Rural Phone and Broadband Connectivity

Tessa Munt Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Jesse Norman]

At the risk of prolonging my own remarks, my hon. Friend has managed to read my mind. I plan to end my speech by focusing specifically on Openreach and the problem that he has described. As Members will know, Openreach is BT’s network infrastructure arm. I have been flooded with complaints about Openreach and its poor customer service, as, I am sure, have Members on both sides of the House. The problem is compounded by a lack of direct accountability to end users, and, I might add, to Members of Parliament.

[Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)]

I could not agree more. It seems to be impossible to contact Openreach. When I eventually forwarded a string of e-mails to the Minister, they were incomprehensible. The position was utterly unclear.

[Jesse Norman]

I assume that the hon. Lady means that the response from Openreach was incomprehensible, rather than the e-mails that she received from her constituents. [Laughter.] That is a vital clarification. I cannot comment on the quality of the e-mails, but I can absolutely identify with those who are experiencing those problems, and, indeed, with my constituents who have experienced them as well.

This is a highly profitable business whose network expansion has been significantly de-risked by lots of cash from taxpayers. I should like to see much more openness towards end users, a public commitment to higher standards of service, and, potentially, an opening up of the network so that other operators can offer enhanced services, including customer service—if not, indeed, the possibility of full separation. I should be grateful if the Minister would add his voice, and his enormous authority, to this issue.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Woodcock]

I am afraid that I cannot agree to my hon. Friend the shadow Minister’s request because he has already eloquently put the case himself, and I would be a pale imitation of him if I were to try to follow.

Perhaps we should not be all that surprised that so much of rural Cumbria is seeing such slow progress towards superfast broadband. Many of the areas that I have spoken about have yet to see any significant progress at all with the earlier technology of mobile connectivity.

[Tessa Munt]

I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman has had the same difficulty as I have had in extracting the information from BT as to which areas will not be covered by it. Accessing that information would at least allow the people affected to make alternative arrangements with a satellite company. I do not know whether he has managed to find some way of getting such information about his area, given the difficulties that I have had.

[John Woodcock]

The hon. Member makes a great point—the situation is a nightmare. As I have just set out, often when someone receives assurances, they prove not to hold water. BT is a company that we would think would be good at communicating, but it turns out that for too many of our constituents, who are really tearing their hair out about this issue, BT has proved to be the exact opposite.

That has got to change, and either BT changes its ways itself—in response to the threat of other companies coming in—or, if I might offer the Minister some advice, the Government embrace the idea that they need to be more active in this sector. They had a tremendous example of a lean, active state, which was provided by the later years of the last Labour Government, and this is an excellent opportunity for them to learn from those years and adopt the same approach in their own dealings.

I turn to mobile connectivity. In the Duddon valley, if someone gets one bar of reception, they count themselves lucky. Again, this situation makes running a business tricky, or completely impossible, because it cuts off communities and in a remote area it also has serious safety implications. It is perhaps odd to think of mobile coverage as the next frontier after superfast broadband, but there has been little apparent interest from commercial companies in improving coverage for much of my constituency, and I am sure that the same is true of many other Members’ constituencies.

Any movement on this issue is welcome, but with the greatest of respect to Shropshire, Dorset and Norfolk, pilot schemes in those areas do not mean much to my constituents in Cumbria or impress them very much, if at all. Many of my constituents also look askance at the Government plans to improve rural mobile coverage based on A roads and B roads. My constituents in Seathwaite, for example, are 3 miles from the nearest such road, hidden behind a 2,000 foot hill, so such plans are not likely to help them much. We need more ambition, not a brief flurry of activity because the Prime Minister could not get any mobile reception on his way to Cornwall.