressing the mobility and distance barriers that make fixed-location provision unreachable for many older rural residents. North Kesteven District Council, sharing a border with South Kesteven, runs free weekly community digital hubs in libraries, village halls, and community centres, explicitly framing them as a response to residents being told to do things online without having the access or skills to do so.
No equivalent provision is evidenced running regularly across South Kesteven itself. That asymmetry is structural, not incidental — the same southern Lincolnshire geography that generates the need also makes consistent delivery harder.
There is also a self-referential problem at the heart of the current model. Connect to Support lists the Digital Champions service as a way to help people get online. For anyone already online, that listing is easy enough to find. For a resident who is not, it is effectively invisible.
South Kesteven's age-friendly consultation — and what it might reveal
South Kesteven District Council joined the UK Network of Age-Friendly Communities in April 2025 — a step taken only weeks after the government's Digital Inclusion Action Plan set the national direction. The district is now running a survey of older residents covering connectivity, housing, services, and social opportunities, with Cllr Richard Cleaver framing the purpose in plain terms: 'feeling disconnected from society can have an adverse effect on people's mental and physical health.' Results are expected after September 2025.
The survey asks the right questions, at least in outline. Connectivity is explicitly in scope. What it cannot do is substitute for an assessment of Connect to Support itself — no published evaluation tracks who is actually reaching the platform and who is not. A resident survey will capture experience; it will not necessarily show which people never reached the front door in the first place.
The national policy direction — the NHS 10 Year Plan's digital-first emphasis, the Digital Inclusion Action Plan's commitments — was established before the consultation began. South Kesteven is being asked to respond locally to a system already in motion. What the survey will tell the council is whether residents feel heard on connectivity. What it will not resolve, on its own, is whether the infrastructure exists to act on what they report.
What a genuinely inclusive care system would need to look like
The evidence on what works is reasonably consistent. A 2025 rapid review of 21 studies confirmed that multicomponent interventions — combining device access, skills support, peer learning, and trusted human contact — can meaningfully reduce digital barriers for older adults in rural and socioeconomically disadvantaged settings. But the same review found that skills training alone does not sustain inclusion when structural barriers, such as device cost or poor connectivity, remain unaddressed.
That finding matters for any county with Lincolnshire's demographic profile and geography. The case against platforms like Connect to Support is not that they are poorly designed; it is that a system built primarily around them, without reliable offline alternatives, will work well for those who can navigate it and become inaccessible to those who cannot — who are, almost by definition, the people with the most pressing care needs.
Trusted human intermediaries are not a temporary measure while the reluctant catch up. For a significant proportion of older residents — those without devices, those who distrust online systems, those whose health or mobility rules out fixed sessions — a person is the access route, not a supplement to it. The government's Digital Inclusion Action Plan acknowledged as much in February 2025. The structural question is whether that acknowledgement translates into commissioning decisions, or whether the intermediary layer continues to depend on charitable and voluntary provision filling gaps the statutory system has not mapped.
South Kesteven's age-friendly consultation will carry real weight if it generates one specific, answerable demand: not where residents want more digital support, but where the offline pathway currently exists — and who is accountable for maintaining it.
- [1] Qualitative Exploration of Digital Exclusion and Technology Adoption Experiences Among the Elderly. (2025). https://doi.org/10.66298/kerwa.2025.6.3.217 https://doi.org/10.66298/kerwa.2025.6.3.217
- [2] The Double Burden: The Digital Exclusion and Identity Crisis of Elderly Patients in Rural China. (2024). https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.8106 https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.8106