BT Broadband Provision: Local Businesses
Debate between Jo Churchill and Clive EffordWestminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
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Clive Efford
I shall just finish my point. The Minister has been in post for nearly six years. Why, when he is answering a debate that he has responded to on 45 previous occasions, is he still asking why Openreach has not put in place a hit squad to deal with MPs’ complaints? Perhaps the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds is going to tell us.
Jo Churchill
No, I am not going to tell the hon. Gentleman. I put that and another question to BT on Monday, and it replied that it now no longer uses agency workers to do the difficult work; it now uses its own people to do the work that needs programming, which should sort out the fact that it cannot programme that work to sort it out for the customers. It strikes me that a company of its size, which consistently fails and, by its own admission to me, has the wrong people doing the wrong job at the wrong time, needs some assistance in the rear end department.
Clive Efford
Again, the hon. Lady very eloquently illustrates one of the problems that we have with Openreach.
The Minister gave his own example:
“I dealt with a factory that had been built to be ready to open specifically on the basis of when Openreach was going to connect it, but Openreach was already a year behind schedule. That cost that factory many tens of thousands of pounds. It continues to baffle me why it cannot get its act together and sort out these prominent problems.”
It is beginning to baffle us why he cannot sort out these problems with Openreach.
“I had to intervene on new builds. When a housing development is being put together, one would have thought it was the most obvious thing in the world that the people buying the houses are likely to be relatively young and likely to have children, and therefore likely to want, in this day and age, fast broadband connections. However, it took me a year to 18 months to bang together the heads of BT and the house builders to get an agreement.”