Shared Rural Network Implementation Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport
Jamie Stone
Main Page: Jamie Stone (Liberal Democrat - Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross)Department Debates - View all Jamie Stone's debates with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport
Shared Rural Network Implementation
Jamie Stone Excerpts(10 months ago)
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Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Maria. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan) on securing this excellent debate.
There is a common theme here, as we have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Sarah Dyke) and the hon. Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith). I want to take everyone to a community called Borgie, which is on the north coast of Sutherland facing the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael). In Borgie, an elderly gentleman fell over in his garden. Exactly as we have heard already, he did not have a mobile signal and had to crawl some distance to a landline to call for help.
In the same community, I also have a constituent named Jean, who had a mast installed on her ground in 2019. I give credit where it is due; Openreach and EE, the companies involved, did what they needed to do. You would think that this was a good news story, Dame Maria, but it is not. SSE needs to connect the mast to the electrical grid for it to do its work. It has promised again and again that the work will be done—to absolutely no effect. We are now in 2024, almost five years since the mast was put up, and it is no good to man or beast, as we say in the highlands. On a slightly more humorous note, her neighbours in Borgie call the mast “Jean’s folly”. Alas, it is a folly indeed.
A lot of public money has been spent on the mast, so in this incredibly brief contribution I make an appeal to the Minister. Could she, in the goodness of her heart, representing the United Kingdom Government, have a quiet and meaningful word with the Scottish Government and tell them to get their act together with SSE to get that mast connected? In the meantime, we have no mobile connectivity whatsoever.
Finally, as others have said, we have power cuts all over the UK. My wife was cut off this very morning in the highlands; luckily, we got the electricity back on again. My final plea is therefore that the masts need to have some sort of solar power attached to them. I would be extraordinarily grateful to the Minister if she used her charms to sort out this extremely annoying problem, which is quite dangerous for a remote community in the highlands.