Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Cat Smith and Lord Vaizey of Didcot

Tuesday 15th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Vaizey]

The hon. Lady makes an excellent point and I am pleased that her constituency will achieve levels of 96% broadband coverage. The point she makes, which I would like to emphasise to the Opposition spokeswoman, the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah), is why we have brought forward Labour’s target by two years. We have achieved by the end of 2015 what Labour planned to achieve by the end of 2017.

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

Many of my rural and farming constituents are looking to diversify, and are setting up their own businesses and working from home. Frustrated with the wait for BT to deliver superfast broadband, many have been left in the position of digging their own trenches and working with Broadband 4 the Rural North to deliver superfast broadband so that they can run their businesses. What message does the Minister have for my constituents who have been left in this situation?

[Mr Vaizey]

My message to the hon. Lady, as opposed to her constituents, is that people have to make up their mind. One moment I am being berated because BT has a monopoly and now I am being berated because people are choosing a different provider. Broadband 4 the Rural North is a fantastic community broadband programme. We encourage lots of competition for BT and I am pleased that B4RN is thriving and providing an excellent service to her constituents.

Communications Infrastructure and Flooding: North West

Debate between Cat Smith and Lord Vaizey of Didcot

Tuesday 9th February 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mr Vaizey]

I note what the hon. Gentleman says and I will respond to him imminently.

[Cat Smith]

I remind the Minister that the debate is about communications in the north-west, and although it is important that we discuss what happened in Leeds and York, they are not in the north-west but in Yorkshire. To draw him back to the north-west, will he say something about the issues the fire brigade faced with communications? When mobile telephone networks went down, people found it difficult to contact the fire brigade. Cumbria fire and rescue also had a problem with its internal Airwave communications system, so will he comment on that?

[Mr Vaizey]

I thank the hon. Lady for bringing me back geographically to the subject of the debate. First, I am pleased to hear what the hon. Member for Rochdale said about Rochdale Council. I am glad that it acted promptly when contacted by Openreach and I hope that Openreach has noted that it is incumbent on it to contact the council as soon as possible. Some councils perhaps do not respond as quickly as they should, but it is good to hear that Rochdale acted immediately, particularly given the urgency of the situation.

The Airwave network is robust and resilient, but sometimes if a major cable is taken out, that can affect the backhaul, the mobile communications and mobile masts, so we need to look at that in the flood resilience review. I am sorry that I strayed towards the north-east, but those were the two most prominent examples of a major exchange being taken out by flooding and I wanted to reassure hon. Members that Ministers and the operators were alive to repairing the situation. We were also obviously aware of the concern when the emergency services network was affected, but I am pleased to say from my own experience of sitting on that committee over the Christmas recess that the co-ordination between the telecoms operators, the emergency services and local authorities seemed to be very robust.

Let me return to the specific subject of what has happened to the constituents of the hon. Member for Rochdale. I take this opportunity to extend my sympathy to them. We know that events such as flooding fundamentally affect the way a small business running on tight margins operates, and the people running those businesses are quite entitled to expect a speedy service to get them back on track.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned the excellent work of Rochdale Council. I am pleased that Openreach stayed in touch with the council on these matters. The council may have operated speedily, but it will also have been aware of the need to repair the cable and to keep the highways and carriageways running. Even when we have the excellent co-operation that happened between Rochdale Council and Openreach, such repairs can be technically and logistically complex.

I am not minimising at all what the hon. Gentleman says. We can learn lessons from what has happened, and particularly from the terrible disruption to the two small businesses that he highlighted in his remarks. As with any disruption on that scale, we will work with the industry to understand what happened and what measures we can put in place to ensure that the response to such events continues to improve.

It was mentioned that Openreach would not talk to individuals. Openreach is a wholesale provider of telecoms services to retail providers, including BT and other well-known retailers. I am certainly not here to defend either Openreach or, indeed, telecoms retailers’ customer services. What I am robust in defending, however, are broadband roll-out programmes.

I know, as a constituency MP and the go-to person for my colleagues’ frustrations, how woeful the customer service can be; it is sometimes utterly Kafkaesque. Why operators often cannot sort out their customer service in the most simple and straightforward fashion possible is baffling. I hope that Openreach and retail providers will take note of the hon. Gentleman’s remarks, because he brought to the House real case studies of people who frankly found themselves banging their heads against a brick wall when they wanted quick, robust service to get their business up and running.

Be that as it may, I turn to some better news: as of Thursday last week, 135 businesses in Rochdale had applied for financial support under the business support scheme, of which 107, as I understand it, have received payments totalling more than £53,000. The Government are committed to supporting those affected by the floods and to ensuring that the country is better protected from future flooding. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for bringing these matters to the House’s attention, and I am always available to any hon. Member who experiences frustrations with either Openreach or a retail telecoms provider.

I hope that customer service will improve. The outgoing chief executive of Openreach was effective and brought some much-needed changes to the organisation, but we now have a new chief executive. I hope he and his team will read this debate, take some lessons from it and perhaps even engage directly with the hon. Gentleman, so that they can hear at first hand how the systems and real people interact.

Question put and agreed to.