Tackling the Digital Divide

Selaine Saxby Excerpts

Thursday 4th November 2021 Westminster Hall

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ali. I thank the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) for his kind words and for standing in to take over this debate. As the original sponsor and the chair of the APPG on broadband and digital communication, I am delighted to speak in the debate.

I also speak as the MP for North Devon, a part of the country where our broadband speed lags behind not just the rest of the country but the rest of the south-west. That is why I have committed myself to the APPG to see what more can be done to roll out better broadband to north Devon and beyond. While I warmly welcome last week’s announcement that more rural properties will be reached through Project Gigabit, it is still over two and a half years away.

Gigabit broadband is available to 28.7% of the population in the UK as a whole, but to just 20.3% in North Devon. Superfast broadband across the UK is at 95% coverage, whereas in North Devon we are at just 86.7%. Our average download speed is just 42.1 megabits per second, compared with a south-west average of 64.8 megabits per second and a UK average of 72.9 megabits per second. Some 3.1% of rural areas are unable to receive decent broadband, compared to 0.4% in the UK and 0.6% in the south-west, and 6.3% of my constituents are unable to receive 10 megabits per second. After Brexit, broadband was the No. 1 issue on the doorstep in the election campaign of December 2019. With those figures, it is no wonder.

The challenge of the digital divide, when it is as extreme as it is now in rural parts of the UK, such as my constituency, is that people have no idea what they have, could have or should have. After all, what does gigabit capable mean? If people have had under 10 megabits per second, they find superfast broadband exciting—do they need to go faster? They do not know what they are missing out on because they have no way of accessing it. Smaller companies, such as Jurassic Fibre, have installed gigabit-capable fibre, but take-up has not been high, as lack of understanding, awareness, cost and the inconvenience of changing service provider—these are not wholesalers—is holding back our speeding up.

I want to put on record my thanks to Openreach for connecting up Tawstock primary school and Umberleigh primary school during the pandemic, but how do we still have schools that are unable to access the web? Children as young as six have explained to me how lessons are interrupted with a “circle of doom”. Is it any wonder that local employers complain of a skills gap? How are students going to learn digital skills with the circle of doom as their learning companion?

Given how far behind we are in connectivity, parents are often also in no position to assist with technical challenges. Our schools, parents and students have all done a fantastic job getting through the pandemic despite the connectivity challenges they have faced, but the situation has gone on for far too long. Parish councillors—many of mine doing a sterling job now in their 80s—may not be best placed to decide on the right broadband solution, as they are being asked to. We now see some villages with multiple operators putting up poles and promoting their services, while others languish with nothing.

It is not just our broadband speeds that needs accelerating, but the roll-out. I thank Openreach for tackling the Lynton and Lynmouth rural build project, which has generated dramatic photos of the fibre passing down the funicular railway; but that project came to fruition due to a chance meeting between me and the chief executive. While I am grateful for that, what would have happened without it?

I recognise that Connecting Devon and Somerset is doing its very best in difficult circumstances to connect up North Devon, but it too needs speeding up. The approach of connecting up one or two remote properties at a time does not seem joined up or a good use of vital engineers or taxpayers’ money. This week, it took my intervention to prevent the Building Digital UK programme from over-fibring in one village that Openreach has already connected up as a commercial build. It keeps putting up additional poles in beautiful North Devon, rather than using existing assets, which is creating so much extra work. I hope that more can be done to effectively manage the programme; with so much still to connect, having some places connected by multiple providers does not seem a good use of taxpayers’ money.

I urge the Minister to rethink what more can be done to help rural constituencies such as mine to join the digital revolution before we move into yet another phase, with landlines potentially to be switched off, when we have no mobile service either. If I move my head during a call at home, I lose my connection, on both wi-fi and mobile calls. I say to the Minister, please do not turn my landline off. What will I do if there is ever an emergency?

I am not on commission with Openreach—if CityFibre wants to rebrand as RuralFibre, I am happy to welcome it instead—but we need one wholesale company to come and connect the whole of Devon, rural or not, commercially viable or not. We are falling behind not only the rest of the UK, but the rest of the world. To my mind, hard-to-reach, remote rural constituencies such as mine need better digital connectivity than more well-connected urban areas.

Across the south-west, connectivity is poor in terms of both transport and digital infrastructure. In Cornwall and Devon, the number of jobs that are reachable within 60 minutes by car is two times lower than the UK median, and the number of jobs that are reachable within 90 minutes is five times lower than the median. When we talk about levelling up in North Devon, it is primarily digital infrastructure that we seek. We have been left behind for too long with poor transport infrastructure, and our geography means we will never get any closer to the nearest city, but the technology is available to connect us digitally. I hope the new Secretary of State will bring the drive she has shown in addressing other inequalities in our society to bridging the clear rural digital divide.