Rural Phone and Broadband Connectivity

Karen Lumley Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Jesse Norman]

My hon. Friend is right to focus on the combined effect of lack of mobile and broadband connectivity.

It is testimony to the importance of this debate that the House is so full, especially on the Government side of the argument. I am delighted that the Minister, who is not yet the Samson Agonistes of his Department, has retained his beard for this important debate. We must pray he never loses it and, in particular, that it confers the strength required to see this vital project through to its natural conclusion—and certainly that if he does lose it, he does not lose it to the mobile operators.

Responding to my debate on 6 January, the Minister stressed the huge investment in and the tremendous progress the Government are making on broadband and superfast broadband, and on improving mobile communications. He is absolutely right, and I pay tribute to him and the Secretary of State, but he acknowledged that there were still issues—how could there not be—with implementation, and it is on implementation that I believe this debate should focus. I shall pick three key areas of implementation.

The first concerns partial mobile not spots, about which so many Members have spoken. I welcome the agreement recently reached between the Government and the mobile network operators, but it would be helpful to have some detail from the Minister on what specific steps he is taking to ensure that areas with multiple communications problems—of the kind highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin), which also exist in my constituency—can be prioritised for improved coverage.

The Government also need to focus on the worst-hit areas and not merely allow the operators to target the easy wins. If I may, I will tentatively offer a suggestion. Perhaps the Government might consider initiating or promoting a means by which rural communities could petition their councils for mobile services as a signal of interest to the operators and as a trigger for a fast track through the planning process. We need that kind of change if we are to get adequate roll-out to some of the more remote areas.

[Karen Lumley (Redditch) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is not acceptable for Mr Washington of the Lenches in Redditch to have less than 2 megabits to run his business?

[Jesse Norman]

One can only hope, depending on his business, that once the upgrade goes through, Mr Washington will have considerably more than 2 megabits—enough to allow him not merely to run his current business, but to expand it into all kinds of other value-added areas.

My second area of focus concerns the mobile infrastructure project. The situation, it is fair to say, has, after initially high hopes, become disappointing and frustrating. When the sites to benefit from the mobile infrastructure project were first announced in July 2013, the ambition was for them to be acquired and built this year. That has now slipped—officially, at least—to spring 2016. Ten sites were identified in Herefordshire alone, but to date only two in the country, not just in my county, have been delivered. This is a vital area for the Government to focus on.

I very much welcomed the Minister’s announcement on 6 January that the mobile infrastructure project masts would now run 3G and 4G antennae, which is a great step forward. He said that

“we have put a rocket under the MIP”.—[Official Report, 6 January 2015; Vol. 590, c. 69WH.]

Could he be a bit more specific? What we need now is a schedule of all the sites that Arqiva plan to develop, a detailed explanation of what barriers exist to getting the plans delivered and a plan from the Department to recover costs from Arqiva if the contract can no longer be delivered.