BT Broadband Provision: Local Businesses

James Cartlidge Excerpts

Thursday 10th March 2016 Westminster Hall

[Helen Goodman]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and his constituency of Ashford is not even particularly rural; it is not as if the company has to travel dozens or hundreds of miles to make the connections in his constituency. It seems to me that it has a particular problem with the small business sector and it has a problem the minute someone is outside one of the large urban areas. Further to the point made by the hon. Member for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris), it is obvious that the benefits of good internet access are greater in rural areas than in big urban areas, because, as anyone with a rural or semi-rural constituency knows, vast amounts of resource go into transport and moving stuff and people around.

[James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)]

I am sure that every hon. Member present is getting a feeling of déjà vu and agreeing with pretty much everything that the hon. Lady is saying. I have a similar case. Stoke by Nayland golf club in my constituency ended up doing a self-dig in March last year. It dug its own line, with the agreement of Openreach, after many months waiting for BT Openreach to come and put down a line. Recently, an engineer finally turned up, offering to put down a line. That company in my constituency had already dug into the ground itself. Does not that prove that there is a massive breakdown in communication between Openreach and whoever the actual supplier is?

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Now, the Minister made a rather good speech yesterday in a similar debate, in which he said that BT was spending far too much time buying sporting rights and not enough dealing with the problems. He is right. BT needs to concentrate on the day job but it is not doing that. This infrastructure is vital to the country’s productivity.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Davies]

And when I have spoken, the Minister has always answered at the end with a cheery smile and a great further commitment to rural broadband. However, I believe he would agree that even though he has always spoken well, there is still much more to do.

There are three main issues involved in providing adequate broadband to our rural businesses. The first is information. It is vital that our businesses have access to all the information they need to make an informed decision about their broadband needs. Many businesses that I speak to in my constituency tell me that they cannot get access to the speeds that they need, yet they are unaware of many of the options available to them. Often, few are aware of the possibility of ethernet connections, and many are put off by the extra costs involved, as might be expected. Others are still oblivious to the promise of satellite and wireless broadband, which could satisfy their requirements.

Businesses face a lot of noise about off-the-shelf products that hides alternative options that might benefit them. I therefore recommend that the Government do all that they can to ensure that our businesses are properly informed of all the options available. BT and other providers offer alternative services that might fulfil the needs of those local businesses.

[James Cartlidge]

Although information is key, does my hon. Friend not accept that sometimes there are physical reasons? With mobile reception, for instance, in some areas there are dips in the land or other factors that cause a “not spot” where there is no signal. I have good mobile signal where I live, and I use mobile broadband. Does my hon. Friend share my hope that the Minister is doing all he can to encourage further support for mobile phone signal as well as broadband in rural areas?

[Chris Davies]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend, and I am sure the Minister will pick up that point when he sums up later.

When I have spoken to BT and Openreach about the roll-out of broadband, they have outlined many of the challenges involved in getting broadband to local rural businesses. They have told me of challenges in assessing the infrastructure that they need to roll out superfast and ultrafast broadband, and the costs involved in doing so. Although I applaud the Government’s work in assisting the roll-out of broadband to rural communities, I ask that the same concern be given to the roll-out to rural businesses. I am informed that where it is economically not viable to provide broadband to an area, it is down to the local authorities to decide where to procure services. I therefore ask the Government to do all they can to pressure local councils and the Welsh Assembly Government to give the same consideration to business broadband as they do to local communities.

Finally, following on from my previous point, I ask the Minister to consider how we can bring together broadband provision for communities and businesses. It is not economically viable to provide broadband to large areas, such as those in my constituency in rural Wales and on the Welsh marches. Premises for both habitation and business are spread over vast geographical distances, which can make broadband provision extremely expensive. I therefore commend Openreach’s community fibre broadband partnerships, which offer communities the opportunity to part-fund the roll-out of broadband in their local area. The scheme is aimed at giving give local people and businesses the broadband provision they need. I encourage the Minister to take this opportunity to welcome the scheme, as it would help many of my constituents.

That said, the scheme involves challenges. Local communities and businesses have to fund it themselves, paying half up front when work starts and the remainder on completion. Many of my constituents who are local business owners are not able or willing to pay those costs up front. Costs for installation often run to tens of thousands of pounds, and many business owners are concerned that their cash flow will suffer as a result of extensive implementation costs. Will the Minister meet me to discuss alternative funding options, perhaps including a community loan scheme so that our rural businesses and communities can access the connections that they need while avoiding cash flow issues?

Connecting our businesses to broadband is essential in the modern age. Openreach and the Government are working tirelessly to connect our excellent British businesses, but there are significant challenges to provision in rural areas. I implore the Minister and BT not to forget about businesses in rural areas. The risks of doing so are high and detrimental to the rural economy. If rural businesses are forgotten, we could lose a significant portion of our important rural life as businesses seek to move to better-connected cities and towns. That would cost jobs and livelihoods, not to mention deplete our rural communities. My message is simple. I commend the Government for the roll-out thus far, but they must ensure that it happens across not just most of the UK but the whole UK.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Vaizey]

No, I will not give way. My hon. Friend spoke at length on the issues and I am not giving way to him.

The company built a factory based entirely on the expectation that the service would be delivered, only to find that it was not delivered—Openreach said that it had a problem with blocked ducts. If people are paid £30,000 to deliver a business line, the least they can do is to get out there and look at the ducts, in particular if the order has come in six months before they are meant to deliver it. There is no defence.

I freely admit that it is frustrating to deal with such issues. I wonder sometimes how I could distract attention from them. In fact, I asked the Prime Minister the other day, “Can we have a referendum on something? I am suffering all these attacks from my colleagues, please can we have a referendum on something like our European membership as that might distract them for a few months before they come back to the issue?” But it has not distracted them—we are still debating Openreach’s failures.

The Opposition have contributed a great deal to telecoms and telecoms policy. I read this morning that one Opposition Member was fined £5,000 by the Information Commissioner for making 35,000 recorded calls urging people to nominate him as the London mayoral candidate, which he failed to achieve. But he has added to BT’s coffers!

We are still waiting for a broadband roll-out policy from Labour, but I am grateful to the hon. Member for Eltham for reminding us that Labour’s target was 90% superfast broadband by 2017, which we achieved by the end of 2015. So we are two years ahead of what Labour promised with its unfunded commitment when it was in government and before it left us with a wrecked economy and such long-term plans. I sometimes dream that Labour won the 2010 general election and that a Labour MP might now be having to stand in my place and explain why his Government had still not got to 90% and why they were still going to wait for two years to do so. We have never changed our targets; we will reach 95% by the end of 2017.

I sometimes dream, too, of the SNP being the official Opposition—I know I should not say that, because it is almost blasphemous, but the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk yesterday was entirely reasonable in pointing out the complexities and difficulties of the programme. I also commend the hon. Member for Angus (Mike Weir) for the reasonable points he made today about the problem not necessarily being wholly a Government one.

I want to revise slightly what I said yesterday, because it is important to make two points. First, when I complain about Openreach’s customer service, I should also praise the thousands of people who work for Openreach. They do an extremely good job in difficult circumstances. They are probably dealing with quite antiquated systems, which have not been modernised, and certainly the engineers who do the work on the ground are formidable people—I have met a few of them, when they have been enabling cabinets in my constituency. They work in all weathers and often unpleasant conditions. I want to put on record my gratitude to the thousands of men and women who work for Openreach in delivering roll-out.

Secondly, there is a distinction between poor customer service by Openreach and the roll-out of superfast broadband. The roll-out is an engineering project. We like to give Openreach a hard time, but it was the only one that stepped up to the plate to bid properly for the contracts—it might well be thinking that it made a rod for its own back—and, in terms of the roll-out, Openreach has hit every target. My hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) wondered earlier whether it was value for money: as he well knows, thanks to the clawback mechanisms in the contract, we have achieved £130 million. In fact, there is considerable underspend on the contract as well, so we will probably be able to use existing money to go further than 95%.

As far as I am concerned, Openreach is full of very good people doing a very good job, and the roll-out of infrastructure is going extremely well. In this debate, we are dealing with issues that I will not say are beyond my control, but that should be laid squarely at the door of Openreach. In yesterday’s debate I said that Openreach has the lowest levels of customer satisfaction, just below TalkTalk, according to Ofcom surveys. It is important to remember that no communications provider is perfect. I am sure that if we looked in our inboxes we would all find complaints from our constituents possibly about TalkTalk, Virgin, Sky or even some smaller companies providing business broadband. No company is perfect.

[James Cartlidge]

BT has a monopoly on that front. I have never had a complaint about any other company apart from BT.

[Mr Vaizey]

Well, I have, but perhaps I live in a different world.

Having said that, I find it frustrating that I am sometimes doing the job of the chief executive or directors of Openreach. I find it frustrating that I have to broker a deal between Openreach and house builders to provide what should be provided in any common sense view—when building a brand-new housing development, surely that is the time to lay brand-new technology that people will expect over the next 20 years. I find it frustrating that I have to deal with a legion of complaints that are the result, frankly, of bad management and bad customer service. I sometimes feel that someone in Openreach loathes me so much that they sent out a memo saying, “Please give me the address of every single MP’s office, so we can make sure that every time they try to get a phone line, it will take three months.” At least four MPs have complained about that to me.