George Kerevan
Main Page: George Kerevan (Scottish National Party - East Lothian)
George Kerevan (East Lothian) (SNP)
I want to be somewhat novel for an Opposition Member and thank the Minister, not only for attending but for seeming to listen. In my short experience in the House, that is not always the case, so my thanks are genuine.
I suspect that the Minister has heard it all before and that he feels a little complacent because he has, he thinks, almost delivered. It was always going to be hard to deliver broadband right across the country; there were always going to be some problems at the edges. However, from the start of the deployment project in 2010 to the end of this Parliament, when we may get the full roll-out of superfast broadband, it will have taken 10 years. World war two took six years, during which we organised the Normandy invasion and invented nuclear weapons. Ten years is too long. I respect the Minister’s hard work, but I think that that is a reasonable criticism.
Ten years is too long because the demand for bandwidth never diminishes. Once we have superfast, we will need ultrafast. The demands of the economy are constantly changing, partly because of where people are. My constituency, sadly, is 572nd in the list of constituencies regarding broadband roll-out, but I know that in the next 10 to 15 years its population will rise by 25,000, so the problem will reset itself. We have a mix of areas—rural, coastal, urban, hills—but above all we have fast-growing local businesses, and they are being held back. If the population increases and broadband has moved on to the next stage, ultrafast, there will be an issue about how we get it.
Which spider lies at the centre of the web of problems that have led to the process taking 10 years? The answer is BT Openreach. We can argue about the issues and about what BT has done right and what it has done wrong, but it always comes back to the fact that we had a monopoly supplier. We have to address that. I am not being specific about what the issue is or how we deal with it, but if we do not address the fact of Openreach, we will never move on and be able to solve the ultrafast broadband problem when it arises, as it will.