Broadband and Mobile Connectivity: Rural Areas

Edward Morello Excerpts

Wednesday 21st May 2025 Westminster Hall

[Chris Bryant]

I am very grateful for the last bit of that, because the right hon. Lady reminds me that I need to talk to my colleagues in DESNZ about that. It is not directly my responsibility but, if she writes to me about it, I am happy to get it to DESNZ or to ensure she gets a response from DESNZ as soon as possible. She makes a perfectly legitimate point, and we need to get that right. I thought she was talking about a different switch-off, which is why I was confused.

Reporting of mobile coverage is something that frustrates many of us. The Ofcom site may say, “96% of all four networks available everywhere across the whole of your constituency,” but I say, “No, you can’t get a signal anywhere in Hannah Street in the middle of Porth—end of story.” I have been in discussion with Ofcom, and we have exchanged letters, which I have placed in the Library of the House of Commons, about how it is going to change its reporting.

That reporting has historically been based in part on two things: first, the coverage predicted by the mobile phone companies, which might not necessarily match people’s experience; and, secondly, 2 megabits per second, which frankly is of no earthly use to anybody—most of us now want 5 megabits per second. From about the middle of June, Ofcom will be reporting across the whole of the country on 2 megabits per second and 5 megabits per second, so people will have a much clearer understanding of the situation on the ground. I hope that might drive further commercial investment from the mobile phone operators, which will say, “You know what? We need to make sure we have more masts in this area, because frankly it’s not good enough.”

The hon. Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller) mentioned Chichester; I have Godalming in my head, because I was at the Pizza Express there one Saturday evening and I could not order a taxi because there was no mobile signal at all. You would think that in the middle of Godalming, with the former Chancellor of the Exchequer as its Member of Parliament, that would have been sorted. There are lots of places like that around the country where the mobile signal simply is not good enough and we need to strengthen it.

Much of that will be me trying to get the mobile companies to work harder to make sure that that works across the whole of the country. I want to work out with them what some of the problems are, and whether those are to do with the planning issues that have already been referred to. It seems to me bonkers that we would even consider building a new housing estate without making sure that it has proper mobile signal available and proper connectivity of every kind. One would think that that would just be quintessentially part of the offer. These are all issues that we are going to address.

The hon. Member for Frome and East Somerset asked me three specific questions—I try my best to answer specific questions when people ask them, in the hope that that will encourage people to ask specific questions. First, she asked me about the promised map. That should be happening fairly soon. “Soon”, obviously, is a parliamentary word that has a moderate quantity of meaning, but I am trying to make it as fast as I possibly can. The advantage that will come roughly in the middle of June is that Ofcom will be providing a completely different understanding of mobile coverage in all our constituencies, which will be helpful.

I too thank everybody in BDUK; I think that when we have done the drop-in sessions for MPs, everybody has found it very helpful. It has been able to provide specific details about what is happening in a particular village and a particular street. We will continue to do that, so I would say, “If anybody has not booked in, please do.”

The hon. Member for Frome and East Somerset asked me what would happen in the spending review. I will not answer that question, because I do not know what will happen in the spending review. As I said, our ambition is to get full fibre to as much of the population as we possibly can, as fast as we possibly can, and our ambition is to get to 5G stand-alone. For many public services, 5G stand-alone would be far more useful than a version of 3G that is not very efficient and not very functioning. For instance, the police would be able to use 5G stand-alone. People would be able to download video, to take part in video conferencing and so on.

We also need to do better at enabling people to have mobile signal inside their home and not just outside their home. I live in Wales and my house is stone built, which means whatever signal I get in the garden is not very available inside. I moved to VoIP, or voice over internet protocol, because I know how to do that—but of course many people do not, so we need to enable that more.

[Edward Morello (West Dorset) (LD)]

The Minister asked for specific questions. Part of the problem is that the cost of customer acquisition is four to five times larger in rural Britain than it is in urban areas, so the big companies prioritise urban areas, where they can find a lot of customers, leaving rural areas to small businesses that then face the capital cost issue that he refers to. My specific question is this: how can the Government help those small businesses that are trying to connect rural communities to go faster?

[Chris Bryant]

That is precisely what Project Gigabit is designed to do. That is what we are doing, and it has been a significant investment already. I am not sure whether the hon. Gentleman has been to one of our drop-in sessions with BDUK staff, but they would be very happy to go through every part of his constituency and work through precisely what we are doing to try to help.

I need to temper people’s expectations about the speed at which some of these things can happen, partly because there are skills needs out there that must be addressed. There is likely to be, I would guess, some consolidation in the altnet market in the weeks and months ahead. In addition, where there has been competition between them, some of the altnets have ended up putting in ducts and poles, which are not exactly welcome in local communities that have never had poles before. It is not always an easy thing to arrange.

I want to correct the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts) on one thing, because she referred to the Government’s switch-off process. It is not a Government switch-off process; it is led by the industry, for the very fine reason that copper is failing. The number of occasions on which copper is now failing far exceeds the problems we have had in any other way.

The thing that keeps me awake at night is, if people are moved from copper to fibre—they have an entitlement under the universal service obligation to a landline-only fibre connection, if they want it—whether their telecare device will work with that. That is why, since I was elected to this post, I have worked with the industry as hard as I possibly can to address some of those issues. We have been working with local authorities to identify all the vulnerable customers, trying to make sure that the operators switch people over only when all these issues have been dealt with and they know that their telecare device will still work, and saying to the telecare companies that they should stop selling kit that will work only in an analogue system and not in the new system.

On top of that, many companies have now moved to a much longer battery life back up than the one hour provided for by Ofcom. That is not Government-led, but obviously, we are trying to make sure that the sector and the industry deliver in a way that is safe for all our constituents.

Question put and agreed to.