Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Anne-Marie Trevelyan and Matt Hancock(4 years, 2 months ago)
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Matt Hancock
A huge amount of work is under way to ensure that we are fully prepared for all eventualities this winter. It is an important piece of work across the Department.
Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con)
Matt Hancock
We have ended where we started this questions session: with my delight at a new hospital that has been funded and announced by the Prime Minister on Friday—Newgate in Northumberland. That is a very important development. My right hon. Friend makes a wider point about the importance of community hospitals, which are local to where people live. With modern advances in technology, we can deliver more services closer to people’s homes and in people’s homes, and then in community hospitals, while of course needing to build those superb hubs of science and care that our great hospitals are.
Covid-19 Update
Debate between Anne-Marie Trevelyan and Matt Hancock(4 years, 2 months ago)
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Matt Hancock
Yes. We need the scale of the national system and the resonance of the local system and the local knowledge. We are increasingly driving things in that direction, and I would love to talk to my hon. Friend, who is incredibly knowledgeable in these matters, to see what more we can do.
Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con)
I thank the Secretary of State for his and his officials’ incredible efforts over the last few days that have meant he was able to make the statement today that informal childcare will sit alongside formal childcare to allow those selfless grandparents across the north-east and elsewhere where local restrictions have to be brought in to make sure, out of the goodness of their hearts and the love of their families, that their sons and daughters can go to work—often low-paid, seasonal work with difficult hours. I thank him for that. Does he also agree that it is for all of us to be selfless, not selfish, as we try to get to grips with the second wave?
Matt Hancock
That is a good point on which to end, because my right hon. Friend has worked incredibly hard over the last four or five days to try to ensure that we find a way to protect people who use informal childcare without unnecessarily harming others by widening the exemption beyond what is needed. It is important to control the virus and keep listening to people as to how best to do that, and she has helped enormously. Her final point is critical, which is that we all have a role to play in taking seriously the rise in cases and hospitalisations that we have seen and making sure that we are all doing our bit to control coronavirus.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Anne-Marie Trevelyan and Matt Hancock(5 years, 4 months ago)
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Matt Hancock
Ahead of 29 March, we managed to put in place a full programme to ensure access to drugs. Of course, the approach is not just about ensuring stockpiles—there are adequate stockpiles for so many medicines all the time—but is about ensuring the flow of materials and finished drugs across the channel via ferries and, where necessary, aircraft.
Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con)
Prevention of Ill Health: Government Vision
Debate between Anne-Marie Trevelyan and Matt Hancock(6 years, 1 month ago)
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Matt Hancock
The hon. Lady makes a great plea, which I will look into in some detail.
Mrs Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con)
We have a duty of care to support all our citizens to maintain good health by empowering employers in the private and the public sectors to motivate staff to invest time and commitment into their diet, fitness, and long-term health. How will the Secretary of State create that new ethos?
Matt Hancock
There is such an important role here for employers. It is not part of the culture of the UK, except in some excellent examples, that employers take a proactive view of the health of their employees. Other countries around Europe do that much, much more systematically. I am attracted to the Dutch model, but there are others, too, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her support in doing that.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Anne-Marie Trevelyan and Matt Hancock(6 years, 4 months ago)
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Matt Hancock
I listened carefully to the right hon. Lady because she has long been a campaigner on health issues, and I very much take her point about knee operations. Of course, the number of EU nationals working in the NHS in England has risen by over 4,000 since the referendum. I know that there are concerns in specific areas, but I hope that we can all take reassurance from the fact that that number has continued to rise. We are determined to ensure that the NHS has the workforce that it needs.
Mrs Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con)
I welcome the Secretary of State to his place. I encourage him to visit the most rural part of England, up in Northumberland, to see for himself the challenges to healthcare provision due to the lack of a real rural financial formula. Will he update my constituents and the Save Rothbury Hospital campaign on how the review for that community hospital is going? That sort of low-level care is what makes the difference.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Anne-Marie Trevelyan and Matt Hancock(6 years, 11 months ago)
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Matt Hancock
We have tried to work with the Scottish Government for years, but when the First Minister first took my hand on a cold Christmas eve, she promised me broadband was waiting for me. It is three years later and we are still waiting for the Scottish Government to get on with it.
Mrs Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con)
My constituency is on the southern side of the border, which is just a line on the map as far as they are concerned. North Northumberland is still struggling to get the broadband it needs so that my many small villages are not cut off. Will the Minister ensure that, in 2018, we will see progress there?
Matt Hancock
Yes, absolutely, and increasingly we need to ensure that the delivery works on both sides of the border. Obviously, what matters is getting the roll-out of superfast broadband to everybody in the borders and throughout the country. No matter where the administrative boundaries are, what matters is getting broadband connections to people.
Digital Economy Bill
Debate between Anne-Marie Trevelyan and Matt Hancock(8 years, 3 months ago)
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Mrs Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con)
It is an honour and a pleasure to speak in this debate. Broadband connectivity is possibly the most important issue at every level for my constituents in north Northumberland. I thank the former Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey)—he is not now in the Chamber—who listened endlessly to requests from me and my constituents for a universal service obligation to ensure that those who live in our most rural communities have access to decent broadband.
The concern brought to me, which I have raised, is how robust the right to request, under a universal service obligation, broadband with a speed of 10 megabits per second will be, given the reality of access to the system. The first point I ask the Minister to consider—it has been raised by colleagues—is that, by the time the Bill is enacted and we can move forward, 10 megabits per second will be well below a realistic level. How might we benchmark that number today, so that we will have a number to which we can relate in two or five years’ time?
Matt Hancock
May I say, because this issue has come up several times, that the Bill proposes to put the speed into secondary legislation precisely so that it can be updated appropriately? The figure of 10 megabits per second, which I have described as the absolute minimum, is the Ofcom definition of what a family currently needs. I think my hon. Friend will see from what I have said the direction in which things are heading.
Mrs Trevelyan
I thank the Minister for his intervention, which will very much reassure those for whom that matter has not perhaps been made as clear as they wish it to be. The key will be to support Ofcom’s proposals, which I understand we can expect at the end of the year, so there is clarity and we can control the situation.
In Northumberland, BT has done an enormously good job in very difficult technical circumstances. When the telephony system was installed back in the 1950s, a cabinet was put at the end of almost every street in Durham, but one was put in only every 10 to 20 miles in Northumberland, with very few copper cables going on for miles and miles. This is proving a very serious challenge for BT in meeting the needs of farmsteads that might now have nine or 10 homes, where in the 1950s there was one farmer who perhaps did not even want mains electricity at that time. We have some real engineering challenges in Northumberland, but I want to put it on the record that BT and Openreach are doing an incredible job in trying to find ways to meet them.
One issue that has not been raised in any detail is the gainshare programme. The BDUK money, which has been rolled out through BT to reach some of my constituents, will not come back in at the speed we would like unless the offer of broadband, where it exists, is taken up by my constituents. The Government need to think carefully about how they get across the point that if broadband is available in a community—it is available in many places, although not nearly enough across Northumberland—people must change their contracts to one involving broadband to ensure that the gainshare will come back in for the rest of the community. The iNorthumberland team at Northumberland County Council have worked tirelessly alongside me for four years in my broadband campaign to drive it out, in spider’s web fashion, to our smaller and smaller communities, but we are definitely not there yet.
The target of reaching 95% by 2017 is very unrealistic in my patch, and we need to review it. The reality is that superfast broadband will continue to expand. Where broadband already exists, superfast broadband will continue to expand, which is fantastic for such constituents. However, it is not good, while superfast broadband keeps expanding, if we cut off more and more small communities as a result because they have not been able to put in place the infrastructure for it.
The challenges of using technologies other than fibre to do that are real. In Northumberland, bizarrely enough—we tested it in my own home—the satellites leave us caught between two different beams, so satellite broadband does not work very well. The idea is good, but in practice we are stuck between the two beams. To be fair to BT, it looked at the three villages where we had done some work and has supported trying to drive forward work to get fibre a little closer—the distance is down from 9 miles to 6 miles—to improve things.
There are also some real challenges with point-to-point wi-fi. The Northumbrian hills are quite a long way from one another. In some landscapes in the UK, the hills are closer together and point-to-point may well work much more effectively. In my constituency, the hills are large and at great distances, and the signal fades, so we will not get the impact that we need for those living in rural communities. Up the Coquet valley, farmers and their families are several miles—an hour and a half in the snow—from the next community, village or farm, but they need that comms technology available to them.
We have to find ways to ensure we have one-off investments. In the ’50s, some farmers said that they did not want mains electricity, but people will invest in and support the costs to get fibre to far-off communities, to ensure that we do not cut them off. Northumberland gets 7 million tourists every year. They all expect that there will be broadband and wi-fi in the houses they rent and the hotels and bed and breakfasts that they stay in, but it simply is not there, in the most beautiful parts of the county. We need to make sure that the investment is driven right through.
My constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Calum Kerr), mentioned that we always talk about download speeds, but for business development, upload speed is a vital part of the data process. We must make sure that that is understood. I would like to see it specifically in the Bill. Download is only one part of the process. It is great for streaming films if someone has 10 megabits—or so I am told; I can only get about 4 megabits in my house—but without a very good upload speed, we will not be able to get any kind of business development into rural communities. We want to broaden the engagement of those businesses in our rural communities.
As was said earlier, people who work a four-day week in their office in Newcastle, let us say, but for the sake of their quality of life want to spend three days a week working from home cannot possibly do that work or upload the documents that they need to upload without that clear upload speed of 10 megabits per second. In some of the larger villages in my constituency, the upload speed is often less than 1 megabit per second. It is impossible to work with that from a business perspective. Will the Minister therefore consider how we can make sure that operators meet a commitment on that as well?
Provision of sites for infrastructure is covered in the Bill. I have had concerns for some time—more have been brought up with me over the past few days—about the balance of the relationship between site providers and operators. How the rent for the use of private land by operators is determined will be important in ensuring that land can be rented easily for infrastructure, particularly for telephony systems. I have heard of anxiety from potential site owners that voluntary agreements may be harder to reach—something that will simply slow down investment in telephony systems for my constituents—if there is no provision in the Bill for a reasonable consideration to be paid, albeit perhaps one below current levels.
Potential site owners are concerned that the Bill implies that there could be retrospective change to existing arrangements, which is slowing down tenancy agreements. It would be helpful if the Minister confirmed that the new code will not be retrospective, to ensure that an operator will not have the option to break an existing lease purely to enter the new code. My main concern for north Northumberland is that that risks slowing down the roll-out of the emergency services network, on whose masts my constituents hope to rely to extend our telephone system to some of the most rural communities. I hope the Minister will be able to answer those questions.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Anne-Marie Trevelyan and Matt Hancock(8 years, 9 months ago)
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Matthew Hancock
I cannot give the hon. Lady that assurance, not least because, having considered this question and listened to representations from both sides of the argument, the commission did not make a formal recommendation on this matter. I can tell her, however, that FOI can be used to scrutinise those who set up the contracts that businesses, large and small, supply into.
Mrs Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con)
T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.