Rural Phone and Broadband Connectivity

Robert Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Jesse Norman]

Councillor Richard Sherras is rarely far from my thoughts. My hon. Friend’s point is illustrated perfectly by a business in Blakemere in my constituency with the wonderful name of Wiggly Wigglers. Wiggly Wigglers was set up 25 years ago in 1990 by fantastic local dynamo Heather Gorringe. It has become an award-winning example of local entrepreneurship. It began with composting worms and garden products, and has now diversified into flower delivery. It has 11 employees, nine of whom are women. It is a perfect example of the kind of higher value-added rural business that constituencies in rural areas across the country seek to emulate, but it is totally reliant on online sales— Blakemere is a village of 63 people. In Heather’s words:

“Our other services are pretty rubbish…A bus goes by once a day, our rubbish is collected once a fortnight, our roads are full of potholes, our train services impossible.”

Indeed, last year, the B road was cut off for a month and one day, and her husband Phil pulled out 39 cars and other vehicles from a chest-high flood. This is the reality of rural broadband compared with other services, and their broadband service has got steadily worse over the past few years, not better.

[Sir Robert Smith (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (LD)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for bringing this important debate to the House. He is highlighting how crucial it is for rural businesses and farmers to have good connectivity, but another important message is that good connectivity reduces the pressure on the road network, because people can work from home and not overstretch the commuter roads. The roads around Aberdeen, for example, are already overstretched.

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[Mr Reid]

My hon. Friend is correct. We all knew for months, if not years, in advance that NATO was meeting in south Wales. His comments clearly indicate that BT looks for excuses to declare MBORC.

As several hon. Members have mentioned, BT Openreach is in the privileged position of having a monopoly on landlines. It should not be able to dodge its responsibilities for months simply by declaring MBORC. Will the Minister look at the regulations again?

The universal service obligation is supposed to guarantee a landline service no matter where one lives, and my constituents are quite rightly fed up being told that if they lived in Glasgow their phone line would be repaired quickly, but that they will have to wait months because they live in a rural area. I hope the Minister will look at the regulations again. Heavy fines need to be levied for failure to repair faults in a reasonable time and for not turning up to appointments. If BT was faced with heavy fines, it would be compelled to employ enough engineers.

[Sir Robert Smith]

It also transpires that Openreach pays compensation to service providers, but not all service providers necessarily pass that compensation on to the end user. Perhaps if there was more of a compensation culture the management would be more efficient about maximising repairs.

[Mr Reid]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. Fines are necessary to encourage companies to carry out their responsibilities properly, and not just use the cop-out of declaring MBORC.

On mobile phones—the problem is not just with landlines—Vodafone cannot escape criticism either. Its performance in carrying out repairs has been poor. For example, last summer it took 18 days to repair a fault on the isle of Islay, and another fault on Islay in December took even longer to repair. These are not isolated cases. There is now yet another fault on Islay that is taking ages to repair, and there have been several instances in other parts of Argyll and Bute of long delays. When challenged, Vodafone dodged responsibility by blaming the many other companies involved in tracking down and repairing faults.

A mobile phone service is not a luxury these days, but a necessity—for example, if someone’s car breaks down on a quiet country road or a farmer has an accident. I am aware of a farmer who broke a leg. He was conscious and able to use his mobile phone, but because he had no signal, he had to lie in severe pain until somebody found him. That shows the importance of mobile phone coverage these days. It is an essential, not a luxury.

I am pleased the Government have reached an agreement with the mobile phone companies. It means that the latter will be investing at least £5 billion over the next three years to extend coverage and improve signal strength, and that the number of places not covered by mobile coverage will reduce by two thirds. However, I will keep fighting for 100% coverage and speedy repairs, because speedy repairs are as crucial as the original investment. It is no good having a box-ticking exercise with an investment strategy, and then failing to maintain the service. Constituents with contracts with Vodafone are entitled to use the service. Leaving everything to the market is no good, because the mobile companies and BT Openreach would simply concentrate on the densely populated areas and ignore the highlands and islands. The Government should introduce performance standards for repairs and fine companies that fail to meet them.

Having criticised Vodafone for its failure to carry out repairs in a reasonable time, I want to congratulate it on its Rural Open Sure Signal programme, which will bring mobile phone coverage to several villages in my constituency. However, I urge it to follow up the initial investment and all the publicity with a proper repair service, because that investment is no good if the system does not work.

I was pleased when in 2013 the Government gave Arqiva a contract to build mobile phone masts in places where there was no signal. The new masts were supposed to be up and running by the end of this year, but from the experience of Argyll and Bute, this programme seems to have badly stalled. The last time I met Arqiva, it could not say where in my constituency the new masts were to be sited or when they would be constructed. We need more transparency, and I hope the Minister will tell Arqiva to publish its intentions now. We need to know where the masts are going and when they will be put up.

Bringing superfast broadband to rural areas is vital. I am pleased that more than 20% of the Government’s investment in superfast broadband—more than £100 million—was given to the Scottish Government to bring superfast broadband to rural areas in Scotland. However, delivery was left to the Scottish Government, and they gave the contract to BT Openreach. Cables have been laid and some addresses have been connected to the new superfast broadband, but most of Argyll and Bute is extremely frustrated that neither the Scottish Government nor BT can tell them when, or even if, they will get broadband. Some people on very slow speeds tell me they do not want superfast broadband; they just want a decent broadband service.

The Scottish Government and BT must be much more open and tell people when, or if, their home or business will be connected to fibre-optic broadband. Not knowing what is happening prevents people from making other arrangements, such as wireless or satellite. Given these failings, I must congratulate a local organisation on its initiative. Mull and Iona Community Trust, well led by its extremely enterprising general manager, Moray Finch, is leading the way with a project that will deliver superfast broadband by wireless to parts of Mull and Islay, as well as to the islands of Iona, Colonsay, Lismore, Luing and Jura, and to Craignish on the mainland. MICT has done very well, but that same type of project should be going on throughout Argyll and Bute, because in many places it is simply not practical to deliver superfast broadband via fibre-optic cable. I want the Scottish Government to follow the lead of the Mull and Iona Community Trust and work with community groups throughout Argyll and Bute to deliver superfast broadband everywhere in the constituency.

It is not just in remote rural areas that problems arise. BT promised that the town of Dunoon in my constituency would get superfast broadband paid through BT’s own resources last year. However, this was postponed without any announcement—it was only when people started complaining that we found this out—and it is supposed to be happening this year, but there is still no sign of anything happening. Some constituents receive extremely slow broadband speeds of well under a megabit in some cases. It is high time that BT got the work done and gave my constituents a decent broadband service.

Broadband and mobile phone services are essential these days. Investment in infrastructure and much speedier action when faults occur are essential. The Scottish Government and BT must drastically improve their performance to bring superfast broadband to Argyll and Bute as a matter of urgency. BT and Vodafone must drastically improve their performance when repairs are needed. The loss of both landline and mobile phone services in Argyll and Bute this winter has been unacceptable. I call on the Government to beef up the regulations so that phone companies can be fined for poor performance when repairs to the phone infrastructure are needed.

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[Sir Robert Smith (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (LD)]

I am pleased to take part in this debate and I congratulate the hon. Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman) on securing it, because it has highlighted, across the Chamber, the need for broadband and mobile reception in rural areas, and the recognition that it is no longer a luxury, but a necessity.

Let me start by discussing the basic need for some kind of phone that connects someone’s house to the network and by reinforcing the concerns about the performance of Openreach in the most basic provision of phone lines, especially to new builds in the constituency. It has sometimes taken six months between someone moving into a house and their having a basic phone connection. We are talking not about superfast broadband or broadband, but a basic phone connection. Anything that the Minister can do to improve that performance will be welcome; the point has been made that such a connection should be treated like electricity and water as an essential service to the household. I hope he will also deal with the relationship between Openreach and the service provider in ensuring that the consumer gets compensation for a failure to deliver. Such compensation would help focus the mind and make some recompense for people not having that basic service.

As many have said, we still need to roll out basic broadband to many of our constituents. I remember that when the first roll-out took place the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) was the Minister. He was an extremely useful Minister for my constituency, because he dealt with broadband, post offices and the oil and gas industry, bringing together almost all the casework for someone dealing with a reserved section of the legislation, given that so many other activities are devolved to the Scottish Parliament. He was shown all the different innovative projects. At the time, Scottish and Southern Energy was going to do broadband through the electricity cabling, but suddenly the exchange in Stonehaven mysteriously reached the trigger point for BT to roll out ADSL. The point about competition and the importance of driving forward innovation has been made well in this debate. The wi-fi solution for many of those places still needing a broadband connection has been highlighted by others as an important way forward.

I particularly wish to reinforce the importance of superfast broadband to the north-east of Scotland, because with the oil and gas industry, there are a lot of businesses dealing with large amounts of data, and a lot of those businesses have grown up in rural parts of Aberdeenshire. Similarly, many people who work in the industry or work abroad could work from home if they had the proper superfast connections to deal with the data. The money that the UK Government have given to the Scottish Government needs to deliver on the ground for those people in the north-east of Scotland if we are to keep a vital industry effective, at its most efficient and raising more money for the tax system to reinforce investment in infrastructure.

The other challenge is not just the mobile phone reception from the network but the fact that many of the traditional houses are made of granite, which mobile phone signals cannot penetrate. The business centre in which the constituency office is based is a brand new building with high-quality insulation, which again cannot be penetrated by mobile phone signals.

[Chris Bryant]

The hon. Gentleman cites a problem that is very similar to the one that exists in the valley communities in south Wales. People cannot get mobile telephony inside their homes because their houses are made of stone or granite which cannot be penetrated by the signal. A possible answer to that lies in wi-fi, for which people need broadband. People end up getting hit by a double whammy.

[Sir Robert Smith]

The hon. Gentleman makes a point. There was also the illegal solution of boosters. Perhaps it is time for Ofcom to look at how mobile phone signals can be boosted in properties and business centres. Individual suppliers using wi-fi and broadband could be a solution—that could be the case for the business centre that I mentioned. There would need to be a signal booster for each network, but it should be looked at.

Let me reinforce the fact that broadband and mobile phone connections are not a luxury; they are essential. It is time that we saw delivery to those rural areas that missed out the first time round.