Access to Broadband Services

Alyn Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 6th September 2023 Westminster Hall

[Alyn Smith (Stirling) (SNP)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered access to broadband services.

It is good to see you in your place, Sir Christopher, and I am delighted to see so many colleagues from across the House with an interest in broadband. It is close to our hearts in Stirling. I find myself saying quite a lot that in Stirling we have the best broadband in the UK, and we also have the worst broadband in the UK, which I think a number of us, representing urban and rural areas, will have in common. I represent an area that is about as big as Luxembourg, with a huge rural territory, and I am focused on rural broadband provision.

In St Ninians in Stirling, I have fantastic full-fibre broadband. I have nothing to complain about personally, but I am deeply concerned for an awful lot of people I represent who I fear are being left behind by Government policy. I say that mentioning two Governments: the Scottish Government and the UK Government. Telecoms is reserved, but the Scottish Government have been active in this field. I want to reach out to colleagues today and say, “Let’s identify the problems together and work together.” We are going to need to work with the private sector, the state sector and community groups to bridge the gap that we see, because we cannot leave anyone behind.

I will do a brief stocktake of where we are, identify some of the problems and suggest a few solutions, because the people we all serve want to see an outcome to today’s debate, not just a bumping of gums. I am particularly grateful to the House of Commons Library and the Chamber Engagement Team, who have put together some very thorough briefs on this issue. I have had a number of briefings from stakeholders. I have done site visits with Lothian Broadband, Virgin Media and National Broadband. I am also grateful to Paul Anderson in my team for pulling it all together and explaining to me what some of the big words mean, because there is a technical aspect to all this that few of us are across.

I would like to start on a note of agreement. I think we can agree that broadband is not a “nice to have”; it is a necessity. It is the fourth utility. Covid has accelerated everything—it was the great accelerator. It has accelerated trends that were already there, such as people shopping online, doing their banking online and accessing Government services online, particularly as the Post Office seems to be more interested in closing branches than providing services. Banks are closing their branches with gay abandon, particularly in rural areas. That makes broadband more important for rural areas, and it makes joining up rural areas to good broadband even more imperative than it is for urban areas.

There is a moral aspect to all this. People working from home need good broadband. As we see more and more people expected to work from home—and I am fully in favour of that, for all sorts of positive reasons, such as work-life balance and fewer carbon emissions—people in rural areas are being excluded from that potential benefit, because they do not have the broadband they need.

There is a social aspect to this, not least in terms of the substantial amount of public money—Scottish and UK—that is going towards it and the substantial amount of private money that has been invested, for which companies can legitimately expect an honest return. Joining up rural areas is important, and we need to see a greater focus on it. Broadband will revitalise rural areas at a point when, as we are recovering from covid, so many other factors are militating against them. I have talked about the cutting back of services in other areas. That makes broadband even more important.

There has been no shortage of Government activity. I would like to think I have a good relationship with the Minister on this and many other points, and I want to find solutions here. There is a substantial amount of public money being put towards this. Telecoms is reserved to the UK Government, whose Project Gigabit programme is £5 billion of public expenditure. Its objective is for 80% of the network to be built privately, with a subsidy for harder-to-reach areas. I agree with that focus. Gigabit broadband is to be available to 85% of the UK by 2025 and to the rest by 2030. The cynic in me says that those sound like rather round numbers, and we always need to be conscious of the sound of deadlines whooshing past us. I represent a big chunk of the 15%, and I want to see faster activity and a better focus on rural areas, for the reasons I have outlined.

The Scottish Government, for their part, have recognised that there are gaps in provision. As we have a third of the UK land mass, we have a lot of rural areas to cover, as well as the islands. The Scottish Government created the Reaching 100%—R100—scheme and put £600 million behind it, as well as a £49.5 million UK Government spend. We are working together on this, and I want to see more of that. I want us to work together to target the areas that need it, although I fear that is not quite where we are at the moment.

We have rightly seen significant private sector engagement, and the Scottish National Investment Bank has been helping with access to patient capital. I have seen that locally in Cowie, Plean and Fallin to the east of Stirling. The eastern villages are having full-fibre broadband rolled out, with the help of Scottish National Investment Bank money, and that is very welcome. But in the spirit of constructive engagement, which I hope I have demonstrated, we all need to ask whether those schemes are all actively delivering and whether there is sufficient co-ordination across the private sector to avoid needless duplication in the roll-out of broadband.

In January 2022, the Public Accounts Committee found that the gigabit roll-out “risks perpetuating digital inequality”. House of Commons Library research shows that only 48.7% of premises in Stirling have gigabit availability, despite Stirling’s having, as I say, some of the best broadband that exists. We have download speeds of 43.9 megabits per second. That is less than half the UK average of 111.6 megabits per second.

We need to do better, and I have a few suggestions. The focus of both the UK and Scottish schemes has been on full-fibre connectivity. I agree with that—that is the gold standard—but it does mean the physical infrastructure is that much more expensive, particularly in rural areas. I make a plea for alternative means of delivery to be considered. Satellite and 4G broadband may well be a way of massively increasing provision—perhaps not as far as full fibre might, but if full fibre is several decades away, as I fear it may be for some places, there are solutions that exist right now that could take over. The broadband provided by alternative solutions might not be as effective, but it will be transformative for those areas now.

National Broadband, with which I had a useful meeting and which provided me with a lot of good information, has calculated that by using alternative technologies, it could supply all 435,000 premises UK-wide without access to broadband with a faster connection for just 3% of the budget of Project Gigabit. That strikes me as a transformative offer for an awful lot of rural areas, and we need to look at it seriously.

I also suggest that, as well as better focus of the subsidy and where it goes, we need better co-ordination of the regulatory aspect of how the private sector companies involved are rolling these schemes out, because there are instances where we have not seen the co-ordination that we need. I am thinking particularly about local authorities with lots of different rules and permitted development rights not being quite tracked through the way they need to be, creating a picture that is more complicated than it needs to be, but also private sector companies not talking to competitors, as they would see them.

We also need to look at what is being delivered. If we have reached the point where one player in the market can make a virtue of delivering the speeds people are paying for, that hints that an awful lot of people are not getting the speeds they are paying for and, indeed, that the taxpayer has subsidised. We need much more active regulation of the roll-out of Project Gigabit and R100, as well as the return on investment that companies are legitimately able to make. They should make a return, but I do think we need to see greater consequences for non-delivery of expectations.

A lot of solutions exist right now. I represent an awful lot of people in rural Scotland who want the same services that everybody else has, and we need to do better on their behalf. I think that applies to an awful lot of our constituencies, and I will work with anybody to help serve them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alyn Smith]

I am conscious of time so I will not mention anyone individually, but I thank all hon. Members for their contributions and also for their kind words personally. I am not against all unions; I am in favour of some of them—one being my wedding earlier in the summer. I should also mention that the Stirling beheading stone is a historic item; it is not actually used for that practice anymore, although I suspect it might be if I do not deliver better broadband for a lot of my constituents.

I am grateful for the Minister’s comments. I will follow up, if I may. I was particularly struck at the progress made in Stirling. We may have slightly different numbers, but from 1% in 2019, the year of my election, to the progress that we have now—

[Sir Christopher Chope (in the Chair)]

Order. I am afraid we have to move on to the next debate.

Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).