Communications Infrastructure and Flooding: North West

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

Tuesday 9th February 2016 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy (Mr Edward Vaizey)]

Thank you for that warm welcome, Mr Percy. It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I know that your constituency has been affected by flooding, so no doubt you will be taking a personal interest.

I thank the hon. Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk) for securing the debate. He is a doughty champion on behalf of his constituents on numerous issues and I hope he will not think it too frivolous of me to note on Shrove Tuesday that Rochdale is also the home of the world’s largest pancake, which was made in 1994. This year, therefore, is the 22nd anniversary of that, but Rochdale also has a fantastic Member of Parliament who quite rightly brings this issue to the House’s attention. I also thank the hon. Members for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith) and for West Lancashire (Rosie Cooper) for their contributions.

As Members know well, December was a record-breaking month for rainfall in many parts of the UK and exceptional amounts of rain fell on to already saturated ground. It was an horrific time for a great many people and those of us who were lucky enough not to be affected nevertheless saw what was happening on our televisions. Many Ministers went to see for themselves what was happening.

Rivers broke records when, on Boxing day, the River Calder in Yorkshire and the River Aire in Leeds reached their highest levels ever recorded. It goes without saying that the Government will stay squarely behind the residents and businesses affected by the floods. The hon. Member for Rochdale rightly focused his remarks on the effect of damage on his small businesses. Our task is to do everything we can to help the towns and communities to recover from the devastating floods.

Before I turn to the specific points raised by the hon. Gentleman, it is worth saying that we are investing nearly £200 million to help communities to recover from both Storm Desmond and Storm Eva. The first payments were made to councils in flooded areas within six days of the first floods and £48 million has already been paid out to 37 authorities in the affected areas. We have also made it clear that anyone displaced from their home or business premises will not have to pay council tax or business rates for as long as they are out of their properties. The fund includes £50 million for affected residents and businesses, £4 million in match funding for charities, and £40 million to repair roads, bridges and other key areas. We are also building 1,500 new flood defence schemes, which will better protect 300,000 more homes, with an extra £2.3 billion of capital investment to help our most at-risk communities.

In December, my right hon. Friend the Environment Secretary announced that there will be a national flood resilience review, the purpose of which will be to assess how the country can be better protected from future flooding and increasingly extreme weather events and, importantly for this debate, the effects of such flooding. We are due to publish the review this summer with a view to work beginning in autumn to implement short-term measures and to review longer-term strategy. I hope that the hon. Gentleman’s remarks will be taken into account in the review.

[Julian Sturdy (York Outer) (Con)]

The Minister will be well aware that not only the north-west but York suffered badly from flooding and we lost telecommunications for a number of days across the city. What can he do to bring the telecommunications industry to account to deliver a flood resilience scheme that can match the country’s need?

[Mr Vaizey]

My hon. Friend is quite right to bring me to account and ensure that I return to the subject matter in hand, but I wanted to mention the review because it will take telecoms resilience into account. I will go on to talk about that in more detail in a minute, but it is important to note that that work is in addition to that of the ministerial recovery group, which was established to ensure that local areas continue to receive co-ordinated support as they rebuild after the winter’s flooding.

Let me turn to what happened with telecoms infrastructure as a result of the floods. It is the case that it was affected badly in places, so my hon. Friend’s point was well made. Indeed, as the hon. Member for Rochdale pointed out, telecoms is essential to all our small businesses as well as to us all in our lives, so any disruption has a major impact on our ability to go about our lives and run our businesses. It is interesting to note that the main disruption was caused not by the telecoms network being taken out, but by power failures in the region. However, flooding did affect two key infrastructure sites: one was at the BT exchange in York and the other was at a Vodafone site—actually it was at a Cable & Wireless site, which is owned by Vodafone—in Leeds. The flooding in York on 27 December affected about 50,000 fixed-line and 46,000 broadband customers and there were knock-on impacts on mobile operators whose networks went through the exchange. BT brought the system back online within 24 hours and it worked with the fire service to protect the exchange, because Storm Frank was on its way.

The flooding at the Vodafone site, which also happened on 27 December, disrupted 999 services for a matter of hours as well as some emergency services communications. I stress that I was in touch with both companies throughout the incidents and the national alert for telecoms was invoked several times. That process brings together representatives from the UK’s major communications providers with Government bodies to ensure that everyone across the industry and Government has the latest information on what is happening.

In relation to Rochdale, there were four separate incidents that involved damaged cables. Two were quite complex, technical cable repairs that involved several thousand connections. The other two were located under carriageways, one of which was not damage caused by flooding per se but damage to a BT cable caused by other contractors. Obviously, it takes time to locate the exact point of the cable break and such repairs require permission from the local council to dig up the carriageways and various permits from councils in connection with access to manhole covers, putting traffic-light controls in place and so on.

[Simon Danczuk]

For the record, Rochdale Council was excellent in meeting those requirements and it acted as soon as it was contacted by BT Openreach. However, BT Openreach was lax in calling for the authority to take action.

[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.