In a basement of a hostel, tucked back from Smithfield Market in Central London, huddles a small group, talking urgently about why the PCs spread out around them matter so much to their work.

Both the shelter and its staff belong to Centrepoint: which, as the UK’s leading youth-homelessness charity, provides essential services to young people between 16 and 25 years. This particular hostel is where the charity introduced its first computers: in 2006, when the charity still considered them something of a luxury. Three years on, IT seems increasingly like a core utility. “It could be better,” says one of Centrepoint’s staff. “But it’s growing.”

Godfred Hercules, this foyer’s support and develoment worker, runs through the reasons young people find themselves at Centrepoint’s gates: abuse, kicked out, parents unable to financially support them. Some leave out of choice. “Our aim and purpose is to make their lives better so they can manage to get jobs, hold down jobs, get housing and learn to manage their money and generally be better off than when they came in,” he says.

Computers? Godfred ticks off their uses: employment, training, school coursework, writing CVs, scanning university prospectuses, seeking housing, applying for benefits. Everything. “It’s pretty vital really.”

Stuart Rogers, Centrepoint’s chief resources officer, expands on this: while chaos and homelessness often go hand in hand, technology can actually act as a vital counterbalance to some of that confusion: providing continuity and support-networks without the need for a fixed address.

“You can be geographically displaced but computers mean you don’t have to feel displaced emotionally,” he says. “whether that’s from friends, from family, from education and from those connections you’ve made in training and education.”

A young woman, Emilyn Hutchinson, is the last to speak. She came here, at the age of 17, in 2007, as a resident, as a result of violence at home. At the time, the hostel had one solitary computer, which she shared with 11 fellow Centrepoint residents. Access was infrequent, it often broke: as Emilyn strove to stop this profound personal crisis impacting her education, she instead found feeble internet access pushing her further away from normality. A needless extra hurdle to getting her life back on track.

She explains: “I had depression. Going out the house was one of the hardest things for me. Sometimes it’s hard just to step out the door. Having access to the internet would have helped massively.”

Emilyn got through: she’s now a confident young woman, in independent living, and studying for a degree in Clinical Psychology at Brunel University. “Am I online? Yes, definitely. It’s my life,” she laughs.

ABOVE: Emilyn and Godfred

Emilyn Hutchinson joined Race Online 2012’s People’s Taskforce in March 2010.

Centrepoint is currently seeking funding to pilot College Without Walls, a programme for ‘NEET’ (not in education, employment or training) young people which will use technology to deliver college courses, and mentoring, that will not be bound by a fixed academic year or geography. It is devised so people can maintain their education when they move address and so lose their association with a physical college and their immediate support-network: twin factors that lead many young people with otherwise bright futures to instead drop out of learning and opportunity.

A first task for anyone trying to get more of the country online is to look at the older end of the age spectrum. According to Ofcom, those aged 65 and over are less than half as likely to have a home internet connection than those under 65.

What encourages people in this age group to get online? Perhaps the common term ‘silver surfer’ is misleading, as it gives the image of people surfing the internet for hours every day. Researchers from the University of Hertfordshire Business School have been studying older peoples’ attitudes to the internet and have found that the idea of sending and receiving e-mail appeals to them the most.

A focus on communication was picked up among people in this age group who are already online – what they really love is keeping in touch with their closest family members, especially those who might be hard to track down by phone. Children or grandchildren living abroad are a good example of this, where the advantages of using the internet to avoid long-distance telephone charges are also obvious.

We think that once people have taken advantage of basic e-mail communication, more ‘advanced’ internet usage will probably follow – be that social networking, online shopping or watching TV online. E-mail should be a no-brainer from which other things will follow.

It’s this kind of research which is useful to people like us who are trying to get people online, and it’s always good to see.