Superfast Broadband

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Monday 12th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)]

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Boston and Skegness (Matt Warman).

I shall try to keep my comments brief, because many Members are present. I am sure that that is because we all share the same frustration at the slow roll-out and the lack of availability of fast broadband, especially in rural areas. I use the word “fast” rather than the word “superfast” because in chunks of rural Hampshire we aspire not to superfast broadband, but just to something that is usable. Town and country appear to have split, and not even neatly, into the haves and the have-nots, with the digital divide most keenly felt in villages where downloading from Netflix is merely a romantic dream and the mundane tasks of tax returns and communicating with the Rural Payments Agency , or even just shopping online, are at best painfully slow and at worst impossible.

[Lucy Frazer (South East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is highlighting all the important aspects of being connected to the internet, and of broadband, to individuals. Will she also acknowledge that the rural economy is worth £400 billion, and that it is therefore especially important for rural areas to be connected to broadband?

[Caroline Nokes]

My hon. Friend has made an excellent point, which I shall deal with later in my speech.

At this point, I could lapse into a great long list of villages in my constituency where broadband is slow and unreliable, but let me first point out that this is Hampshire. It is not Inverclyde, or rural Somerset, but a county that is the largest in the south-east and has a population of nearly 2 million. At its closest point, my constituency is just 65 miles from Westminster—not, of course, that that appears to be a guarantee of good service: as we heard from the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), London suffers as well. Earlier this year, the villagers of Barton Stacey were celebrating the upgrade of the nearby exchange at Sutton Scotney because they finally had access to a speed of 0.5 megabits. That is the harsh reality for people in such villages. Anything is better than nothing, but it still is not good enough to enable someone to do their homework.

Let me briefly turn to the positives. The National Audit Office has reported that phase 1 of the roll-out is progressing well, but the Minister’s own figures indicate that, by the end of 2017, 13% of my constituency will still be waiting. The superconnected cities vouchers were a great initiative, but rural businesses tell me of their frustration that they were not eligible although they had started from a worse position.

Across the Test valley, planning policy has for years been to convert redundant farm buildings into commercial premises. We have countless attractive barn conversions where entrepreneurs are employing people and contributing to the national and rural economies, but are being hampered from competing in a digital world. Their perfectly reasonable question is, “If this is crucial for urban businesses, why is it less important for the rural ones?”

Of course, the problem is not limited to businesses. Home owners moving into new developments often find that fast broadband is not only not available, but not even scheduled to be available. New developments appear to have been simply forgotten as part of the process. One constituent in Stanbridge Lakes was recently quoted a figure of £27,000 to be connected, an amount way beyond the means of any ordinary person.

I urge the Minister to make superfast broadband a requirement for developers as part of the planning process, and potentially as part of the section 106 process. In 2015, no one would dream of building a development with no access to electricity, water or adequate drainage, but it seems to be perfectly possible to build large housing developments with no access to the fibre network. According to information from Hampshire county council, Hampshire will not, in fact, have 95% coverage by the end of 2017. It will be September 2018 before wave 2 of this complex engineering project reaches that target—across the county, that is; rural constituencies such as mine aspire to a target of 87%. I know that there are satellite solutions—of course there are—but, according to my constituent David Hepworth, from Up Somborne,

“good reviews of satellite broadband seem rather hard to find”.

Householders, local authorities and businesses all feel that they are over the proverbial barrel. The only game in town is BT, whose reputation in villages such as Sherfield English, Lockerley, West Tytherley and East Dean is poor. The service is slow and patchy, phone lines are notoriously unreliable, and there is a lack of capacity. Contractors even routinely disconnect one household in order to add a line to another: that has happened four times to one of my constituents, Ian Forfar. A resident of Lockerley has had her phone number unilaterally changed by BT with no warning, and Mrs Sara Gruzelier of West Dean has told me that BT seemed perfectly happy to send her husband and Brigadier Hargreaves (retired)—with a combined age of 150—up a ladder to do its job for it.

What my constituents want is some reassurance from the Minister that he will look at the timescales for roll-out, make sure promised deadlines are met and that alternative technologies are in place for the 13% who suffer from that digital divide, and work with DCLG and local authorities on new developments. None of this is unreasonable, but for rural areas of Romsey and Southampton North it seems a long way from Openreach and more like “out of reach”.