BT Service Standards

Brendan O'Hara Excerpts

Wednesday 9th March 2016 Westminster Hall

[Brendan O'Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) on securing this important debate. As the Member of Parliament for Argyll and Bute, an area covering 7,000 sq km of west Scotland, including 26 islands, I know only too well how much rural Scotland depends on BT for both landline infrastructure and the delivery and roll-out of broadband. Sadly—indeed, it is a sad thing to report—BT is all too often letting down its customers in my constituency.

We all have horror stories of constituents who have been promised everything but received very little or nothing. On the wild west coast of Scotland, where storms are commonplace and power shortages are a regular occurrence, other utilities act as an emergency service, but BT all too often acts as it always does: rather slowly and too inefficiently. Sometimes it takes weeks, or even months, to get a landline reconnected in my constituency—in an area where connectivity ranges between patchy and non-existent—leaving people entirely cut off. I know I am not alone in saying that my inbox is bulging with complaints from constituents about BT. My fear is that, particularly among the elderly, once my constituents do not have a landline, they cannot get to me quickly enough to seek my help. What is happening elsewhere in the United Kingdom is magnified many times over in rural Scotland, particularly in Argyll and Bute. My biggest concern is on the roll-out of broadband. Although I fully support the fantastic Scottish Government initiative to roll out broadband across rural Scotland, BT is all too often a stumbling block to that progress.

As the Member for Argyll and Bute, people would expect me to talk up my constituency, but anyone who has ever visited Argyll and Bute will know that that is a very easy thing to do. The scenery is stunning; we have wild open spaces, there are the lochs and the islands, and our locally produced food and whisky are the envy of the world. However, the reality is that we face a crisis in Argyll and Bute, and it is a crisis of depopulation. Our population is ageing and in decline, and we have to do something before it is too late. I am firmly of the opinion that the lack of connectivity is the single biggest barrier to our reversing that decline and beginning a recovery. At the moment, we cannot keep our young people and we cannot attract other people to move from other parts of these islands to Argyll and Bute.

[Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)]

My hon. Friend will know, of course, that more and more of the school curriculum depends on reliable internet access. People do not even need broadband for that, but need at least slow speeds. Does he agree that without a reliable connection, schoolchildren across rural areas in Scotland could be put at an educational disadvantage?

[Brendan O'Hara]

I absolutely agree, and I will come on to that in a moment. My hon. Friend is absolutely correct, and my postbag is full of letters from parents of school pupils who are deeply concerned that their children cannot access the internet in the way that 90% of the country’s children can. I also constantly receive letters from businesspeople saying, “We were promised the roll-out would be here six or eight months ago, and it’s still not here. It is continually being put back.”

[Jim Shannon]

If broadband were rolled out in our constituencies in the way that we would like to see it, we would soon see small businesses that operate from people’s homes creating more jobs. Back in my constituency, people tell me, “We could get more jobs if we had superfast broadband across 100% of the area.” Does the hon. Gentleman have the same concern about his area?

[Brendan O'Hara]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely correct, and we share many of the same problems and frustrations in attracting businesses to our communities. There are people who want to come and live and work in our constituencies but simply cannot, because we do not have the connectivity and the infrastructure to allow them to do it.

I do not want to appear melodramatic, but there is a crisis looming in Argyll and Bute, and we have to act now to avert it. All too often, when our young people leave for college or university—be it in Glasgow, Edinburgh or London—we simply cannot attract them back. Once they leave and go to an area where broadband and mobile connectivity are quite rightly treated as a utility, asking them to come home is like asking them to return to a place without running water or electricity. We would not ask someone to return to a place without running water or electricity, so why should we ask them to return to a place without basic levels of connectivity?

Similarly to the situation that the hon. Member for Strangford rightly points out, we are struggling to attract families and businesses into Argyll and Bute. Everything that a family would want is there—we have a clean environment, fresh air, wide open spaces, wonderfully welcoming communities and a safe place in which to raise a family—but we do not have connectivity. We do not have sufficient broadband or mobile phone coverage, and what aspiring and ambitious entrepreneur would bring his or her family to an area where they may have to rely on very expensive and not particularly efficient satellite broadband, with the limited usage that that would provide for a business? They simply would not do it.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North West (Carol Monaghan) pointed out, parents who want the very best education for their children know that whereas 90% or 95% of children in the UK can access the internet freely through their smartphones, children in my constituency are once again disadvantaged because of the lack of connectivity.

Last month, the Argyll and Bute economic forum, chaired by Nicholas Ferguson, who is the chairman of BskyB, produced an excellent, detailed and wide-ranging report. It concluded that the single biggest barrier to the development of Argyll and Bute is connectivity and pointed out that Argyll and Bute does not even have 4G coverage at a time that the Government are discussing how to roll out 5G. That emphasises how deprived we are.

My postbag is bulging with complaints about BT, and I am sure the same is true for many other hon. Members. This issue is far more than inconvenient for my constituents; I believe that it is a matter of our survival. BT has a responsibility to my constituents and to people in other rural constituencies to make sure it gets this right. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and it cannot be allowed to pass. As I say, our survival depends on it.

Thank you, Mr Nuttall, for calling me to speak, and I once again congratulate the hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North on securing this very important debate.