Strengthening Community Resilience

Greg Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2026 Commons Chamber

[Dan Jarvis]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend, not least because the Cornwall experience and the experience of Storm Goretti has been genuinely important in shaping this campaign. I am grateful to her and her Cornish colleagues for the important role they play. A storm summit will be taking place in Cornwall towards the end of November. I have asked the director of Cobra and his deputy to be there. That will provide a really important forum for discussing the kinds of issues my hon. Friend has raised today.

[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

In any emergency, communication is key. In answering the question from my right hon. Friend the Member for Stone, Great Wyrley and Penkridge (Sir Gavin Williamson) earlier, the Minister talked about restoring mobile services if they had been damaged in a storm, for example. But that rather misses the point for the villages that my right hon. Friend mentioned and the villages in my constituency, such as Cuddington and Bryants Bottom, that have no mobile signal right now. Through this resilience work, what more can the right hon. Gentleman do, with other Government Departments, to speed up delivery of the shared rural network and get those rural notspots the connectivity they need and deserve?

[Dan Jarvis]

The hon. Member makes an important point. Communication is key. I know he will understand that I was responding to a specific point about where a particularly capability had been lost and how it could be restored as quickly as possible, but I take his point about areas that do not have connectivity in the first place. I am sure that that is a conversation we want to have across Government, to look at what more we can do, working with colleagues in DCMS, but let me take that away and I will come back to him with some further thoughts.