Broadband Universal Service Obligation

Jo Churchill Excerpts

Thursday 15th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Jo Churchill (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)]

Thank you for your indulgence, Mr Deputy Speaker, as I was not here for the opening speeches.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Boston and Skegness (Matt Warman) for securing such an important debate. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Drew Hendry), who said that he was now in festive mode. All I would say is, for the sake of the family, step it up a little before next Sunday.

Members will see very rapidly what ambitions I have. Much of what was said by the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey and my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) was about how badly served their areas are. I, too, have those problems. I, too, have businesses without connectivity and so on.

I am also a neighbour of the Minister. We share roads that go through villages that sit next door to one another and we, too, have these problems. I therefore point out that he knows only too well how difficult it is to deliver broadband in rural areas. Given that Ofcom writes about some of our postcodes, “Ofcom does not currently provide any information on this because the speeds are so poor,” I think we are more than aware that work needs to be done on this.

I am interested in what the legal right to broadband actually means. As the Digital Economy Bill progresses and we roll out the universal service obligation, I am interested to understand more explicitly what that means. I welcome the broadband universal service obligation and was pleased to hear the Minister say in Culture, Media and Sport questions that the same thing would happen for mobile connectivity.

Better Broadband for Suffolk is on track to deliver 96% coverage, which is one point above the national average. However, my constituency will only reach somewhere in the upper eighties. That will leave an enormous number of my constituents without mobile and broadband connectivity. A recent survey that I have collected in the last six weeks, which have I sent to the Minister, shows that 55% of people do not have adequate broadband coverage. The coverage in the constituency is 0.4%. People cannot bank online. The Government expect people to do more and more online—complete their tax returns, register their cars and so on. If they cannot get online or if their connection drops off, it is very hard to do those things. Broadband should be the fourth utility.

Rural communities are affected more than most. We have heard about farmers and I will not go over the same points again, but they are innovators. Farmers need connectivity, not only for their health and safety, but to work the topography drones and so on that allow them to seed their land as they want to. They need it for their basic payment schemes, which often collapse when they are trying to enter the data. We are encouraging people to have rural businesses. If there is no connectivity, people do not want to go to the bed and breakfasts and enjoy what Suffolk has to offer.

There will also be health issues as we start using telemedicine. For example, there are insulin pumps that upload information to the cloud all the time. That cannot be done without connectivity and that will affect the health of individuals. Nobody minds how connectivity is given to them on phones or on broadband—they just want it. They do not want to hear statistics, they want action.

The survey I conducted showed that 56% of respondents had difficulty with broadband, 55% said that mobile coverage was poor and 70% experienced failure. Bury St Edmunds has 4G only 51% of the time.

As we move forward, could we show a little bit of initiative, locking enterprise zones into hard-to-reach villages, such as, for example, Creeting, out of the back of Stowmarket enterprise zone, and Moreton Hall out of the back of Bury St Edmunds? Could we also take up the churches’ offer of masts on churches? Mostly, could the Minister consider Suffolk, with the A143, the road with the worst coverage and the most not spots, becoming a pilot and thereby the true exemplar of how to do it?