BT Broadband Provision: Local Businesses

Damian Green Excerpts

Thursday 10th March 2016 Westminster Hall

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. I will detail my next case and then come on to the general issues that she raises, because I agree with her entirely.

In Whorlton, the Danshell Group has a care home for vulnerable people with learning disabilities. It paid an even higher fee, £100,000, for its links, because it is trying to help people to maintain contact with their families through Skype and it is using sophisticated technology in other ways to provide therapies for those people. It still does not have its connection.

When people are paying these very large sums of money and they get in touch with BT months before they want the connection, they should expect a decent level of service. One thing that struck me in the William Smith case was that every time we rang BT, there was a new problem: it had to go under the road; the fibre had to be blown; there needed to be a new duct here; there needed to be a new duct there. It became absolutely clear that at no point had the people in BT sat down and made a plan. They had not looked at what was needed and said, “Okay, if we’re going to achieve this by then, we need to do this on date A, this on date B and this on date C.” There was no plan. It was as if they were complete amateurs and had never done it before.

[Damian Green (Ashford) (Con)]

To illustrate the hon. Lady’s point, which is about not so much the inability as the unwillingness of BT to acknowledge that it is a joined-up operation, I want to read out an email sent to a constituent of mine in the last couple of weeks by someone in the executive level complaints team at BT. My constituent had complained, not unreasonably, that he could get only 1 megabit. The email reads:

“Our suppliers (Openreach) are in charge of this network and they would not consider any request from the public to move lines or modify serving exchanges, with the view to simply improving broadband speeds.”

I cannot but take that apart. Openreach is not a supplier to BT; Openreach is part of BT. It is dishonest of BT to pretend that somehow Openreach is a separate operation. Also, that allows it to say, “I’m sorry. Just because the public ask for higher broadband speeds, you can’t expect us to provide them.” That is completely unsatisfactory.

[Helen Goodman]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and his constituency of Ashford is not even particularly rural; it is not as if the company has to travel dozens or hundreds of miles to make the connections in his constituency. It seems to me that it has a particular problem with the small business sector and it has a problem the minute someone is outside one of the large urban areas. Further to the point made by the hon. Member for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris), it is obvious that the benefits of good internet access are greater in rural areas than in big urban areas, because, as anyone with a rural or semi-rural constituency knows, vast amounts of resource go into transport and moving stuff and people around.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Vaizey]

No, I will not accept that, because the hon. Gentleman is missing the point I made earlier about the distinction to be made. The physical roll-out of infrastructure is going well, and more than 4 million homes that would not otherwise have got superfast broadband now have it. That job has been done extremely well. What frustrates me is the poor customer service, which I hear about again and again from my colleagues. That is why we have had two debates in two days. I am really trying to get the message to Openreach to sort that out.

[Damian Green]

I spent several years as the front person for the UK Border Agency, so I have every sympathy with the Minister having to be the front person for Openreach. Has he reflected on the policy implication? Even though the roll-out, in effect, of fibre to the cabinet has been a success—as he said—that is still not providing an adequate service for millions of households and businesses throughout the country. Therefore, at some stage, a Government will have to bite the bullet and say, “We actually need fibre to the premises, however expensive it will be.”

[Mr Vaizey]

My right hon. Friend is moving me on to the next stage of infrastructure roll-out of broadband, but I agree, whether that is fibre to premises or new technology such as G.fast. I have talked about the need for a gigabit Britain and, as far as I am concerned, we are reaching the end of the superfast broadband roll-out programme and now we need to look ahead. We are not complacent: we need to go for a gigabit Britain.

To make things easier for people to build such networks, we will reform the electronic communications code, so that laying fibre across land becomes cheaper; we will reform planning so that mobile operators—as mentioned by one of my hon. Friends—may build bigger masts to get better signals; and we will work with Ofcom on a digital communications review, which will open up BT’s poles and ducts. I completely agree with those who say that it is important to follow up and to ensure that the practical implementation of the regulations actually happens. The Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills also announced a review of business broadband, which is at the very heart of what colleagues have been talking about.