Broadband: Rural Communities

Flick Drummond Excerpts

Wednesday 13th December 2023 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Flick Drummond (Meon Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder) for securing this incredibly important debate. Like others, getting better broadband for my constituents in has been a key focus of my work since 2019. During covid it became clear how isolated some of my constituents could become.

I want to raise awareness of a couple of issues in particular, which are still holding us back. I am afraid I am not as positive as my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) about Openreach. The communities of Kilmeston, Bramdean and Cheriton had a gigabit voucher approved by Building Digital UK more than a year ago but, since then, Openreach has delayed things.

First, Openreach told constituents that BDUK was the hold-up on approving the gigabit programme vouchers. When I contacted BDUK, it turned out it had not been given all the information it had requested. I had to ask BDUK to extend the deadline for the previous scheme to get the vouchers approved, and it did so. I am grateful to BDUK for all its hard work and for responding so quickly to my questions.

Since then, Openreach has dithered about installing the fibre. Again, constituents were told SSE was the blocker. I met SSE and it turned out that every other telecoms provider agrees nationwide licences with SSE for its poles to carry cables, but Openreach has not. Openreach has agreed to pay for the licence for this project but there is apparently a delay in getting the payment made to SSE. That nonsense had been dragging on for months, and I understand the sheer exasperation of my constituents.

There are a couple of senior public servants who were given fast broadband very quickly. That is fine but, while doing that, Openreach bypassed many other residents with equally important jobs: the director of NHS emergency services; a consultant orthopaedic spinal surgeon; three GPs; a CEO responsible for vehicle fleet support for 12 police forces, two first-aid services and two ambulance trusts; a project manager for a national mobile telephone company; project manager for SSE, ironically; a senior TV news correspondent; the editor of a national sports newspaper; and many more, which I will not list now.

I complained about this to the CEO of Openreach and I got diverted to the MPs’ complaints department. Does he know how his company is performing in rural areas? I will keep battling on to break this logjam, but perhaps it would be useful for Ofcom to look into how different infrastructure owners work together in practice. Although we have guidelines, it seems more can be done to facilitate getting cables installed.

A second problem relates to constituents who have been abandoned completely by another company. The company, now branded as Trooli but originally Call Flow, has told residents of Woodlands in my constituency that it is discontinuing its services. That has come out of the blue, with minimal information supplied. They are being told to switch to 4G; the trouble is there is no 4G in that area. Although Trooli says it is within its rights to do this, surely it is unacceptable that a company that has had public money to set up its network can simply walk aways from it, when there is no viable replacement.

[Chris Loder]

Does my hon. Friend agree that some of these unscrupulous providers, who suggest they are going to do things but then backtrack and fail to deliver, should be properly held to account, and that we should find ways to ensure that Ofcom does that?

[Mrs Drummond]

Absolutely, and I hope Ofcom is listening to the debate. It is disgraceful that public money is being used and wasted. Hampshire County Council supported the installation and has done everything it can to help me across the constituency. This is not any fault of the council, and I am grateful for its support. Trooli’s behaviour has been appalling, and I would welcome the Minister’s advice on how I can put this right. I will also ask Ofcom to look at the matter.

This community will be included in the procurement scheme, with CityFibre hooking it up in future. However, the community cannot be left without provision in the meantime, though I hope it will be prioritised for the future work. The Government-funded Hampshire procurement is fantastic news for Meon Valley. The technology is evolving with 5G on the way. It is vital that we use every means of getting better broadband into our communities. I will keep pushing Government and the private sector on this issue, because businesses, families and schools depend on being able to work at high speed. It is very frustrating for everyone when it takes so long to put in.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

It is universally acknowledged that you are the snappiest dresser in the House, Mr Dowd, so it is great to see you in your place here today. I feel very odd—in the past few weeks, I have been to both the cinema and the theatre with the Minister and I am now in a debate with him for the second time today. There is to be another debate today, though I cannot be there. I do feel as if I am spending more time with the Minister than is good for my marriage. I do not think he will break with any precedent by answering any questions today, but we will try.

I commend the hon. Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder) on securing this debate. This is the second time we have debated this precise issue, but it is important to keep on fighting the battle. He may have caught the Minister and me smiling or laughing a bit because the hon. Gentleman referred to Ofcom and network coverage issues and both I am the Minister made the same point during the earlier debate—that, quite often, Ofcom’s version of reality is so different from the experience of ordinary people that it really is time that Ofcom and the providers looked much more carefully at how they present what they purport to be evidence of coverage.

Likewise, the Minister will no doubt say—he announced it this morning—that he is putting the PSTN switchover on pause, which is a good idea. He referred to several other matters where the Government are taking action because there are very legitimate concerns about how the switchover will affect the provision of quite a lot of services. Indeed, following this morning’s debate, the Minister will be delighted to know that I have tabled questions to ask him how many traffic lights in the UK depend on PSTN. I look forward to hearing his answers.

The hon. Member for West Dorset referred to Stoke Abbott, which was thus described in 1906:

“as pretty a village as any in Dorset.”

I was delighted to be in Bridport a few weeks ago with his predecessor, Oliver Letwin, who has a slightly different view of the present Government from him, I think.

It is always good to have the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). We missed him this morning; I believe he was at the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee. He made an important point about livestock: most farmers must have some kind of digital connectivity simply to do their job. They cannot pretend to be Gabriel Oak and Bathsheba Everdene from “Far from the Madding Crowd”; to make a living in agriculture, one must have a modern farm.

The hon. Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) is absolutely doughty on these issues. I feel as if I have lived in her kitchen now, because this is the second time I have heard the stories about her hubs and her platelets or whatever it is that she had to have installed. She was determined to find some positive news, but mostly came out with negative news. There are real problems for anyone who wants to be able to deliver. As she herself said, no one will lay fibre 5 miles down a lane to a single house, so other options must be available. She referred to satellite. Obviously, we want to see much greater technical innovation in this field so that no one is left out.

The hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord) complained about the Government’s lackadaisical attitude. I have heard him make some of his speech before, but there is no danger in repetition—that is the only way one ever gets anything done in politics, so I commend him for that.

The hon. Member for Meon Valley (Mrs Drummond) is a wonderful swimmer, as I know because I recruited her to the parliamentary swimming team, and she had a list of people who had been kind of given preferential treatment. If someone in a community needs to have more than superfast broadband in order to do their job but the whole community does not get the same, that can be a problem.

[Mrs Drummond]

Let me just qualify that: only two public servants, who I did not mention, got fast broadband. The ones I mentioned did not get fast broadband. I was explaining that they were equally important. I did not mention the ones who got fast broadband for obvious reasons—I think they are quite embarrassed about getting fast broadband before their neighbours. There are huge numbers of very important people who also need it.

[Sir Chris Bryant]

If I got anything faster than anyone else on my street, I think my neighbours would lynch me.