What would you do without internet for a week?
Shopping, banking, ordering NHS prescriptions, paying council tax bills, and applying for jobs and benefits are just some of the important everyday tasks people can now carry out from the comfort of their homes thanks to the internet - opening doors for many people, from busy full-time workers to pensioners keeping up their independence.
But as online services continue to expand, and in-person provisions shut down as a result, those who cannot afford laptops, smartphones and broadband are at risk of being cut off from the rest of the world.
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Deputy Mayor of Liverpool Jane Corbett, who runs a poverty action group in Everton, said the problem of digital exclusion was a "poverty trap".
She said: "A lot gets talked about in terms of food, energy, clothing, but not much is said about digital access.
"The levels of poverty in the city are increasing for people in work as well as out. Since Covid-19 we've seen an increase of people who are facing in-work poverty of 130% . It's jumped right up. People think it's just people out of work, but it's not - a third of people on universal credit are actually in work. The cost of living crisis on top of all that makes it really difficult to cope, and one of those costs is the cost of digital access.
"A lot of services have gone online. Not online the council and the NHS, but also job opportunities and work. A lot of landlords, including housing associations, expect people to contact them online.
"You're basically excluded from a whole world if you're not online. If you're not online, it actually becomes pretty dangerous economically."
In the UK, the average broadband bill is just over £30 a month, but this can vary based on internet speed, package type, and location.
In an effort to save residents money, Liverpool City Council teamed up with O2 last year to provide struggling households with MiFi routers, portable broadband devices which allow multiple users to share an internet connection, and free SIM cards.
This offered a valuable lifeline to people like Kelly Walsh, a single mum of four, who said she didn't know what to do when Covid-19 plunged the UK into lockdown and she was told her children would have to attend school online.
Kelly, 47, from Everton, said: "My children could only access the internet at school because we didn't have it at home. It was either food or internet.
"I told Jane about it and she got me a little MiFi router so my daughter could do her coursework online - otherwise, she wouldn't have been able to do it. Going online is a necessity. If I hadn't had it, they wouldn't have had any education at all.
"If it wasn't for the council, my children wouldn't have been able to do any of their schoolwork whatsoever.
"Things are so much more difficult if you don't have internet - shopping, job searching, even banking is all online. The only place you can get free internet access is at a library, and those are few and far between.
"It can be quite upsetting. There are other things more important - food, heating, electricity - but I really do feel that internet is a necessity in today's society. So it's quite upsetting when as a family you can't afford to have it. £30 a month is nearly a week's shopping for me."
Cllr Corbett said: "In the council we have a Get Connected scheme, and have connected 1,800 families with a MiFi with unlimited data for a year. Also the London Grid for Learning has provided broadband for quite a few of our schools and gave us 500 Chromebooks for pupils across the city.
"But there are also pockets of the city, particularly in Everton and small areas of Clubmoor, Anfield and Speke, where the 2022 census digital return rate was very low.
"There's more and more people affected by this because of the cost of living and because they have to make really difficult decisions about what they can't pay for and what they can.
"Society has changed dramatically, particularly over lockdown when people desperately needed to be online. It was like a missing piece of the jigsaw on the Government's end. If they had thought things through, they would have realised they were excluding a whole generation of children struggling to be online. Long term, it means they are excluded from a lot of the offers that are out there.
"It's a vicious circle, a very vicious system. You've got to be online to see what opportunities are out there, otherwise you're locked out. It's a poverty trap."
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