BT Broadband Provision: Local Businesses

Debate between Jo Churchill and Helen Goodman

Thursday 10th March 2016 Westminster Hall

[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.

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

My constituency is located slightly above that of my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge), and we have problems across the constituency. To further reinforce what the hon. Lady is saying, some companies in my constituency have now produced their own lines, and doing that cost a company I spoke to this morning, which has had the problem since last May, £6,000. That company can afford it, but that might not necessarily be the case for my small businesses or when there are issues of safety, such as when my farmers are involved.

One local business—this trumped everything I have seen—had its line, let’s just say, “reallocated”. The business line was not identifiable enough so it was reallocated to a homeowner. It took BT five to six weeks to figure out where the business line had gone and that it had redirected it. The gentleman in question was passed back and forth between line and broadband engineers. After a month, his broadband was reinstated. However, his connection speed was reduced by half. For the past three months, he has been forced to drive 25 miles to another office in Ipswich where he can access broadband. He identified the lack of supply and poor customer service as the two main obstacles to resolving his case. I would love to say that that example is isolated but it is not, and it has a real impact. The Minister knows, because I have seen him on many occasions, that the problem really affects my rural constituency.

[Helen Goodman]

It certainly does. The issue affects the hon. Lady’s constituents and the whole country. Our productivity is not rising as it is in the other G7 countries, and it has not been for eight years. Proper investment in infrastructure is one of the ways that we can get our productivity up, from which we will all benefit. When it works, it is really great.

There is a quarry in my constituency that has a very good website and, because of its website, it is able to sell stone to Spain because the Spanish people who are building the cathedral in Barcelona—the Sagrada Família—saw that the stone was the right colour. That is fantastic. When it works, it is brilliant, but it is not working often enough. The OECD and the International Monetary Fund say it; everybody says it. I really feel that the issue should take priority over some things, such as HS2, into which public money is about to be poured. If we could get the IT right, we might not need all the investment in transport, which is proving to be so controversial across the country.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Goodman]

Yes, the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right and, in a way, that is rather similar to the William Smith example I gave. These are not one-off examples. The Countryside Alliance has pointed out that

“8% of premises in the UK (2.4 million) are connected to lines that are unable to receive broadband speeds above the proposed Universal Service Obligation of 10Mbit/s. Many of these are in rural areas, where about 48% of premises…are unable to receive speeds above 10Mbit/s.”

That is 1.5 million people in the countryside who are unable to receive those speeds.

We all know that the Minister is a very nice man. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] He has helped many of us—faute de mieux—with our particular cases. I agree with what he said yesterday. I think he is right, but I am not wholly sympathetic because he is being forced to intervene as if he were a Minister in a Soviet, centrally-planned economy, on a case-by-case basis. That is because the policy framework set up by this Government, in which I think he had some hand, has not worked properly, and that goes back to the point made by the hon. Member for Angus (Mike Weir).

The Government made the areas for the contracts for the roll-out of broadband too small to be economic for any operators apart from BT to bid for them. That is why BT won all the contracts, maintains a monopoly, faces no competition, feels under no pressure and serves our constituents so badly. Everybody will probably welcome Ofcom’s proposals for changes to the governance of Openreach, particularly better standards of service to small businesses, and compensation when those standards are not met.

As well as keeping the pressure up on BT, which I want the Minister to do, we need him to talk to his colleagues in other Departments because the Government’s policy of digital by default is not serving rural communities very well. I had yet another complacent response from Treasury Ministers, saying that 98% of small and medium-sized enterprises submit their tax online. I bet that is only because they are not doing it at home because they go along to an accountant in a small town some way away and pay that person to do the submission online.

We have the same problem with the Rural Payments Agency. Once again, the Public Accounts Committee has had to look into the problem. I see that the Chair of the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is in Westminster Hall this afternoon. He knows that the treatment of farmers by the Rural Payments Agency—expecting them to monitor their cattle movements and supply all the information online—is hopeless. I ask the Minister to go back to his colleagues to get some change of attitude from them.

[Jo Churchill]

I have been calling broadband access our fourth utility since I joined this place so I was interested last week when my right hon. Friend the Minister for Small Business, Industry and Enterprise also called it the fourth utility. As the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) has said, it is interesting that although one Department is pushing for 100% coverage and a fourth utility, perhaps the joined-up thinking across Departments is not there.

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Lady has put it beautifully.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Debate between Jo Churchill and Helen Goodman

Tuesday 27th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman]

My hon. Friend has expressed that beautifully.

I shall move on to the question of employment and support allowance. Again, hon. Members need to think about the overhang from the heavy industries and the impact that reductions in people’s income has on those individuals and on whole communities. I suppose this seems quite unusual to those representing a constituency whose casework consists of a lot of neighbour disputes and planning issues, and where only one person a week turns up with a benefits problem, but in a constituency like mine—a former mining constituency in an industrial area—the bulk of the casework is this sort of thing. The cuts Conservative Members are proposing to vote for tonight will have a devastating impact on the amount of money in the local economy, as well as being very unfair to people who are not going to be able to go back to work.

Finally, I want to make one observation on universal credit and lone parents. It is not reasonable to have the same conditionality for a lone parent with children under school age as for people in couples. The practicalities of looking after children are different for lone parents and for married couples. Ministers in the Parliament before last changed the rules so that the conditionality for lone parents was aligned to the tax credit system, and the period was 16 hours instead of 30 hours for people in couples. Ministers must help people balance their parenting responsibilities and their working responsibilities better.

[Jo Churchill]

I was fortunate enough to sit on the Public Bill Committee, and I also sit on the Women and Equalities Committee. That has shown me two things. I recently spoke to women in Oldham running a voluntary group, and the leader said to me she did not feel what we were doing was wrong, because she felt these measures helped marginalised minority women break out of the cycle of being kept in their homes, improved their English and helped them understand how their families interact with the wider world, asking women to find work and not rely on—