BT Broadband Provision: Local Businesses

Neil Parish Excerpts

Thursday 10th March 2016 Westminster Hall

[Gordon Henderson (Sittingbourne and Sheppey) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) on securing the debate. She highlighted an issue of concern to a number of businesses in my constituency. She is right, and there will be a sense of déjà vu, because she could have written my speech for me. As she said, the way in which BT treats its customers sometimes borders on the farcical, to the extent that I sometimes wonder how it survives. To demonstrate my point, I will highlight one case in which I have been involved for many months.

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

My hon. Friend asks how BT survives. Does he agree that it does so by having a virtual monopoly? There is no real competition out there, especially in rural areas, so it can treat its customers abysmally.

[Gordon Henderson]

I could not agree more. My hon. Friend is perfectly right, but even monopolies come a cropper eventually if they do not provide a service.

In my constituency I have a family-run company called Bennett Opie, which manufactures and supplies to the retail trade a range of pickles and preserves. If any hon. Member here likes pickled walnuts, no doubt they will have tried one of Bennett Opie’s products, because it is the only company in this country that makes pickled walnuts. Bennett Opie has two sites in Sittingbourne and, as in the example that the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland raised, it wanted to link those sites with an internal computer network. On 21 January 2015, it approached BT to find out the cost of installing a short -haul data services circuit—we both now know what one of those is.

Bennett Opie provided BT with the addresses of its two sites on 26 January 2015, and on 4 February it signed an agreement with BT. It was confirmed on 6 March that a survey for the work had been completed—all was going swimmingly for Bennett Opie. The company was then advised on 9 March that additional civil engineering work was needed at the first site. Bennett Opie signed a contract for that additional work on 13 March, because it was happy to pay. BT confirmed on 19 March that the civil works had been completed and advised of an end of May move between the two sites.

The broadband line was scheduled for installation at the first site on 25 March, but the installation failed. A month later, on 20 April, the broadband line was finally installed successfully at the first site. The full SHDS circuit was predicted to be installed on 22 May, but it failed. The end fibre at the second site was successfully terminated and tested on 26 May, and two days later, on 28 May, the end fibre at the first site was terminated and tested, but it failed. The full completion of the SHDS circuit was due on 29 May, but it failed and a fast track was applied to the order—Bennett Opie hoped that that would speed things up.

The list goes on and on, so I will pick out one or two more events from the subsequent period. BT notified Bennett Opie on 19 August that civil works, which were due to be completed, would be completed by the end of November, extending the installation almost to the end of 2015. On 14 September, BT advised Bennett Opie that plans for the works drawn up from the August site meeting had been submitted to Kent County Council with no response. Kent highways department, on behalf of Kent County Council, confirmed on 21 September that BT had not supplied it with drawings or plans. On 2 October, Kent highways confirmed misinformation and failings by BT relating to the location of works, the status of permits and the time needed for traffic management. In addition, Kent highways advised that the civil works had been rescheduled for 4 November.

On 18 November, BT provided a revised completion date of 27 November and provided details of the permit reference number for the works. Kent highways confirmed on 20 November that the permit number given to Bennett Opie by BT was for the civil works cancelled on 4 November and that BT had not applied for a replacement permit—I could not make this up.

I will skip a few entries. BT confirmed on 8 December that rod and rope engineers were on site and estimated that the tubing work would be completed by close of play that day—whoopee. On 9 December, BT confirmed that engineers were still working on the rod and rope task and that completion was expected that day. BT told Bennett Opie on 15 December that it could not complete the rod and rope task because traffic management was needed in order to access a manhole.

On 17 December, BT gave a traffic management survey date of 21 December, and on 22 December it provided Bennett Opie with details of four permit numbers for the job and confirmed that it would now take place on 18 January 2016, a year after the original agreement.

On 4 January, BT told Bennett Opie that Kent highways required night work to be done on the permit numbers quoted and that the work would slip to 8 February. Bennett Opie, quite understandably, contacted Kent highways, which confirmed that the permit numbers provided were wrong—two of them related to work due to take place in Brighton, which is some way from Sittingbourne, one did not exist on its system and the last was an incomplete number. On 18 January, workmen were observed working at night on the pavement outside the first site with a large reel of plastic tubing. Despite BT’s claim that two-way traffic signals were needed, the van simply parked on the pathway, a “keep right” sign was erected and a small barrier was put around the manhole. No other traffic management was used.

When Bennett Opie contacted Kent highways on 19 January, it confirmed that BT had requested full traffic light control; that the fibre tubing job was completed and ready for the fibre to be blown; that BT could have proceeded faster with the work due to the lack of traffic management actually needed or used; and that night work would not have been prevented during December, so the work could have been done then.

That comedy of errors is symptomatic of the way in which BT treats business customers, but of course it is no laughing matter for companies such as Bennett Opie, which lost business because of BT’s inefficiency. The good news is that Bennett Opie now has a working connection, 15 months after it signed its agreement with BT. As its chairman, Philip Opie, told me, the Great Eastern laid a transatlantic cable in 1865, and it took just one month. So much for the age of technology.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Ryan. I thank the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) for introducing this important debate. She has made some important points. It is nice to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Chris Davies), who made some good points about rural broadband in particular, including that the delivery of the single farm payment is not just about broadband but has a little to do with the Rural Payments Agency as well. It is lovely to see the Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy, my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey) in his place. I know that he always enjoys my contributions to these debates, so I did not want to disappoint him in this one.

I congratulate the Government and local authorities on all the public money going into delivering broadband into rural areas, but—there is always a “but”—are we getting value for money out of BT? I know that the Minister works hard with BT, but we need to put even more pressure on it to deliver. The problem is that although we may get to 90% or 95%, the last 5% of people, by their very nature, are in the hardest areas to reach, and they are the ones who will put more and more pressure on the system. We see BT doing some areas or part of an area, stymieing anybody else who might come in to deliver broadband there and then not completing the whole area. BT must not only deliver, it must deliver across the whole area.

I also understand from meeting BT recently that it has now decided that it might have access to a satellite. That is marvellous, is it not? That technology has been around for a long time. I welcome the fact that BT is starting to consider different technologies, but BT has a major contract to deliver rural broadband across the country. It should not be thinking only now about rolling out such technologies; they should have been rolled out a long time ago. I have made that point to the Minister many times, and I do not apologise for making it to him again. If BT had more competition, somebody with a red-hot poker behind them—I will not say in what part of their anatomy, because that would be rude —they might actually get on with it. That is the problem that we have.

[Jack Lopresti (Filton and Bradley Stoke) (Con)]

I apologise for cutting off my hon. Friend mid-flow, but as well as having technology and lots of taxpayers’ money, BT needs to get the fundamentals right. I moved offices in the summer, within a BT area in a business park. It was a fairly simple and rudimentary move, and my office went out of its way to ensure that the transfer went seamlessly as far as dates and times went, and got a special licence so we could access the property before we took possession. There were days of disruption to the phone line and the BT service, which inconvenienced my constituents and cost a lot of taxpayers’ money to put right, yet when I wrote a letter to Sir Michael Rake, the chairman of BT, on 5 August, I had no reply. Arrogance and aloofness will not be solved by taxpayers’ money.

[Neil Parish]

I could not agree with my hon. Friend more, because that is again symptomatic of the fact that although BT does not have a total monopoly, by its very size and scale it has a virtual monopoly. BT has played on that over the years and is still playing on it now. Hopefully the chairman of BT will hear my hon. Friend’s contribution today.

[Jack Lopresti]

Well, he did not get my letter, so I hope so.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Parish]

Hopefully he will reply to my hon. Friend. Was that letter from 5 August?

[Jack Lopresti]

Yes.

[Neil Parish]

That really emphasises my point that competition is necessary.

I am also very disappointed that Openreach has not been detached from BT. BT has so much by having Openreach—it has so much of the cables, the infrastructure, the fibre optics and really everything across the country for delivery of broadband. So, BT holds all the aces. Is it truly giving other companies the opportunity to gain access to its infrastructure? I suspect not. It also has all sorts of fantastic lawyers and wonderful people around the place who make it very difficult for other companies to intervene, and that is the problem.

As the Minister knows, the second contract for delivering broadband across Devon and Somerset was not awarded because it was not value for money. Therefore, we are now going out again with a further contract. I hope there is a real competition for that. Although it is perhaps easier in some respects to deliver broadband across the whole of Devon and Somerset in one contract, if the contract is so big BT will probably be the only company to bid for it again. However, if we have smaller contracts, other companies can come in and deliver broadband across places such as the Blackdown hills and in villages such as Upottery and Ruishton—all those villages across the Blackdown hills and on to Exmoor, which are difficult to reach. So I have still got many more people to be connected.

The point has been made by my hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire and others that broadband is the fourth utility and we really need it for all our rural businesses, including our farms. All of us in Westminster Hall today who represent constituencies with areas of rurality are amazed—are we not?—when we go around our constituencies and discover the types of businesses that are there. It is not just the farms. There might be businesses manufacturing or designing wings for Airbus, or other such things, where they would be least expected. However, the only way that those businesses can prosper is by ensuring that broadband is there and connected. Broadband is key.

I now turn to what happened recently in an area of my constituency at Dunkeswell and Luppitt—

[Helen Goodman]

Before the hon. Gentleman gives a specific example, could he enlighten us on the so-called “childish turf war” between the Government Digital Service, the Rural Payments Agency and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which meant the payments to farmers were down from 90% to under 40% at the end of December 2015? He might be able to tell us a little about that.

[Neil Parish]

I hope I will not be ruled out of order, because that is going a little off the topic of the debate. However, I can enlighten the hon. Lady. We had the head of the RPA in Parliament yesterday, and obviously what happened—to put it in layman’s terms—is that DEFRA created a system that was not entirely compatible with what the RPA was doing. We tried to drill down yesterday on the issue: at what stage did the head of the RPA realise that, and at what stage did he intervene? Was there a breakdown in communication? Was there a clash of personalities? Yes, there was; there is no doubt about that. The trouble is that whatever Department or whatever system was to blame it is the farmers who pay the price, because they are still waiting for that payment.

In fairness to the RPA, it has speeded up its operation. However, what we are mindful of is that we do not want this situation to carry on as things did in 2004, when the payments were bad for 2005, 2006 and 2007, and it took 10 years and more to put matters right. We want to make sure that within one year the situation is absolutely right. There are people farming on the commons, and other farmers. Why should they have to wait so long for their payment when the problems are down to others?

As I say, we had the head of the RPA in yesterday and he was trying to say, “Well, it’s this Department, or that Department or the other Department.” However, as the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland says, if the farmers are not getting their payment, they are not interested in which Government Department is failing. We must deliver.

[Jo Churchill]

Before my hon. Friend is asked to come back to the topic of the debate, may I just draw a comparison? No matter who is to blame—whether it is BT, or any other company or persons—the people who suffer are our businesses, and that is the point that we want to address here today. The Government are doing good work. Suffolk County Council is hitting its targets; indeed, it got an extra payment for doing that. But the key word that my hon. Friend used was “communication”. I had a very robust conversation on Monday with BT’s directors—in fact, it was incredibly robust—and I pointed out that if they cannot communicate with their customers, their businesses and so on, they should not call BT a communications company.

[Neil Parish]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, which brings me back on track. She is right about communication, and I will say a little more about that in a minute.

The point that my hon. Friend also rightly makes is that broadband is absolutely essential for our businesses. If we have a car, a piece of machinery or anything else that is not working, we can swap that car or that piece of machinery for another make that delivers what we want it to deliver. The problem that our constituents have is that there is no other “make” out there that can necessarily deliver broadband. Again, that is why BT needs more competition and why it has to step up to the plate.

Despite all my rhetoric I am not actually anti-BT, but I want BT to deliver. I know that the Minister is working very hard on this issue. I have urged him before to apply his iron fist to make sure that BT delivers, because it is not our money—it is our taxpayers’ money. It does not matter whether it comes from Government or councils; in the end, it comes from our individual taxpayers, who are often the very same people who are not getting connected to broadband. Therefore, they have paid for broadband but they are not getting it, so they have a double whammy.

We have made that point this afternoon and I know that the Minister must probably think, “Oh, yet another debate on broadband.” But once people are connected to broadband we will not have these debates, because people will not be concerned. While these debates continue, naturally he must respect that.

My final point is about some businesses in Dunkeswell and Luppitt, which are the sites of old aerodromes. They could not access broadband for three weeks, because the exchange went down. Exchanges can go down, but I will now explain the compensation that those businesses have been offered. Many businesses in my constituency have been affected by poor internet and broadband speeds; some of them have had no internet at all for a lengthy time, which is unthinkable from day to day. Companies such as Assinder Turnham Ltd, a property and construction consultancy, Lynch Motor Company Ltd, Dolly Diamond, and Flymoore Aircraft Engineering were all without internet for as long as three weeks. I completely understand that a catastrophic fault at a BT exchange can and will happen from time to time, but when it happens, what is done to compensate and help the businesses that are left on their knees?

I will take Flymoore Aircraft Engineering as an example. It is a local business in my constituency that deals with aircraft respraying and engineering. It lost broadband from 25 January for three weeks. Flymoore could not do its VAT returns, and so spoke to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. Flymoore asked BT for evidence to provide to HMRC, but was told that it would cost £10 to get something called a work report. This company was without broadband for three weeks, but it ended up paying BT for the lack of service. It could not pay its staff or order parts or supplies for aircraft, and it did not receive new orders for work and so lost vast amounts of money. Flymoore could not access the European Aviation Safety Authority’s website, which has all the mandatory legal requirements for aircraft safety. Because of that, it could not finish ongoing jobs. It could not access repair information or manuals online. It needed those instructions to physically carry out the maintenance on the aircraft.

At the very least, we would expect substantial compensation for the serious loss of business. Flymoore had a financial buffer to deal with market uncertainty, but virtually all of that has been wiped out, and the business is struggling financially. BT did not initially offer compensation, but Flymoore has since managed to get £25 in compensation and three months’ free internet. What sort of company offers that level of compensation? If there was competition in the marketplace, BT would have to offer proper compensation.

I will not go into all the details of the other businesses affected, but interestingly they have all been offered different amounts of compensation and different lengths of free internet access. There seems to be nothing in place to compensate for the types of losses that the businesses have had. It is not only about delivering broadband in the hardest hit areas, but about ensuring that when the broadband connection is there, it is constant. If it breaks down for a long period, those businesses need adequate compensation. What they have been offered is pathetic.

BT needs to step up to the plate, deliver broadband and compensate people when they do not receive it. My hon. Friend the Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Gordon Henderson) gave us a huge catalogue of issues with a company trying for more than a year to get broadband onsite. We want, and we have, a dynamic economy, but we will only improve it further by having good delivery of broadband across the whole country.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy (Mr Edward Vaizey)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to respond to this important debate under your chairmanship, Ms Ryan. I thank the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) for securing it.

Halfway through the debate, I began to wonder whether we were taking part in a kind of Sport Relief charity function, because we had exactly the same debate yesterday. To deal with all hon. Members’ complaints about Openreach, I propose a 24-hour debateathon. I am particularly pleased that I am the last man standing.

Yesterday, we had the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Calum Kerr), who is not the Scottish National party’s Culture, Media and Sport spokesman, but its Environment, Food and Rural Affairs spokesman: he worked for a telecoms company for 20 years so the SNP sent him along. He has not made it today. We also had the official Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah). She has not made it today; she sent the sports spokesman instead. But I am still here, still standing and happy to take questions.

This may not be a Sport Relief event, but it is a mass therapy session. Many hon. Friends and hon. Members came here to relieve themselves of the sheer frustration of having to deal with Openreach on behalf of their constituents. As I have said on many occasions—well, certainly yesterday—as a constituency MP, I also have to deal with that frustration.

The hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) mentioned the example of a factory that I cited. I was, in fact, talking about a factory in the constituency of the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland—I had forgotten that she would be leading this debate. As she knows full well, I have been closely involved in trying to sort out that problem. There is no defending what happened to that factory. I am not here to defend it, because I do not work for Openreach. It is absolutely astonishing that a business would spend £30,000 up front with a supplier such as Openreach, build its warehouse based entirely on the belief that it was dealing with a reputable company that would deliver what had been contracted for, and then find—

[Neil Parish]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Vaizey]

No, I will not give way. My hon. Friend spoke at length on the issues and I am not giving way to him.

The company built a factory based entirely on the expectation that the service would be delivered, only to find that it was not delivered—Openreach said that it had a problem with blocked ducts. If people are paid £30,000 to deliver a business line, the least they can do is to get out there and look at the ducts, in particular if the order has come in six months before they are meant to deliver it. There is no defence.

I freely admit that it is frustrating to deal with such issues. I wonder sometimes how I could distract attention from them. In fact, I asked the Prime Minister the other day, “Can we have a referendum on something? I am suffering all these attacks from my colleagues, please can we have a referendum on something like our European membership as that might distract them for a few months before they come back to the issue?” But it has not distracted them—we are still debating Openreach’s failures.

The Opposition have contributed a great deal to telecoms and telecoms policy. I read this morning that one Opposition Member was fined £5,000 by the Information Commissioner for making 35,000 recorded calls urging people to nominate him as the London mayoral candidate, which he failed to achieve. But he has added to BT’s coffers!

We are still waiting for a broadband roll-out policy from Labour, but I am grateful to the hon. Member for Eltham for reminding us that Labour’s target was 90% superfast broadband by 2017, which we achieved by the end of 2015. So we are two years ahead of what Labour promised with its unfunded commitment when it was in government and before it left us with a wrecked economy and such long-term plans. I sometimes dream that Labour won the 2010 general election and that a Labour MP might now be having to stand in my place and explain why his Government had still not got to 90% and why they were still going to wait for two years to do so. We have never changed our targets; we will reach 95% by the end of 2017.

I sometimes dream, too, of the SNP being the official Opposition—I know I should not say that, because it is almost blasphemous, but the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk yesterday was entirely reasonable in pointing out the complexities and difficulties of the programme. I also commend the hon. Member for Angus (Mike Weir) for the reasonable points he made today about the problem not necessarily being wholly a Government one.

I want to revise slightly what I said yesterday, because it is important to make two points. First, when I complain about Openreach’s customer service, I should also praise the thousands of people who work for Openreach. They do an extremely good job in difficult circumstances. They are probably dealing with quite antiquated systems, which have not been modernised, and certainly the engineers who do the work on the ground are formidable people—I have met a few of them, when they have been enabling cabinets in my constituency. They work in all weathers and often unpleasant conditions. I want to put on record my gratitude to the thousands of men and women who work for Openreach in delivering roll-out.

Secondly, there is a distinction between poor customer service by Openreach and the roll-out of superfast broadband. The roll-out is an engineering project. We like to give Openreach a hard time, but it was the only one that stepped up to the plate to bid properly for the contracts—it might well be thinking that it made a rod for its own back—and, in terms of the roll-out, Openreach has hit every target. My hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) wondered earlier whether it was value for money: as he well knows, thanks to the clawback mechanisms in the contract, we have achieved £130 million. In fact, there is considerable underspend on the contract as well, so we will probably be able to use existing money to go further than 95%.

As far as I am concerned, Openreach is full of very good people doing a very good job, and the roll-out of infrastructure is going extremely well. In this debate, we are dealing with issues that I will not say are beyond my control, but that should be laid squarely at the door of Openreach. In yesterday’s debate I said that Openreach has the lowest levels of customer satisfaction, just below TalkTalk, according to Ofcom surveys. It is important to remember that no communications provider is perfect. I am sure that if we looked in our inboxes we would all find complaints from our constituents possibly about TalkTalk, Virgin, Sky or even some smaller companies providing business broadband. No company is perfect.