The information comes from a report written by PricewaterhouseCoopers at the request of Martha Lane Fox, best known as the founder of travel website lastminute.com, and now the UK’s Champion for Digital Inclusion.

Previous research on digital inclusion has tended to focus on social and consumer benefits, the analysts say; this is the first time that research has considered the economic case for getting more people online.

Lane Fox said: “We need to champion the 4 million people who are currently socially and digitally excluded so that they can enjoy the benefits of being online in the next three years. We want to show there is both a moral and economic imperative for the wider community to take the issue of digital inclusion much more seriously”.

The report certainly delivered some eye-catching conclusions:

• The economic benefit of getting everyone online in the UK is £22 billion.
• If the 1.6 million children who live in families which do not use the internet got online at home, it could boost their total lifetime
  earnings by over £10 billion.
• If 3.5% of the digitally excluded unemployed could find work by using job websites it would deliver an estimated £560 million to the UK economy.
• Internet savvy workers can earn an average increase in lifetime earnings of over £8,000.
• The government could save at least £900 million a year in customer contact costs if all digitally excluded adults got online and made just one electronic contact per month.

However, the press release last week raised a number of questions, and it wasn’t just me who felt a little uneasy about those numbers. Now that the complete report has been published, the logic behind them is available for wider scrutiny.

And even now I’ve seen it, I’m still wary of that headline-grabbing figure of £22 billion. This represents aggregated potential economic benefit, which arises from five sources — online shopping, improved education, higher earnings for ICT users, improved access to jobs, and government efficiencies.

Although the calculation behind each source of economic benefit draws on documented evidence, each one appears to be worked out on a different timescale, and involve bringing a different number of people online.

The educational benefit is worked out over the lifetime of the 1.6 million digitally deprived children in the UK; 4.5% of them boost their future earnings because they do better at school. The consumer benefit appears to be based on 8.1 million households, and assumes that all of them abruptly decide to get online after two years — to coincide with the DITF’s targets (some nice positive thinking there).

Nor do these number necessarily constitute a boost the economy, as the media are reporting. The cash-conscious online consumer still has the same income (enhancement in income being accounted for separately), so the overall effect of saving money by shopping online is likely to be economy neutral.

It’s also worth pointing out that the financial benefit is spread across three groups: individuals, businesses and government. £22 billion doesn’t represent a single pot of cash, and maybe not even much of an uplift to the economy. Does it really make sense to add the numbers together?