Rural Broadband

Andrew Bingham Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2015 Westminster Hall

[Neil Parish]

Thank you for passing the motion to me, Minister. Don’t worry, once I get going, it will be fine.

I beg to move,

That this House has considered delivery of rural broadband.

Next time, Mr Betts, I will make sure that I know the new procedure. It is a great pleasure to work under your chairmanship. It is a delight to have the Minister here this afternoon, and I shall put some questions to him at the end, which I am sure he will be more than able to answer. I thank hon. Members for turning up this afternoon. We are all concerned not only about rural broadband but about the delivery of broadband throughout the country, which is very significant.

The internet is increasingly important to everyday lives, whether for online shopping, for staying in touch with friends or for all our rural businesses, such as farming and tourism, which are keen to have broadband. Despite a public subsidy of about £1.7 billion, too many consumers, businesses and individuals cannot access broadband. Theoretically, until we had to change the system, farmers were expected to deliver payments online, and next year they will have to, but if they do not have superfast broadband or a good internet connection that will be impossible.

BT owns a lot, if not all, of the infrastructure and is the largest retail provider using it. Ofcom is considering whether to propose separating the infrastructure division, Openreach, from the rest of BT, which would create more competition and mean that BT no longer had a conflict of interest in delivering the high-quality broadband that everyone deserves. I do not know whether this afternoon the Minister will want to be drawn on the question of what should happen to BT. An independent Openreach would improve the quality of service and increase infrastructure investment.

There are two elements to the delivery of superfast broadband in most constituencies: the publicly funded programme—in my constituency, Connecting Devon and Somerset—and the commercially funded roll-out of superfast broadband in larger towns and cities. We must remember, however, that Government and council money is all taxpayers’ money, and we want to see value for it. In earlier debates in the House, we have been very concerned not only about the pace of broadband roll-out but about whether it is being rolled out with value for money for our taxpayers.

For the Devon and Somerset roll-out, the first delivery contract was let to BT and is believed to be on time; it has been suggested that it is also within budget. The target refers to 90% coverage of the area by 2016, but that is where the problem lies in many respects. If roll-out across a constituency or a country is in percentages, people automatically roll out to the areas that are easiest to get to and, all the time, we will have to put public money in to get to those hardest-to-reach areas. I have yet to be convinced that we are getting the necessary value for money from many of the contracts.

If we let one contract get to 90% of the population and another to 95%, and if it is the same company rolling out the broadband, what stops the company from not delivering what it should have done under the first contract but delivering it under the second contract and saying, “Of course it is all too hard to reach. We need more money to reach the hardest-to-reach areas”? One of our problems in Devon and Somerset is that there has not been enough competition in letting the contracts. A contract was let to BT, then a further one was to be let to it again. There has not been enough competition, so there are not enough people out there with wireless connections or different types of technology to keep BT moving. BT has been slow at bringing in the new technologies.

Many Members present have constituencies with a hilly topography and many farms, villages and hamlets are stretched out and a long way from the cabinets and the fibre cable. In the end, there will have to be a system not only of fibre cables but of wireless and other technologies to deliver broadband.

[Andrew Bingham (High Peak) (Con)]

I cannot stay for the whole debate because I have to go to the main Chamber, but given the very name of my constituency, the High Peak, I want to echo what my hon. Friend is saying. Broadband has very much become the fourth utility, and businesses and farmers need it. The terrain of the area that I represent makes broadband difficult to get, so we need to put some effort into that last 10%, because those people are as important as the first 10%.

[Neil Parish]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. There have to be other initiatives, or other existing systems. Can we use church towers or mobile phone masts, if there are any? Do we need more of those, or do we need to link the broadband or internet connection to other systems? Otherwise, we seem to be getting only to those areas that we can get to and not to the hardest-to-reach areas. I am not yet convinced, even with the latest contracts, that we are getting where we need to be.