Rural Mobile Connectivity

Debate between Helen Morgan and Edward Leigh

Thursday 12th February 2026 Commons Chamber

[Helen Morgan]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point about the use of public money and how we develop infrastructure fit for the modern age as part of a public and private operation.

Rural roaming measures have been opposed by the industry, but they were recommended by the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in its 2019 report. I am convinced that if the Government are serious about enabling economic growth in rural areas, they should explore that option. My constituent Rob Paul, a consultant with vast experience of rural telecoms projects, suggests that robustly enforced financial penalties are the only thing that operators will respond to. After years of being let down, I cannot disagree.

I turn to the digital switchover. Mobile phones have been cited as the default back-up option in a power cut once the copper landline network is switched off, as has now happened over most of the UK. That is hugely concerning for people in areas prone to extensive power cuts in winter storms. As we are rural, our power is not put back online as a priority. Back-up batteries for routers will last for a couple of hours—perhaps up to 12. People in remote parts of North Shropshire are sometimes left without power for several days. Someone who is at home on their own, in the dark and frightened, might want to call someone other than the emergency services in the event of a power cut. It is crucial that people can access their mobile phone and get a reliable signal when the power is down, whoever they are.

One 90-year-old constituent told me that she purchased a phone because she was concerned about the digital switchover and wanted to ensure that she could still make calls in the event of a power cut. The mobile connection in her village of Knockin is so bad that she was never once able to use the phone. When she asked EE to end the contract, it required £293 to release her.

It is not just about power cuts. Hundreds of people in Kinnerley and Ellesmere have been left without any service at all when their broadband cabinet has been taken out by other factors such as fire or car accidents. Peter, who lives near Whittington, has terminal lung disease. Last weekend, his internet went down for 12 hours, which also meant that his landline was down. There was no mobile signal at his home. If Peter had had an emergency, he would have had no one to turn to.

Improving rural phone signal would not just help vulnerable individuals. It would help local businesses, grow the economy and help our health and social care system. Smartphones are an essential part of daily modern life, whether that is for a GP patient who needs to book an appointment or request a repeat prescription or for a small business owner who needs to take payment from a customer. I have spoken to countless elderly people who struggle to access key services. I have heard from farmers, landscape gardeners, taxi drivers and dog groomers whose businesses all suffer because of signal problems. One livestock and arable farmer told me:

“I cannot express strongly enough how frustrating it is farming in the modern world. It is depressing the amount of time wasted walking around the yard trying to get a slight signal to answer the phone”.

Someone who gets injured may have no way of contacting the emergency services or seeking other help. Vast sums have to be spent on helping tractor GPS systems to navigate the inconsistent signal.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this important debate. I represent a rural area like hers—mine is in Lincolnshire—and in some Wold villages it is appalling: there is no mobile connection. All the red telephone boxes are being closed, and it is a tremendous struggle to persuade BT to keep them open. I wonder whether we could do more work with councils such as West Lindsey on the voucher scheme and Project Gigabit to get to the last hard-to-reach areas. Through this debate, can we encourage the Government to put resources into helping district councils such as West Lindsey?

[Helen Morgan]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a good point. I will mention Project Gigabit and its shortcomings, but we could have a three-hour debate on the subject. I wholly agree that we cannot consider mobile coverage and broadband separately. They are two parts of the same thing: the areas with the worst broadband signal tend to have the worst mobile signal. It is a very difficult problem to resolve.

As I was saying, modern farming requires modern technology, but if the signal is inadequate it does not work. Being able to rely on broadband would also help those who work in an office, but just 50% of rural commercial buildings in North Shropshire have access to full fibre. The announcement of Project Gigabit gave us real hope, but after two years, the contract was handed back having connected just 3,500 of the planned 12,000 properties. The word I would use to describe Project Gigabit is “shambles”, as my adjectives of choice are unsuitable for the Chamber. We are still waiting for details of when the rest of the properties will be delivered, but meanwhile we continue to pay exorbitant prices for mediocre broadband because Openreach and other companies neglect to invest in our area. Across the House, Members are calling for a change in direction for rural digital infrastructure.

I am conscious of time so I will speed up slightly. Essentially, gaps in mobile and broadband coverage threaten to undermine national ambitions. My report from the APPG on digital communities highlights how co-ordinated action to address the challenges and unlock the full potential of the UK’s digital infrastructure is crucial for rural areas and for growth in the rest of the UK as well. Successive Governments have failed to grasp that. We can just look at the emergency services network, which should have been introduced in 2017. Nearly a decade on, we are still waiting for it to be properly rolled out.

The Government’s ambition is to have high-quality 5G in all populated areas by 2030, yet we rank 30th among 39 developed economies according to the Social Market Foundation. We know that we are lagging miles behind and we are still trying to make up the ground. In Shropshire, we would be grateful for consistent 4G. People who live in rural areas pay the same, or even higher, fees as people in towns in return for a second-rate service. We must be given the connections that we need to reliably access modern life.

Successive Governments have treated rural areas with disdain, telling us that everything is great when we can see for ourselves that it is not. It would bring far more money into the Treasury and unlock the huge potential of the rural economy if the Government finally saw sense. I hope that the Minister will address the abject failure of the shared rural network and Gigabit projects, and outline a sensible strategy for delivering rural infrastructure in future.

Planning, the Green Belt and Rural Affairs

Debate between Helen Morgan and Edward Leigh

Friday 19th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Helen Morgan]

I do not know the details of that individual case, but we need to ensure that planning departments are properly funded so that the decisions made by planning officers are appropriate. Without knowing the details, I do now know whether it is a good development or a poor one, but those departments need to be empowered to make decisions correctly.

Some proposals for development are inappropriate and some are downright dangerous—we mentioned the building of houses on floodplains earlier. The only insurer to re-insure houses on floodplains is due to close its operations in 15 years’ time. We cannot build houses on floodplains. It will not be possible for them to be insured or sold; homeowners will be trapped.

We should also not be building housing developments without additional schools or GP surgeries. Most importantly, we should not be building housing developments where the developers do not prepare the roads and green spaces to an acceptable standard and do not allow them to be adopted by the local authority, but set up a shared management company and leave the homeowners fleeced for the rest of their home ownership experience. I encourage the Deputy Prime Minister to consider that in the forthcoming legislation.

Good councillors approve planning for good developments. That is why, on the days when the Conservatives are not accusing us of being nimbys, they are telling people that we are going to concrete over their countryside.

Planning is not just about housing. We have many demands on our countryside: housing, renewable energy, nature restoration and, importantly, the growing of food. We need to simplify planning so that all those things can happen. Housing, renewable energy and job creation are incredibly important, but I urge the Government to ensure that when they go ahead, it is not at the expense of food production. The Liberal Democrats have called for the development of a land use strategy so that these important and competing demands can be balanced, and so that we use land in the optimal way, protecting the highest grade arable land for food production and putting the infrastructure of renewable energy and housing in less prime places. I therefore hope that the Government will consider a land use strategy as part of their planning reform.

That brings me to another important area of the countryside: our waterways and our beaches. It is a scandal that raw sewage has been allowed to be dumped into our rivers and on to our beaches, while water company executives have taken home huge bonuses and their—often overseas—shareholders have taken huge dividends. The Liberal Democrats are proud to have led the campaign to end the sewage crisis. We welcome the water (special measures) Bill and will be watching closely to ensure that the water regulator is given the powers it needs to finally end this sewage outrage.

I will move on to rural affairs. There was no mention in the King’s Speech of rural communities or priorities for the countryside, which I hope means that the new Government will be ensuring that every policy is rural-proofed and that the demands of delivering public services in rural areas, where the population is spread over a large area, are being considered.

I also want to mention the English devolution bill. The Liberal Democrats are the proud voices of local communities and community-led politics, and we absolutely welcome steps to devolve power away from Westminster, but I ask the Secretary of State to confirm what that will look like for those councils without a devo deal, a metro mayor or a combined authority mayor. It is important that all local councils have the powers and funding to deliver for their communities. That funding must reflect the cost of delivering services in rural areas. Rural councils have been taken for granted for far too long. We need to ensure that people who live in rural areas, who also see increases in their council tax, are getting the public services that they deserve.

Rurality affects the delivery of all types of services, but I want to touch on just a few key areas. Health is an important issue in my North Shropshire constituency, where we have seen huge problems with GP and dentistry access and a crisis in our A&E service. While I welcome the Government’s plans to tackle the crisis in mental health service provision, which is also a big problem in rural areas, we really want to see rural-focused policy to deal with the recruitment crisis in rural areas and the cost of delivering health services over large distances, and to ensure that people who live a long way from a hospital or diagnostic centre can travel to it more easily.

That brings me to public transport, which is quite problematic in Shropshire. We have lost 63% of our bus miles since 2015, which makes it difficult for anybody to access work opportunities, social opportunities, educational opportunities and, indeed, health services. I am really pleased that the Government will allow local authorities to franchise their own bus services—the Liberal Democrats have long called for that—but I would like to see the detail of how that will work and how we will get the funding to kick-start those routes and get labour moving properly around our countryside.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Edward Leigh)]

Order. Can the hon. Lady bring her remarks to a close, please?

[Helen Morgan]

Of course.

I was briefly going to mention mobile signal, but I will rush over that because I have talked about it a reasonable amount in the House. I want to talk about farming and the rural economy, because that is the backbone of our economy and food production is extremely important. Farmers have faced a crisis over the last few years, with the botched introduction of the environmental land management scheme, the input costs they face and the fact that vast tracts of farmland are underwater and have been for the last 18 months. I must encourage the Government to look at trade deals to ensure that farmers are working on a level playing field, and to ensure that the sustainable farming incentive deals with the consistent problem of flooding following prolonged rainfall, given how our farmers are storing an enormous amount of water upstream.

I will draw my remarks to a close because I am keen to hear the maiden speeches of all these new Members, who I welcome to this place. To reinforce the points I have made, community-led planning is so important, and we would love to see a land use strategy. We need to ensure that the cost of delivering public services in rural areas is properly considered and funded, and the infrastructure needs to be there. Finally, please do not forget about food security, which is so important to national renewal.

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

I call Sam Rushworth to make his maiden speech.