Phillip Lee
Main Page: Phillip Lee (Liberal Democrat - Bracknell)
Dr Phillip Lee (Bracknell) (Con)
In the spirit of the motion, I will be as superfast as possible. First, I must draw Members’ attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Interests. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) on securing this debate. I want to talk about the local position, concentrating on rural need and on superfast broadband need in particular. I then want to talk about the potential for satellite broadband to provide a solution for those remote homes and businesses that many hon. Members represent.
To be honest, I wonder what I am doing here today. I represent Bracknell, which is part of the Thames valley, where 10% of the world’s information technology businesses are based. It is part of the golden triangle of Newbury, Reading and Bracknell. We have Oracle, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Dell and Fujitsu Siemens. We have so many IT companies that I do not have time to list them all. And yet, until very recently, part of my constituency only six or seven miles away still had dial-up internet. I wonder why that is.
There are many Members here today, and I imagine that their mailbags are as full of complaints about this as mine is. A village in the west of my constituency, Finchampstead, is packed with people who work in the IT sector. I knock on their doors and ask for their support, and they say, “Yes, fair enough, but how come I cannot get fast broadband? I work for an IT company, yet I come home and I cannot get a decent internet link.” I have absolutely no answer for them. I have heard Opposition Members suggesting that we could not predict what was going to happen. Well, yes we could, and some of us did. The direction of travel was pretty obvious, not only for the internet but for mobile phone usage. We can argue that the capacity we need was not predicted, but we all knew that it was going to grow.
I have been convening meetings, and BT has kindly come in to see me. I am sure that all hon. Members have received BT’s briefing today on its fibre optic outlay. It assured me that it is going to hit various target dates for its fibre optic plans, but those dates have now been pushed back. My constituency is in Berkshire, not in some gloriously remote part of the countryside in Cumbria or the Yorkshire dales. I am in Berkshire, and I do not have a decent internet service. Indeed, in my own home in a semi-rural area in Berkshire, I cannot really get the internet—it is utterly pointless. I have inquired about the problem and tried to work out the solution, as I am not convinced that fibre optic will be there for people.
That is why I shall now move on to deal with satellite broadband. This may seem remarkable, but it is possible to get a decent broadband service throughout the country via satellite. Every constituent that Members represent can secure broadband access at a minimum of 2 megabits a second via satellite. I am told that speeds can reach upwards of 10 or 12 megabits; there is a significant cost, but it is possible. That seems to me to be an ideal solution. It is arguably cheaper and quicker, and it is undeniably greener because it uses less energy to provide the service for sending around the data. It is from the same sort of satellite, I might add, that the information for our BlackBerrys and mobile phones comes. It also relies on the space industry.
Alun Cairns (Vale of Glamorgan) (Con)
Would my hon. Friend acknowledge that satellite broadband is not as reliable as mobile broadband or fixed-line links?
Dr Lee
I accept that, although there has been an improvement, as I know from having had the privilege of seeing one of the new Ka-band satellites launched before Christmas. There is room for improvement in the efficiency and effectiveness of satellites, but the space industry has plenty of experience and evidence of those developments. By the end of this Parliament, about 300,000 links will be possible for broadband via satellite. That is quite a few, and I am sure that it covers quite a few of the homes and businesses that my hon. Friends represent. Broadband Delivery UK estimates that about 2 million businesses and homes do not have good enough broadband. I am one of them and so are many people living in the west of my constituency and elsewhere.
My final point about the space industry is that it is successful—a £7.5 billion industry annually, employing more than 80,000 people. The companies that provide the broadband service do so not only here, but sell their services abroad. They sell these services, some of them to 50 or 60 countries abroad, bringing income into this country. In the process of providing a broadband service that we all know is needed for this country, we will also be able to export, which is fantastic in itself.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border said, this is a no-brainer. There will be a combination of solutions to provide broadband for everybody. It will include wireless and mobile, and fibre optic, but I suggest that for the difficult-to-reach places, space provides the solution. We are fantastic at space. We are already providing solutions for broadband in that way, so let us provide some more.
Ultimately, infrastructure matters. Reference has been made to the visionaries of the Victorian age who brought us trains. However, one mistake was made during that period. If my British social and economic history serves me well, we decided to go with Stephenson’s gauge for rail, instead of Brunel’s. Unfortunately, my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) has now left the Chamber, but an analogy can be drawn here: Brunel had a wider gauge, so we could have gone faster with our trains. We are now struggling to provide even faster trains; if we had gone with Brunel, we would have had them. I suggest that we adopt exactly the same approach to broadband. Let us not have a narrow vision, but a broad one. Let us have a system that provides the very best broadband for all our constituents.