Neighbours helping neighbours: our work with CDA Herts on digital inclusion

Who CDA Herts are

Community Development Action Hertfordshire, or CDA Herts, is the county’s rural community charity. Its aim is healthy, sustainable, connected communities across rural Hertfordshire. A growing part of that work is digital inclusion: helping people get online, and stay online, with confidence.

Its digital projects rely on trained local volunteers, known as Digital Champions and DigiBuddies, who sit alongside people and help with everyday tasks such as shopping, paying bills, ordering prescriptions and setting up email.

A new session in Codicote

This month CDA Herts opened new Digital Support sessions at the John Clements Sports & Community Centre in Codicote, backed by its volunteers, the centre, Hailo-Ops and funding from Autotrader.

Pedro and I dropped in to catch up with Stuart Izzard and the team and see the sessions for ourselves. People came along for help with app updates, the NHS App, two-step verification and more. These are things many of us take for granted, and they sit right at the heart of the digital divide.

Neighbours helping neighbours is at the heart of the CDA Approach.

Kevin put it well when the Codicote sessions launched: it is a new location on the map, thriving with both volunteers and participants, with local businesses contributing their skills along the way. We are pleased to be one of them.

Why this matters right now

The UK’s old analogue phone network closes on 31 January 2027. For most households the switch will be simple. In rural areas the risk is higher. Mobile signal can be patchy, power cuts are more common, and alarms and farm equipment often still rely on the old phone line.

For someone living alone, a telecare alarm that doesn’t connect is a fall nobody hears about.

Check what’s plugged into the phone line

• To do: Telecare and pendant alarms
• To do: Home and burglar alarms
• To do: Lift alarms
• To do: Card payment machines
• To do: Fax machines
• To do: Farm kit, such as weighing stations

Any of these can stop working when the analogue line goes. Tell your phone provider before you are switched.

Where Hailo-Ops fits in

Our work is making complicated processes clear, so that is what we have brought. We mapped the changes landing around 1 October as a swimlane process map. It follows each change from the issue, to what customers say, to where it hurts, to what to do next.

The map covers four changes: Openreach’s final rise in analogue line rental, Google’s September search update, the closure of Microsoft Project Online, and the end of feature updates for Microsoft 365 apps on Windows 10. Most of the fixes start with a simple audit you can do this week.

We have also designed a plain-English flyer on the landline switch-off to support CDA Herts’ digital inclusion work, so the message reaches people who don’t spend their days online.

How you can help

• Check in on older relatives and neighbours, and ask what is plugged into their phone line.
• If someone relies on a telecare alarm, make sure their phone provider knows before any switch.
• Point people towards CDA Herts’ Rural Digital Support sessions.
• If you run a business, list every line and device that dials out, then book your changes early.

Digital inclusion is about people. We are proud to play a small part in it.