Digital Landlines: Rural Communities

Graham Leadbitter Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd April 2025 Westminster Hall

[Damian Hinds]

I do recognise that, and hopefully I will be able to come on to it. While broadband and mobile connectivity have improved markedly in many areas, there is still a big gap between towns and rural areas. With electricity, the key point is that we have been having storms more frequently—and in our sorts of rural areas, with storms comes damage to powerlines.

[Graham Leadbitter (Moray West, Nairn and Strathspey) (SNP)]

In the relatively recent example of Storm Arwen, which had a huge impact on the north and north-east of Scotland, some communities were without power for in excess of a week because of the sheer number of trees that were down over power lines. The back-up generators for the mobile networks ran out of fuel because no one could get to them to refuel them. In most communities, there were at least some houses that still had a working landline, but there is a real fear among those communities about that happening again. Does the right hon. Member agree that that needs to be addressed?

[Damian Hinds]

Absolutely. I found it difficult to get reliable data for a local geographic area on the instances of power outages but, like the hon. Member, I can say from my personal experience, as well as from constituents’ reports, that in my constituency we do have power cuts—as we would call them in old language—that are frequent and can be of significant and sometimes long duration. In the last few years we have had power cuts of multiple days at a time.

With the PSTN charter, the previous Government asked communications providers to work with Ofcom to provide solutions going beyond the minimum of one hour of continued uninterrupted access to emergency services in the event of a power outage. I understand that Vodafone is now providing back-ups with four to seven hours of usage time free of charge to vulnerable customers. I am grateful to Vodafone for letting me see that technology and to ask about it further. For other customers not on the vulnerable list, however, those back-ups come at the customer’s own cost.

In September 2024, Ofcom issued updated resilience guidance setting an industry expectation that power back-ups for newly installed fixed network cabinets should last four hours. As I understand it, however, although the Government continue to encourage providers to go further for householders, the actual minimum requirement remains at just one hour. That is simply not nearly enough for people experiencing power cuts of the duration that we have been talking about.

I have the following asks. There must be much greater awareness about the digital switchover, through a nationally led campaign, alongside the telecare national action plan. Some of the fears people have could be allayed through just understanding more about what will happen.