Oral Answers to Questions

Tessa Munt Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Vaizey]

I am sure that pizzas were not being delivered last night to the Labour women’s dinner, which I gather took place at the Imperial War museum. No doubt the hon. Lady will want to join me in congratulating the museum, which is so ably led by Di Lees, on its magnificent refurbishment, which has introduced the world war one galleries.

I am pleased to confirm that we are bang on target for our roll-out of superfast broadband. We expect to deliver it to 90% of premises by early 2016, but I expect that, given the pace of the programme, we shall exceed that target. The mobile infrastructure project is a pioneering project which has already brought many benefits to rural areas, and I am pleased to see that the super-connected voucher scheme is well under way.

[Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)]

I spoke to the Minister again in July about broadband in my area, and showed him the map of the proposed coverage. It seems that exchanges just a couple of miles away from main roads such as the A38 and the A370, where fibre-optic cables were laid years ago, cannot be connected, and—to use BT Openreach’s description—the “poor-quality cables” around new cabinets that have been fitted in places such as Wells mean that previously generally reliable but slow services running at 750 kilobits have become desperately unreliable and pathetically slow, at about 250 kilobits. There is no point in changing the provider, because all the signals are carried over the same wires. What do my constituents have to do to get superfast broadband?

[Mr Vaizey]

We are delivering superfast broadband to Devon and Somerset, and under our programme, which is worth some £50 million, it will reach 90% of premises. However, as my hon. Friend says, this is a very complex engineering project which involves very complex work. I am particularly happy to praise the work that BT has done in many areas where it is already well ahead of schedule.