Shared Rural Network Implementation

Ben Everitt Excerpts

Wednesday 24th January 2024 Westminster Hall

[Ben Everitt (Milton Keynes North) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Maria, and I thank the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan) for securing this important and necessary debate on the implementation of the shared rural network.

Looking around, I think that we all have particularly rural constituencies—well, nearly all of us—so we know very well the value and importance of having consistent and reliable mobile coverage in our villages and countryside, and of course, as the hon. Member for North Shropshire said, on our farms, for both connectivity and safety.

Through the shared rural network, the Government have an ambitious target of ensuring 95% 4G coverage by 2025, and that target is backed up by around half a billion pounds of Government investment. Clearly, this is a Government who are committed to levelling up and our rural areas, and who aim to ensure that everybody in the UK, no matter where they are, can reap the rewards of that investment.

Ensuring that coverage reaches our rural villages is crucial. I have some beautiful villages in my patch, including Hanslope, Ravenstone, Stoke Goldington and Weston Underwood—crikey, I will have to mention them all now! But you have said that there is a time limit, Dame Maria, so I cannot mention all the beautiful villages. We have thriving local businesses, farms and communities, which all ultimately depend on consistent mobile coverage.

My rural constituents often tell me that they have a restricted choice of networks, compared with people living in the more built-up urban areas that I represent. The shared rural network will address that problem directly by arranging for the UK’s four main mobile operators to upgrade their infrastructure and share access with each other. I know that will be welcome news for rural constituencies and communities across the country, giving businesses and our communities more choice and driving competition, which is crucial. That is the key message that I took from the hon. Member for North Shropshire: it is about competition. The economic angle in this debate comes to prominence here. Consistent and complete mobile coverage across the UK is one of the missing pieces of our ability to unlock and unleash economic growth outside the UK’s big cities and populated areas. Better coverage will help businesses to increase their efficiency, which is obviously useful for consumers and customers.

The other important side to this debate is the issue of inequality. Improving rural connectivity is about tackling regional inequalities and the digital exclusion that we been fighting during this Parliament. It is about levelling up. With the shift towards more working from home since the pandemic, the need for consistent coverage is more important than ever for working families in rural areas. With these types of national projects, it is important that we take a sustainable approach, and that is why the shared rural network is so effective. The masts will be shared by the network providers. When new masts are built, they will have to go through planning, so that communities get their say. I look forward to seeing how this project develops.