Digital Infrastructure, Connectivity and Accessibility

Andy Carter Excerpts

Thursday 3rd December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Andy Carter (Warrington South) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my barrier-busting hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby). I also want to thank my neighbour, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Esther McVey), and the hon. Member for Sunderland Central (Julie Elliott) for securing this important debate, because this is about our future—this nation’s future. Every part of our future is involved in what we do and how we spend our time online: most businesses today do not operate without engagement online; every one of our schools does not operate without being online; our justice system is online for remote courts; our health system is online for accessing medical records; and our usually booming entertainment sector is driven online. Increasingly, every part of our lives is relying on our digital infrastructure.

Let me take us back a few years, on a trip back into the annals of time, to when people had modems that they plugged into the phone line. They would press a button and hear whizzes, and occasionally the pizza wheel of doom would appeared and they would watch it—I am sure the Minister does not remember this, perhaps because he is not quite old enough to remember any of these things happening. I am afraid that that is not confined to history for every part of our communities today. The pizza wheel of doom occasionally appears for some of the rural residents in villages such as Higher Walton, just outside Warrington, where people are really not enjoying much faster speeds than when they had modems a few years ago.

I welcome some of the initiatives being introduced to connect in some of the hard-to-reach areas, such as the village of Lymm in my constituency, where we are seeing major extensions of the gigabit-capable fibre broadband into homes which previously were not included in the schemes. I am keen to explore further the opportunities to look at community fibre partnerships, with the help from government, to secure connectivity for villages across my constituency. Connecting every constituency and every home in the north-west of England to full fibre broadband by 2025 would create a £5.5 billion boost to the region’s economy; 54,000 people in the region could be brought back into the workforce through enhanced connectivity, including small businesses and helping entrepreneurs to drive their companies forward. To do that we need the Minister to confirm rapidly how much money will be available in the voucher scheme after March next year. The rural gigabit vouchers have helped hundreds of thousands of premises to be connected and have the potential to connect even more rapidly, but we need that commitment from the Minister.

I wish to finish by talking about some of the communities that are excluded even though they have superfast broadband. I held a number of roundtables last week with headteachers, who talked to me about some of the pupils in some of the most deprived areas of my constituency, who certainly could connect on to superfast broadband but did not have a laptop. They did not have parents who had the knowledge to be able to support and engage them digitally in lessons. There is a real challenge to tackle that digital divide—that must remain a priority for this Government. The future digital inclusion programme will support some of those hardest-to-reach groups in society, including many older residents who have never worked in an environment where computers were part of their life. We need to keep it in mind that, for them, accessing a GP via econsult is a bit like a foreign language.

To round off, I am really pleased to see that Openreach is partnering with the Good Things Foundation to support the network of digital skills centres from across the country, but let us drive this further and faster.