Lord Vaizey of Didcot
Main Page: Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Conservative - Life peer)(9 years, 3 months ago)
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John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Lab/Co-op)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman) not only on securing this debate, but on the wonderfully persuasive and erudite way in which he opened it, which makes me slightly trepidatious about following him. [Interruption.] That is most kind. I also congratulate the Backbench Business Committee on finding the time for us to debate this hugely important issue.
Even the urban parts of my constituency suffer economically from the geographical remoteness of our corner of Cumbria. My constituency includes small villages and one of the Lake district’s most remote valleys, which all Members should take the time to discover—not, perhaps, before 7 May, but at any time after that. Good-quality broadband connections are vital for local businesses trying to compete with those in more densely populated areas, for our sizeable tourist industry trying to make the most of our stunningly beautiful area, and of course simply for local residents who want to use the web at something better than the prehistoric speeds that so many of them have to cope with.
Over the last two summer recesses I travelled around my constituency by bike, sitting down with local residents in front rooms, village halls and cafes to talk about whatever issues mattered to them, and time and again—whether in Broughton, Kirkby, Leece or Great Urswick—the issue of broadband speeds came up. Many residents knew they had been promised great things by the Government in terms of rural broadband but had not seen the fruits of that.
Ministers have certainly talked the talk over recent years and some parts of my constituency are getting broadband which is much better, even if they believe, rightly, that the description “superfast” is overegging the pudding, but for too many other areas the reality on the ground simply has not changed. There is no great use in our revisiting here the fiasco of the bidding process for rural broadband, but the delays that led to it are still dragging on, leaving thousands of my constituents relying on broadband speeds of barely 1 megabit per second. In the village of Ireleth alone, 500 households are struggling along on that sort of speed. Hundreds of others in neighbouring villages are seeing similar glacial broadband speeds. The residents and I are becoming increasingly sceptical about BT’s promises—the hon. Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire eloquently made this point—to upgrade the local exchanges and ensure these villages get the 21st century service they deserve and need.
Let me give my own experience to demonstrate this point. On 14 October last year my office received an e-mail from BT stating that the exchanges at Broughton-in-Furness and Greenodd, which serve most of the rural areas of my constituency, would be upgraded during the winter of that year. That was excellent news, but then, after Christmas, another constituent from the area contacted me about their very slow broadband. I wrote to BT again. On 21 January, just three months after I was told something quite to the contrary, BT responded that
“there is no date available by when this will be ready.”
BT understood, the e-mail went on to say, that its supplier, Openreach, had met its target of delivering fibre optics to two thirds of the UK and that anything further would be a matter for funding by the Government’s broadband fund. This is another example of it washing its hands of this situation and the clear responsibility of providing acceptable broadband speeds for my constituents.
The Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy (Mr Edward Vaizey)
Will the hon. Gentleman acknowledge in the course of his brilliant speech—which easily passes muster with that of my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman)—the £43 million that has been invested in Cumbria under this programme and the 119,000 premises that should get superfast broadband under it?
John Woodcock
Yes, money has been invested, and where it has come in, it has been welcome, but it has been too slow, it has not met the promises of delivery which the Government themselves set out and there are still too many areas that have got nothing at all, and they are tearing their hair out. As I am sure the Minister will accept, it is my responsibility to speak up for those people in the House today. On that note, will he agree to meet BT with me, so that it can explain when faster progress will be made and when it will meet the promise that it so clearly made?
John Woodcock
The hon. Member makes a good point but BT should not be let off the hook on this, because it has made assurances to my constituents and to others that it has not delivered on.
Mr Vaizey
Of course I will meet the hon. Gentleman. Although it is a great hostage to fortune to say so, I make it a matter of principle that I will always meet any Member who requests a meeting to discuss this issue. And while I am on my feet, I will also say: Devon and Somerset, 300,000 premises and £92 million.
Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman) for his excellent speech, eloquently making points about matters affecting his constituents in rural parts of Herefordshire. Needless to say, many villages in Shropshire are facing similar problems. Let me highlight the village of Pontesbury, the largest village in my constituency. As Members of Parliament are inviting the Minister to go all over the UK, let me invite him to the village of Pontesbury, an important and large village just to the south of Shrewsbury, where it is extremely difficult to get any mobile phone coverage. We have mentioned local businesses, schools and children needing to do homework and other things on computers, and this problem really is holding this village back significantly, so I am pleased to hear about the progress the Government are making.
Mr Vaizey
Perhaps I should clarify that when I am accepting invitations for meetings from colleagues I am happy to have them in the House. Let me also say that I hope that my hon. Friend will acknowledge the £28 million invested in superfast broadband in Shropshire, covering at least 50,000 premises—20,000 have already been reached.
Mr MacNeil
Well done, thank you. At least somebody on the Opposition Benches is switched on. I just saw a lot of blank faces on the Government Benches.
As people, many of our needs have been met. We have food, drink, clothing and communication. In our houses, we have electricity, water and insulation, but we need communication and connectivity. That connectivity happens thanks to broadband—hopefully, it is 4G and mobile connectivity. The point was well made by the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath) who talked about “not not spots”. Let us ensure that we get “have have” spots, because that is what we need. This connectivity is a natural need, and it is what many people want and expect. The expectation that that connectivity will be in place is growing. People are comparing the situation in their own areas not only with other places in their own countries but with other countries, particularly rural places in other countries.
Our aim is to have superfast broadband and 4G reaching 98% of the population, which should mean that connectivity is well distributed across the country and that we do not have places in the UK where broadband coverage is far below 98% of the population. If 95% of us have superfast broadband, then surely 100% of us should get normal broadband. If superfast broadband has speeds of up to 30 megabits or more, surely others can reach 2, 4, 6 or 8 megabits.
There is also a possibility of convergence with 4G, as 4G is primarily a data carrier with speeds of up to 30 megabits. It does not matter whether or not people are connected with fibre, because connectivity can be found to enable them to get on the web thanks to the speed of the new mobile communications.
Mr MacNeil
I see the Minister nodding. I am glad that he is in agreement with me. Connectivity is a social necessity and a business requirement. Young people definitely expect it in rural areas. If we want to keep young people in those areas, we should ensure that they have proper coverage.
Recent lightning strikes in the outer Hebrides and the Na h-Eileanan an Iar constituency knocked out the British Telecom lines for a period of time. I came across hard-working BT engineers in ditches, fields and on roadsides, looking to find the faults for individual houses and knowing that the fault could lie in any one of four possibilities. They worked hard and did their best to get the lines up and running. Meanwhile, people have been in more than a not not spot. In fact, they have found themselves in a not not not spot—to extend the point made by the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome.
Mobile telecommunications are a social utility; they are really necessary for people. We are no longer talking about having them for lighter reasons. People, including pensioners, need the links to make contact with the outside world. Mobile telecommunications are particularly important in places that are far removed from major centres of health care. People who have heart attacks can be diagnosed or have measurements taken from them and then the details can be sent to a specialist who can then advise them on their treatment. I am talking about a life-saving potential, which I know that the Minister recognises.
My fear is that the UK has been left behind in its treatment of rural and island areas. Island areas with the best coverage include the Isle of Man and the Faroe Islands, which control their own mobile and broadband communications. In many ways, the UK has failed in this regard, as 2G is patchy at best, and 3G is patchy if existent at all. Surely, this will not happen with 4G as well. In the Faroe Islands, for 50,000 people there are about 50 3G masts. We look at that with envy in the highlands of Scotland. With a femtocell system, they can reach fishermen 100 km off land on mobile phones on their boats. Although mobile phones do not have that range, they have developed the technology to do that.
In places such as the Faroe Islands there can be a signal in the undersea tunnels between their islands. In stark contrast, people who travel into London cannot use their mobile phone on the Gatwick Express as they go through tunnels. That is an indictment of the treatment of mobile telephony in the UK. I happened to be on the train with a Norwegian the other day and he could not believe that his mobile phone would not work in the tunnels. There is a really bad signal and that is almost the benchmark of what has been happening.
Roaming, or the lack of it, is definitely a problem. I think the model of not enabling roaming has been wrong, because sometimes, particularly in rural areas, there is a mobile telephone network available, but only one. People end up having to carry two mobile telephones and if they know the local area well they will know roughly which one they can use to get a signal. At this point, I praise Vodafone, which has been very good at providing a community Openreach system. I have managed to secure it in a couple of places in my constituency and hope to get it in more. It piggybacks the broadband network to give people a much wanted mobile phone signal.
We must listen when providers say that they could provide a better signal if they were allowed masts that were a little higher. I am not coming down on either side of that argument, as it might be a contentious issue and we will have to wait and see what people say, but we must bear it in mind. Mobile phone companies say that they could give us better coverage if they had higher masts.
Companies also have problems with the bottlenecks of transmitters and masts. Sometimes, unreasonable rents are asked of a second mobile phone company that wants to use an existing mast, because of the basic greed of some companies. That is choking the life and expectations of many communities. The problem also affects tourism, as people go on holiday and are unable to use their mobile phones. That is a point of frustration. If they did not want to use their telephones, they would of course switch them off.
There have been many pleas to the Minister to visit constituencies, but I would like to lighten his work load. I am not inviting him to my constituency—now there is a disappointed face. If he wants to come to Na h-Eileanan an Iar to see our beautiful scenery, he is of course welcome. My political point, which I think would help him, is that he should devolve many of these things to the Scottish Government, who could then control it all.
Mr MacNeil
I am afraid that I meant both mobile and broadband. The Minister is right that the Scottish Government have done a great job and he gives me a tremendous opportunity to tell him just how well they have done. While the UK Government provided £100.8 million through BDUK, £410 million is being spent on the Digital Scotland superfast broadband programme. For that, great thanks should go to the Scottish Government, who know full well and understand the situation.
Eric Ollerenshaw
I agree, but that is not happening. The market is not yet delivering. Where it is not delivering, the Government should be delivering, in terms of planning regulations at the very least.
On the roll-out of broadband, to be fair, the Government took the decision in 2010, which we all welcomed, to do something for that section of the rural community that had been left out for so long, as my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) pointed out. Villages in Lancashire are being connected. It may be fast or slow in certain areas, but some of those contracts are being delivered. As the Minister knows, I, like other hon. Members, was concerned about the missing 5%. I was approached by a group led by Professor Barry Forde of Lancaster university, who said that the BT contracts could not work because of the copper to fibre issue, so BT would be unable to deliver the speeds that it had promised. [Interruption.]
Mr Vaizey
I would be happy to offer my hon. Friend a glass of water for his cough, but we are out of water. I see that the military prowess of my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) has kicked in—he is bringing a glass of water.
As you well know, Mr Deputy Speaker, I was up in your constituency just this week, and a beautiful part of the country it is.
Mr Vaizey
I am sorry—last week. The weeks tend to blend into one. Some £50 million, 98% coverage in Lancashire, and 150,000 premises—that has to be something to shout about, and I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw) will do so once he has had a drink of water.
Eric Ollerenshaw
I am grateful for the Minister’s intervention. He is right, and I paid tribute to that.
Back to the missing 5%: the group led by Barry Forde suggested that it would take up the 5% with a not-for-profit social enterprise and deliver hyperfast super-broadband—that is, 1 gigabit—to every property within a defined area. The group approached me as a constituency MP. The group eventually became known as B4RN—Broadband for the Rural North. I can tell my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith) that B4RN does not lie between Lancashire and Yorkshire. It is based in Lancashire, but gives some help to Yorkshire, as usual.
What the members of the group proposed to do seemed incredible at the time, but they have set about doing that since 2010 and have now wired up every single property in the villages of Arkholme, Abbeystead, Aughton, Capernwray, Dolphinholme, Gressingham, Newton, Docker, Littledale, Quernmore, Roeburndale, Wray, Wennington and Tatham, and soon to be connected are Melling, Whittington and Wrayton. The group is looking to wire up 2,500 people with 1 gigabit of speed. Already we have interest from businesses, doing the very thing that my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness hopes will happen, which want to move into the area that B4RN covers because of the potential offered by this hyperfast broadband delivery.
The history is interesting. When the group decided to do that in 2010-11, members applied for some of the funding from BDUK, but the district council and the county rolled up all the funds and gave all the grants to BT, which resulted in B4RN complaining to the European Commission about the use of state aid. B4RN agreed to drop the complaint provided that the county would protect its postcode areas, as against BT’s scheme.
Hon. Members have mentioned the situation of BT, and I have brought up before the near-monopoly that exists.
Eric Ollerenshaw
Absolutely. As we have heard hon. Members shout from across the Chamber, it is the behaviour of a monopoly.
Another characteristic of a monopoly is a lack of transparency. Let me give another example. Two weeks ago a resident of the village of Scorton, which was to be wired up by BT, approached me to say that he was having problems getting in touch with BT to find out what was going on. He runs a medium-sized engineering company from home with national contracts. I took the first step of any constituency MP and asked BT what was going on. I was told that there were technical difficulties. Eventually, I went to meet the resident in Scorton and found that he had been told that BT was now de-scoping the area because it was too difficult—I had been told one story, and he had been told another.
I am still waiting, three years down the line, for BT to hand me a map showing exactly what it is doing. Let me explain to hon. Members that these are villages up in the Pennines. Then there are places, such as Glasson Dock, which lies on flat land on the coast just beyond Lancaster, that BT is not wiring up, even though there are more residents there than in Dolphinholme, where it is delivering fibre, fibre, fibre. I know that the Public Accounts Committee has looked at the situation, but I would ask it to look again at the BT situation.
Eric Ollerenshaw
I beg to differ. Perhaps the Select Committee that looked at it here could recall BT. I have made inquiries about how to get the competition authorities to look at the situation. This is the behaviour of a monopoly: there is no transparency, we are not being told what is going on, and indeed we are being given disinformation.
Robert Jenrick (Newark) (Con)
Some right hon. and right hon. Members will be surprisingly familiar with my constituency, including the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), although I will not dwell on the result of his leadership of the Labour campaign in the by-election. As they will know, the constituency is predominantly rural, with more than 150 villages, from the suburbs of Nottingham going up through north Nottinghamshire. Our second-largest employer is Vodafone, which employs more than 500 people in the town of Newark. My predecessor and I have had an extremely good and productive relationship with the company. There has been good news, which I will come to, but there are a number of concerns.
Robert Jenrick
I will deal with that last.
During his Westminster Hall debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman) set out eloquently the moral and economic case for broadband in rural areas. It is not just about isolation, but about enabling people to lead full lives in an interconnected world and to consume the news, learn, be economically active and connect with relatives who live around the country and the world. I am part of perhaps the last generation of MPs to have known the world before broadband, and the opportunities it presents are immeasurably greater than those I knew as a child.
The greatest barrier to aspiration and meritocracy is lack of information. Individuals frequently set their horizons according to the world they know and have it broadened by more information and knowledge about which university to go to and which employer to seek out. It is no exaggeration to say that broadband access is about giving young people and people of all ages the benefits of the rich possibilities of our interconnected world. Not having those opportunities has a major effect. It is also evident that such access is about economic growth. The 150 villages in my constituency are brimming with small businesses, entrepreneurs and communities that want to get on and succeed, but they are being held back, with one hand tied behind their back, because of a lack of broadband access.
This is also about closing both the rural-urban gap and the north-south divide. Some 350 people commute from Newark to London. That is a difficult journey to make every day, but it can be made regularly if people can work from home with good quality broadband.
Nottinghamshire county council has made good progress in recent years. I pay tribute to Nicola McCoy-Brown, my contact at the council, and the £20 million better broadband for Nottinghamshire programme. A number of villages, including Collingham, have seen huge improvements in recent years, but a huge amount of work remains to be done. More than 40 villages in my constituency have little broadband, certainly not enough to run a business or to work or do proper education from home.
I want to raise a few concerns. The first is whether all the public money is being well spent. Those Members familiar with my constituency will know that a vast swathe of it is, in effect, made up—my constituents will not thank me for saying this—of commuter villages that are almost the suburbs of Nottingham. I am surprised that those villages are deemed not economically viable for BT to be able to supply them. I suspect that East Bridgford, Bingham and villages surrounding Southwell are economically viable and that BT is not using public money appropriately.
Secondly, the figures of 5% and 10% are frequently misused, because they are denoted by county and local authority. The result for local authorities that are predominantly urban, such as Nottinghamshire, is clearly very different from the result for those that are predominantly rural. My constituency is the 10% that is rural in Nottinghamshire, so the definition of what is rural and remote in Nottinghamshire is different from that in Herefordshire, Wales and Cumbria. In fact, a vast swathe of that 10% is not particularly rural or remote at all. I think the definition is misused.
I entirely endorse earlier comments about linking mobile and data. Smartphones are ubiquitous in my constituency, but no one can use them, even in Newark town. They are sold in all the shops by all the dealerships, but no one can use them.
Time is against me, so I will finish by addressing Openreach. The company claims not to be a monopoly, but it displays all the characteristics of one. I know this issue is market sensitive, but I urge the Minister to look into it. For good business reasons, the organisation needs to be separated from BT and broken up. In the short term, I urge the Minister to do something about the appalling customer service at Openreach and to encourage it to treat its customers with the respect and dignity they deserve.
Alistair Burt (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)
I have followed the debate carefully and was not sure whether I would have time to speak, so I am delighted to be the last speaker from the Conservative ranks. My speech will, of course, commend the Government for the extraordinary work they have done on broadband, while suggesting one or two changes that will make all the difference.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman) and the Backbench Business Committee on initiating this debate. The response from the House has made it clear that he touched on a number of issues that are common to those of us who represent rural constituencies, wherever we sit in the House, and it has been essential to get the matter before the Minister and the House.
My constituency exhibits a number of characteristics that we have heard about, such as properties with fewer than 2 megabits in local authorities that I represent—that affects 8.6% of properties in Central Bedfordshire and 12% in Bedford borough. Again, the same properties tend to miss out, and the hard to reach are genuinely hard to reach.
I have an inventive and thoughtful community that has tried all sorts of different things. It is effective at putting a case together and has detailed plans. I have attended two public meetings in the village of Colmworth and heard a very detailed description of its business premises, residential areas, and the needs of such a rural area. North East Bedfordshire has a diverse community that depends on a relationship between the rural and the urban, as well as on connectivity. The opportunity to work there is becoming even more essential.
Let me say two slightly controversial things. First, I praise BT’s regional partnership director, Annette Thorpe, who has worked incredibly hard with people in my region. I have met her more than a handful of times in different villages in my constituency. She has tried to meet some of the problems, but the difficulty has been that BT is overstretched. It has had too much work and has not been able to deliver, and it has been a problem to satisfy expectations. Annette Thorpe has worked extremely hard to do all she can.
Secondly, my hon. Friend the Minister has been a victim of his own success. The Government inherited a poorly developed programme from the previous Government—whatever the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) says—and they have made remarkable steps forward. However, there is so much work to do and a limited number of people to do it, and it has not been possible to deliver everything we wanted. Communication has been crucial. In Bedford, BT has been struggling to deal with the volume of open market review requests and invitations to tender. That has resulted in it trying to make sense of its own data, which has held it back from the next steps it needs to take. The sheer volume of work being done has caused it to become a victim of its own success.
As well as the familiar issues that colleagues have mentioned, there are some new ones. BT has realised that even when it gets to the end of its programme, it might not be able to deliver. There are some properties it just cannot reach, so what is to happen to them? If it does succeed in delivering 2 megabits, that will not be enough for existing technology, and the issue must be thought through.
A further problem that we have not spent much time on concerns new developments in rural and market town constituencies. King’s Reach in Biggleswade is a new development on the edge of my largest town with 20,000-plus people, and they find it hard to get broadband and superfast broadband. I pay tribute to that community, which worked incredibly hard, and particularly to Councillor Bernard Rix, who led the work with BT, and my assistant, Mandy Setterfield. We have worked with Annette Thorpe—sometimes behind the scenes—to push things along, but there have been problems with siting cabinets and getting new properties linked up. When talking about linking up the old, we must not forget that we must also deal with linking up the new.
Finally, I would like to take up the kind offer of my right hon. Friend to meet representatives from my constituency.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
I am sorry that we have lost a minute because we may lose another speaker. I am sure that could have waited.
Chris Bryant
On the Government’s record, I think what everybody has said today is that we have to take the whole country with us. That means 100%, not 93% or 95%. I merely point out to hon. Members that the original target was 2 megabits a second by 2012. That was abandoned by this Government, who moved the target to 2015. Now, the target has been moved to 2016. I suggest that that means we want lots of people to be able to run before some people are even able to walk in the digital economy, and I think that that is a mistake.
The superfast target of 24 megabits a second has also been changed. It was 90% by 2015. Then, when the Government worked out that that simply was not going to happen, for all the reasons hon. Members have set out today, they moved it to 95% by 2016.
Chris Bryant
No, I will not give way to the hon. Gentleman. We are going to hear from the Minister—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. Look, this debate is not going to degenerate now. If the Minister can control himself, he will be on shortly, and if Back Benchers want to intervene, will they please do it in the correct manner?
The Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy (Mr Edward Vaizey)
Let me begin by saying how grateful I am that the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) mentioned E. M. Forster, because my late father campaigned for a blue plaque for E. M. Forster, which can now be seen on the flats in Arlington Park mansions in Chiswick. That is an aside, but I always like to mention my old dad, my late father, who was in the other place. I usually get to mention him during steel debates, but I digress.
We have had an excellent debate with some 18 contributions, most from the Conservative Benches because only one Labour Back Bencher showed up to make a speech. That gives the lie to the Opposition spokesman’s protestations that Labour is interested in rural communities and interested in getting broadband to them.
We heard excellent speeches from my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman), who called this important debate, and the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock). We heard my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) talking about his area’s local enterprise partnership. We heard from the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) and from my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert), who made some important suggestions. We heard the hon. Member for South Down (Ms Ritchie), who contributed to the EFRA Committee report, which to a certain extent sits behind today’s debate.
We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith), who has pioneered broadband in North Yorkshire, and from my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon) who spoke about Vodafone. The hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Mr Reid) came up with a new acronym—MBORC, which I shall investigate—while my hon. Friend the Member for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris) quite rightly started by praising the Government.
We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman), the hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Sir Robert Smith), my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) and from my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw), whose contribution I always intensely enjoy. We then heard from my hon. Friends the Members for Salisbury (John Glen) and for Newark (Robert Jenrick)—it is the first time I have heard the latter speak, and what an excellent contribution it was.
We then heard from my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) and, of course, from the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath) who I always remember saying—although not in this debate—that the only way he can get a signal is by standing on his kitchen cabinet.
In the time available I cannot answer all the questions put to me, but I hope that in the course of my response some of the issues will be covered. If they are not, I will write to each and every hon. Member who has made a contribution to this debate.
Let me begin with the contribution of the hon. Member for Rhondda. We heard 10 or 15 minutes from him, but just as we searched the Benches behind him for any speakers, we searched for a policy in his speech—but policy could we find there none. Is it Labour’s intention, for example, to designate internet provision as a utility? Is it Labour’s intention to bring broadband to business parks? Is it Labour’s intention simply to provide broadband only where people say they want it, so that for the first two or three years of a Labour Government we would see a marketing campaign before any broadband was rolled out?
What are the Opposition’s positions on our policies? The hon. Gentleman lambasted us for not proceeding with the changes to the electronic communications code in the Infrastructure Bill, yet while it was still in the Bill, he was writing to the Secretary of State saying that Labour could not support it. The Opposition Front-Bench team has complained about the superfast broadband advertising campaign, yet now the hon. Gentleman claims that he wished we had advertised more.
I am afraid that the hon. Gentleman got his facts wrong when he said that we had moved the target. We had a target to get superfast broadband to 90% of the country by the end of 2015, and we have every chance of meeting that target. [Interruption.] I repeat that we have every chance of meeting that target. Then we set a new target of 95%—namely, getting to a further 5% of the country by 2016-17. That is not moving the target. The hon. Gentleman also said that we had ruled out wireless technology at the beginning; our approach has always been to be technology-neutral.
This broadband roll-out campaign is an unequivocal success. We shall very shortly announce that we have passed the 2 millionth premise as a result of the roll-out campaign. That means 2 million households—millions of people—now getting superfast broadband where the market would not deliver. Labour’s alternative policy was to give those people 2 megabits and then forget about it. Incidentally, Labour had no way of paying for it, as it had no policy to show how it would pay for this provision of 2 megabits. In fact, 97% of the country already benefits from coverage of 2 megabits, but we know—and all my hon. Friends know from their constituents—that that is no longer deemed to be enough. Most people now expect 7 or 8 megabits.
Some of my hon. Friends talked about future-proofing. In 2010, we thought that aiming for 24-megabit superfast broadband would be the right policy, but technology changes all the time. Members will have noted BT’s announcement last Friday that it expects to be able to achieve speeds of up to 500 megabits over a copper line, thanks to new technology that it is trying out.
In the past, we have been criticised by the National Audit Office for some aspects of our campaign. I have been robust in defending our programme against the NAO’s critique, and I am pleased to say that last week it praised the roll-out of superfast broadband. It made it clear that we were close to meeting our targets, and were providing value for money. For that I thank the men and women who work for BT, including the engineers who work tirelessly to produce superfast broadband. Over the Christmas period, I visited some of them in Steventon, which is in my constituency. More often than not, they exceed their targets and their reach. I also thank Chris Townsend and all my officials who run Broadband Delivery UK, as well as Bill Murphy, who had overall responsibility for the BT programme.
I think that this is a programme of which we can be very proud. It is being delivered by a great British company, BT, and I was not going to come to the House and run that company down. Let us look at the facts. Superfast broadband is now available to nearly 80% of premises, whereas fewer than 50% had it when we came to office. The United Kingdom has a higher superfast coverage than any of the other EU5 countries. Our average broadband speed has quadrupled over the last four years. We have the highest take-up of superfast broadband in the EU5 and the lowest priced broadband in the EU5 and the United States, and we have the largest number of broadband users in the EU5.
I understand the frustrations expressed by my hon. Friends, because those statistics point to the fact that we live in a digitally savvy nation, and British consumers want to use the internet. For example, they spend the highest amount per capita on e-commerce shopping. They are rightly demanding the provision of higher speeds and better service as soon as possible, but we are moving as fast as we can, and, as I have said, we are exceeding our targets and are well on track. As for value for money, the independent assessment review conducted for BDUK showed that, in the case of a range of cabinets, BT’s costs were 90% lower than those of a normally efficient operator, while the NAO reported that the average costs of a broad range of projects were currently proving to be about 25% lower than the estimated costs of bids for those projects.
So what are the issues? I have dealt with the issue of whether we have moved the target, so let me now deal with the issue of competition. Time and again, people ask me why there is not more competition, but what sort of competition do they want? If we had organised a national bid—if we had asked a company to tender to provide broadband on a national basis rather than for 44 areas—what would have happened if BT had won? We would have had a national provider. Do people think that we should have done it according to regions? Who is to say that BT would not have won those contracts? The 44 areas were small, and were open to smaller providers should they have wished to bid. The fact is that BT won the contracts because it provided value for money. That has shown us how tough it is to build the necessary infrastructure, for this is an engineering project that requires infrastructure build-up.
I will give the Labour party some credit: it did provide an element of competition. It had a digital region in south Yorkshire which went to a provider other than BT, and that went bust. We have had to pick up the pieces, and have had to write off £50 million worth of taxpayers’ money. That is the kind of competition that Labour provided. Nearly 95% of Cornwall, where BT won the contract under the last Government, now has superfast broadband speeds. It is one of the best-connected regions in Europe, and Cornish companies are saying that they have better broadband than when they go to Silicon Valley.
The other issue is customer service. That involves maps, which pose another dilemma. On the one hand my hon. Friends say, “We want maps to show exactly where people are going,” but then the maps are published and BT or the local authority get on the ground and they say, “Actually, this is not as viable as we thought and we’re going to move somewhere else.” That leads to disappointment. There is a balance to be struck, but as far as I am aware now almost all regions are providing maps of up to seven-digit postcodes.
Contrary to impressions, I am not the spokesman for Openreach and I share, as a constituency MP, the frustrations that arise with customer service. I cannot inform the House what proportion of bad customer service and good customer service there is, but we all know that constituents who get good service from Openreach are not going to e-mail us while those who get terrible service will, quite rightly, e-mail us and expect us to sort that out. I hold my hand up and say that I have had my fair share of people complaining about Openreach customer service.
I also share the frustration about new housing developments, and as a result we have got the telecoms providers around the table with the major housing developers and we have put in place a system whereby new housing developments are flagged up to telecoms providers.
Finally, the biggest point Members mentioned is of course the last 5%. Again, I absolutely understand the frustration of my hon. Friends, and all I would say is, “Meet me halfway.” We have never as a Government pretended we were doing anything other than what we were doing. We said, “We have the money to get to 90% and we hope to do that by the end of 2015.” The Chancellor saw how well the programme was going so he gave us more money. We then had the money to go to 95% and we will get there by the end of 2017. Then, to give great credit to the former Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Maria Miller), we said, “We want to get to the last 5%, but the back-of-the-envelope cost is huge—literally in the billions of pounds—so let’s do some research before we go back to the Treasury to say what it is likely to cost.” That is why we set up the £10 million pilot projects: we wanted to get on the ground and see what new technologies could deliver superfast broadband speeds to that last 5%. We do not want to leave the last 5% behind; by definition they are the most difficult and most expensive to reach, but we will get there.
Mobile is another huge issue. We have the fastest roll-out of 4G coverage in the world and the fastest take-up, and I hope my hon. Friends will recognise the superb legally binding agreement to extend that, which the Secretary of State negotiated with the mobile operators. By the end of 2015 we will have reached 98% of premises with 4G from the main operators, but this groundbreaking deal will see the geographic coverage over the two years after that—2016 and 2017—spread to 90% of the country, and it is not going to cost the taxpayer a penny. We have already pioneered it with the mobile infrastructure projects because we have prepared—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Rhondda is misunderstanding annual licence fees. We have pioneered that with our mobile infrastructure projects because, again, we recognised that rural communities want mobile coverage, and we now have 100 sites ready to go.
It has been difficult, however, and my hon. Friends mentioned the difficulties we face with landlords, who see this as an excuse. In fact I was being told only today about a mast in the highlands that is damaged but which the company cannot get repaired because the landlords used its damage as an excuse to try to negotiate a higher rent. These are the kinds of issues mobile providers face up and down the country.
Finally, I commend the digital infrastructure document that we published today. We have been working in the last year to look at all the infrastructure networks the Government have a stake in, including the Network Rail signalling network, the emergency services network and JANET—the joint academic network for universities. We want to bring them together, to get that synergy that we have long called for.
I rest my case there, Mr Deputy Speaker.