Project Gigabit

(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)

Tuesday 26th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[Dr Ben Spencer (Runnymede and Weybridge) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) for securing this important debate. As was clear from his speech and his diligent, razor-sharp focus on targeting the delivery of gigabit broadband in different parts of his constituency, he is a true community champion. His constituents are lucky to have him.

That is a theme of the debate. All Members have spoken about individual parts of their constituency where broadband is a challenge. That goes to show how important our digital backbone is in the United Kingdom. I will resist the temptation to mention parts of my constituency, such as Queen’s Road or Ellesmere Road in Weybridge, where we have done work to deliver gigabit broadband. The debate demonstrates how important the issue is. It is one that inevitably and invariably gets the attention of Members of Parliament, so that they advocate for their constituents and try to deliver it.

Project Gigabit demonstrates simply that where there is a will, there is a way. Back in 2019, 7% of properties had what is defined as “gigabit access” or 1 gigabit per second. In April 2024—the last official stats we have—that had reached 81%. In fact, it is believed that the 85% target, due to be reached in ’25, has already been reached. That is a huge roll-out of gigabit broadband to households over the past five years of a Conservative Government.

There are of course people who do not have gigabit broadband, and it is critical that we work to ensure that they can have that vital accessibility. That is absolutely not just about being able to watch this debate in HD—to listen to my dulcet tones and to see the spots on my face; it is about industry and connectivity, and the events of covid showed just how important that is. Look at the £5 billion investment allocated to the project; some data shows that that is probably a £60 billion contribution to the UK economy.

How do we go about rolling out the delivery of gigabit broadband across the country? We as Conservatives know that the way to do it is to get industry involved and work with it. That is why 80% of the gigabit broadband target is linked to industry bringing it through, although we recognised that to get to the further 20% of roll-out, we needed to bring in subsidy and break down barriers. That is where we move from the initial phase of Project Gigabit, which was to do with industry delivering, to now, with the public subsidy we have seen over the past few years.

A great concern, however, is future inequalities, in particular in delivery to rural areas versus urban areas. The great concern is that over the next six months to a year, there will be a reallocation of priority away from rural areas to urban areas.

[The Minister for Data Protection and Telecoms (Chris Bryant)]

I do not know where the hon. Gentleman got that from.

[Dr Spencer]

The Minister chunters from his seat, but in his speech, please can he assuage that concern? The way to do so is to provide transparent data on the prioritisation of funding and the roll-out.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Data Protection and Telecoms (Chris Bryant)]

Lord, I had not expected that so quickly—nor did you earlier, Mr Dowd. It is great to see you in the Chair. I congratulate the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) on securing the debate.

I will say first that our ambition is no different from that of the previous Government, which is to get to precisely the same numbers by 2030 as was stated previously. I am pretty confident that we will be able to get there. There are significant challenges, which I will try to explain in a moment.

As the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer) rightly said, the whole idea of BDUK and Project Gigabit was to enable gigabit-capable broadband to be brought to nearly every property in the UK, primarily through commercial operators advancing on the basis of commercial viability. We knew that that would be impossible in some areas, which was why there would have to be a subsidy from the Government—or the previous Government knew it, and we subscribed to that, too. The difficulty is that that precise decision by the commercial operators as to where is commercially viable changes all the time. It is a moving target; county by county, they constantly revise decisions on the properties they will cover on a commercial basis. Therefore, the decision by BDUK about how many properties to include in the subsidised roll-out also vary.

That is happening at a time when the market is considering long-term investments. Openreach has decided to increase significantly the number of places it expects to roll out to on a commercial basis. Other operators are worried. In the south-west, operators have already been unable to fulfil their commitments, and other contracts have had to be entered into. That makes reaching secure outcomes in each constituency a difficult process.

I have made this offer before. Some of the dramatis personae of this debate are similar to those I have met in other quarters at other times. I am happy for any individual MP who has concerns in their patch to meet my officials and those from BDUK to go through this issue village by village and do a precise piece of work. I know these are very real issues. As the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon said in his opening remarks, this is not a luxury that is nice to have; it is essential to people’s livelihoods, economy and sometimes their lives, whether we are talking about mobile connectivity or broadband. Many aspects of that have to be delivered over the next few years.

I issue one word of caution. A number of hon. Members referred to hard-to-reach properties. That is a very broad definition. There are properties that are very hard to reach where, frankly, a roll-out cannot be achieved by a commercial operator or the taxpayer. That is where, as several hon. Members have said, we must be imaginative over the next few years about alternative means of delivery. That might be a wi-fi operation or reliance on satellite. Some people have already taken up the satellite option at £75 a month, as has been mentioned, although I am not particularly advertising that. It is problematic that there is only one operator in that space. I hope there will be more in future because competition is good in this market. I would praise the previous Government for that. There is not just one operator; we have allowed competition to operate in the roll-out of broadband.

Members, including some on the Government Benches, have had conversations about ducts and poles. There have been rows about the inconsiderate roll-out from some operators that have brought in street furniture that is otiose, redundant or duplicates what is already there, or where they have chosen not to use ducts because they do not want to talk to the commercial operators. I have been trying hard to ensure that all operators work as collaboratively as possible, within the bounds of competition law, to deliver broadband without obstructions.

I feel as though I have had all the villages of the UK brought to mind, and I am not sure that I have managed to write them down correctly—I apologise if I get things wrong. I welcome the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon to the House; I believe a family member was also here for a while. I have good news for him, although he might already know it, so he may not think it is as good as I do. He has been worrying about connectivity at the Beaver industrial estate, and I think AllPoints Fibre is coming early in 2025 to sort that out.

I looked at the figures for superfast, ultrafast, full-fibre and gigabit in the hon. Member’s constituency. While his constituency is actually ahead of the rest of the UK on superfast—it gets more than 30 megabits per second —that is not going to be sufficient for most people in the next few years, so we want to get much higher than that. On all the other measures, his constituency is some way behind the rest of the UK. I accept that there is a challenge there, and I am thoroughly determined to meet it.

The hon. Member referred to digital exclusion, in terms of physical access to gigabit-capable, ultrafast or full-fibre broadband. There are many different factors that might lead to digital exclusion. If I had a criticism of the previous Government—well, I have quite a few criticisms, but one that even they would accept as fair—it would be that we did not have a digital inclusion strategy for 10 years. In that time, in many areas of the country, whether because of poor skills, poverty, disability or the physical exclusion that the hon. Member referred to—I know it well in the south Wales valleys—there has been a level of digital exclusion that makes it impossible for people to take part in today’s economy or society. We need to address all that. It is my hope that, before we get to the end of the year, we will be able to point to the next steps in digital inclusion that we as a Government need to take.

The hon. Member seemed to say that the previous Government were absolutely wonderful but left the country in a terrible state in relation to broadband, especially in his constituency. If I might gently say, Conservative Members, including the shadow Minister, have to decide which way they are going to go on that: were they a great Government or were they not really up to it? I know what the country decided.

There is no rural/urban divide on this issue. I fully accept that there are specific challenges in many rural areas—my own constituency is semi-rural—but in many urban areas, while superfast broadband or gigabit-capable fibre is theoretically going down the street, it is not going into every building because of a whole series of other issues that we also have to address. That does not mean that we are redirecting Project Gigabit money away from rural to urban areas; more than 90% of the money has been spent in rural areas and will continue to be spent in rural areas.

The fundamental misconception in the letter that the hon. Member signed, and which quite a lot of other Conservative Members signed, which was brought forward by the right hon. Member for Maldon (Sir John Whittingdale), was that Project Gigabit was always designed to take gigabit-capable broadband to wherever it was needed. There was not a specific definition of rural or urban, and I am not changing that. It is need that determines where the money is spent—nothing other than that—and I fully accept that the vast majority of that is going to be in rural areas.

I welcome the hon. Member for Caerfyrddin (Ann Davies) to the House; I have campaigned a lot in her seat—not very successfully. She makes a good point that many villages in rural Wales are some of the most disadvantaged in this area and in mobile connectivity, which is why I am pleased that we recently rolled out seven new enhanced masts for mobile connectivity in Wales, including, I think, in her constituency. That does not answer the broadband issue, but we hope to address that through Building Digital UK.

My hon. Friend the Member for York Outer (Mr Charters) referred to t’internet. On the defence site in his constituency, my understanding is that that is a Ministry of Defence responsibility, but we will chase that up and write to him on that issue. He is absolutely right—Defence families should not be at a worse disadvantage than those across the road who are not in Defence properties. I know that the Secretary of State for Defence is keen to address those issues, because I have spoken to him about it.

The hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) referred to Starlink, and he is absolutely right. He rightly gave a list of villages, which were Warcop, Hilton, Murton—with a “u”, not an “e”—and Ormside, about which BDUK is presently in the process of negotiating. I do not want to descope at this point, because I very much hope that we will get to a resolution in the next month, but he makes a strong point. If it proves necessary to abandon ship, as it were, he can come back at me on that.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Joe Morris) —we must stop meeting like this—was sitting in the same place in the Chamber last week when we had a debate about tourism in his constituency. He is right that the tourist industry cannot survive without proper broadband. To rectify some of the issues that he was talking about last week, including with some of the beautiful villages in his constituency, we need to be able to roll out broadband.

I need to be careful about this point, but there will be properties that are not commercially viable or viable for the taxpayer to fund, because they are simply too difficult to reach. I think everybody accepts that, but it will be a tiny proportion—probably 1% or fewer. As several Members have said, however, we at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology definitely need to accelerate the process of thinking about the alternative mechanisms we can provide. Some people are already relying on Starlink, but we may need to come up with other solutions.

The Lib Dem spokesperson, the hon. Member for Harpenden and Berkhamsted (Victoria Collins), is absolutely right that we need to look for technical solutions. That is why, through UK Research and Innovation and the research and development side of DSIT, we are keen to look at those areas.

The hon. Member for Honiton and Sidmouth (Richard Foord) talked about villages where broadband stopped 100 metres short, which is absolutely infuriating for everybody. Obviously, that is the kind of thing that we want to address. I know that he has already had conversations, and we have another meeting with several of his colleagues coming up, so we will be able to address those issues then.

I know bits of the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Torcuil Crichton) well, as he knows, and I have visited where some of my family are from. We need to look for very creative solutions in his constituency, because he is right that if someone is making Harris tweed, they want to be able to sell it, but they cannot create a business unless they have proper high-speed broadband. I note that we have superfast on Iona. I do not think there are many monks left there, but there is a community. In fact, it has a couple of hotels that I have stayed in, which also want and need connectivity.

I will give the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon a couple of minutes to wind up, but I will quickly refer to my hon. Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (James Naish), who is right that we need to do something about flexi permits. We have already written to the Department for Transport about that. My hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Chris Bloore) has similar issues in his patch.

Finally, I welcome the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge, to his post, as I failed to do when we had DSIT questions last week. He has to decide whether the last Government were absolutely brilliant or whether they completely failed in this area.