Rural Broadband and Mobile Coverage

Simon Hart Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Simon Hart (Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire) (Con)]

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), but I want to go a little further and talk about the Government’s moral and social obligations, aside from their economic ones, in this context.

I hesitate to mention the big society so early in my speech, but it was invented in rural Britain, and rural Britain is finding it increasingly difficult to deliver and sustain the big society as it falls behind the rest of the country and, indeed, the rest of the world when it comes to broadband and mobile coverage.

I want to restrict my comments to mobile phone coverage, as far as we can distinguish it from the rest of the debate. We have heard from a number of people how the UK is not where it should be, and from the previous two hon. Members how Wales is not where it could be. It is interesting to hear examples from Norway, France, the United States and recent ones from Port Stanley of people’s ability to communicate with one another by mobile phone, because I in my office in Whitland in Carmarthenshire could not communicate with the hon. Member for Ceredigion (Mr Williams) just up the road, were we to wish to speak and were he to seek my advice on the coalition’s performance, thus denying us both a golden opportunity to advance our careers. There is, however, a serious social and economic problem.

We have already been told, quite rightly, about the effect on small and medium-sized businesses in rural Britain, but we have not touched on the plight of the elderly in the more lonely parts of our rural communities; on the work of the charities and carers who look after the elderly and vulnerable in those areas, in often hostile geographic and climatic conditions; or on the plight of young people in rural areas, who simply want to be young people in rural areas in a 21st-century context. It is a great source of gloom to me that the babysitting community of Lampeter Velfrey has discovered that there is no mobile phone coverage in the Hart household, the consequence of which is that I do not go out anything like as much as I used to because my babysitters cannot text their friends when they are in my house. If there is a more serious reason for the Minister to address the matter urgently, I am not sure what it is.

To be serious for a moment, however, I want to focus on the impact of the problem on the police and, in particular, on Dyfed Powys police and the mobile ID project known as Lantern, involving the piece of kit they carry around which enables them to take fingerprints while in remote areas, and which relies on the mobile phone network. In our area, the police were subject to two carriers but that was insufficient, so the system did not work as well for our police force as it might have, through no fault of their own. They were able to expand the number of carriers and thus improve the coverage, but unfortunately the Metropolitan police have led a tender process resulting in a UK-wide contract and the tender being awarded to the company that Dyfed Powys rejected on the basis that its system did not work in our area.

We have to be a bit careful about a one-size-fits-all solution based on so-called supreme technological solutions which do not necessarily apply to the wilder and more lonely parts of the country, particularly west Wales. This has an effect on the police’s ability to deliver on its obligations to the community, which is very relevant given the challenges that forces are facing, and that in turn leads to a compromised confidence on the part of the rural community as regards its personal safety and its ability to trust the police to deliver a first-class service, as I know they do.

I welcome the combination of effort by Ofcom and the Welsh Assembly Government. I think we are now instructed to call them the Welsh Government, but for the purposes of clarity they will remain the Welsh Assembly Government, certainly in my house. There is much to be cheerful about because, as other hon. Members have said, this is a golden opportunity—perhaps the only golden opportunity—for the Government to show their commitment to rural communities: not only their economic but social and moral commitment. We have heard for many years—and we believe it, I would suggest—that this commitment is real. There is no greater opportunity than now for them to cement that commitment and to prove to rural Britain that they believe it is a force for good.