BT Broadband Provision: Local Businesses

Debate between Jack Lopresti and Neil Parish

Thursday 10th March 2016 Westminster Hall

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Ryan. I thank the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) for introducing this important debate. She has made some important points. It is nice to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Chris Davies), who made some good points about rural broadband in particular, including that the delivery of the single farm payment is not just about broadband but has a little to do with the Rural Payments Agency as well. It is lovely to see the Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy, my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey) in his place. I know that he always enjoys my contributions to these debates, so I did not want to disappoint him in this one.

I congratulate the Government and local authorities on all the public money going into delivering broadband into rural areas, but—there is always a “but”—are we getting value for money out of BT? I know that the Minister works hard with BT, but we need to put even more pressure on it to deliver. The problem is that although we may get to 90% or 95%, the last 5% of people, by their very nature, are in the hardest areas to reach, and they are the ones who will put more and more pressure on the system. We see BT doing some areas or part of an area, stymieing anybody else who might come in to deliver broadband there and then not completing the whole area. BT must not only deliver, it must deliver across the whole area.

I also understand from meeting BT recently that it has now decided that it might have access to a satellite. That is marvellous, is it not? That technology has been around for a long time. I welcome the fact that BT is starting to consider different technologies, but BT has a major contract to deliver rural broadband across the country. It should not be thinking only now about rolling out such technologies; they should have been rolled out a long time ago. I have made that point to the Minister many times, and I do not apologise for making it to him again. If BT had more competition, somebody with a red-hot poker behind them—I will not say in what part of their anatomy, because that would be rude —they might actually get on with it. That is the problem that we have.

[Jack Lopresti (Filton and Bradley Stoke) (Con)]

I apologise for cutting off my hon. Friend mid-flow, but as well as having technology and lots of taxpayers’ money, BT needs to get the fundamentals right. I moved offices in the summer, within a BT area in a business park. It was a fairly simple and rudimentary move, and my office went out of its way to ensure that the transfer went seamlessly as far as dates and times went, and got a special licence so we could access the property before we took possession. There were days of disruption to the phone line and the BT service, which inconvenienced my constituents and cost a lot of taxpayers’ money to put right, yet when I wrote a letter to Sir Michael Rake, the chairman of BT, on 5 August, I had no reply. Arrogance and aloofness will not be solved by taxpayers’ money.

[Neil Parish]

I could not agree with my hon. Friend more, because that is again symptomatic of the fact that although BT does not have a total monopoly, by its very size and scale it has a virtual monopoly. BT has played on that over the years and is still playing on it now. Hopefully the chairman of BT will hear my hon. Friend’s contribution today.

[Jack Lopresti]

Well, he did not get my letter, so I hope so.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Parish]

Hopefully he will reply to my hon. Friend. Was that letter from 5 August?

[Jack Lopresti]

Yes.

[Neil Parish]

That really emphasises my point that competition is necessary.

I am also very disappointed that Openreach has not been detached from BT. BT has so much by having Openreach—it has so much of the cables, the infrastructure, the fibre optics and really everything across the country for delivery of broadband. So, BT holds all the aces. Is it truly giving other companies the opportunity to gain access to its infrastructure? I suspect not. It also has all sorts of fantastic lawyers and wonderful people around the place who make it very difficult for other companies to intervene, and that is the problem.

As the Minister knows, the second contract for delivering broadband across Devon and Somerset was not awarded because it was not value for money. Therefore, we are now going out again with a further contract. I hope there is a real competition for that. Although it is perhaps easier in some respects to deliver broadband across the whole of Devon and Somerset in one contract, if the contract is so big BT will probably be the only company to bid for it again. However, if we have smaller contracts, other companies can come in and deliver broadband across places such as the Blackdown hills and in villages such as Upottery and Ruishton—all those villages across the Blackdown hills and on to Exmoor, which are difficult to reach. So I have still got many more people to be connected.

The point has been made by my hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire and others that broadband is the fourth utility and we really need it for all our rural businesses, including our farms. All of us in Westminster Hall today who represent constituencies with areas of rurality are amazed—are we not?—when we go around our constituencies and discover the types of businesses that are there. It is not just the farms. There might be businesses manufacturing or designing wings for Airbus, or other such things, where they would be least expected. However, the only way that those businesses can prosper is by ensuring that broadband is there and connected. Broadband is key.

I now turn to what happened recently in an area of my constituency at Dunkeswell and Luppitt—