Broadband: Rural Communities

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 13th December 2023 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your guidance this afternoon, Mr Dowd. I give huge thanks to the hon. Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder) for securing this important debate and for making an important and valuable introduction. I pretty much agree with everything everybody has said so far. I want to endorse what is being said.

The reality is that rural communities are not able to access equal coverage—not only broadband, but other forms of modern connectivity. That puts us and our residents at a significant disadvantage. If we think about health, for example, to live in a rural community is to put oneself at greater risk of not being able to access telemedicine. If we think about our general wellbeing, to be more isolated is a dangerous thing. Last week in this place we discussed isolation and loneliness and the impact on the mental health of people of all ages, particularly older people. To be cut off and not able to access modern communications—broadband and other forms of digital communication—is both dangerous and unfair.

When it comes to education in the lakes and the dales, the Eden valley and Westmorland are beautiful and isolated places with schools as small as a dozen or so children in some cases, and high schools with fewer than 200 children. Those young people have to do their homework. They have to be able to access technology at home to be able to research, study and complete assignments on time. That goes for people studying in our area who are at the University of Cumbria, or who are studying elsewhere around the country but living at home in and around the lakes and the dales.

I think about the business community: one in four people of working age in our communities in Westmorland work for themselves. We have a hugely disproportionately high number of people who are self-employed or working for themselves in other ways—freelancing, and so on. It is important not only that people have access to high-quality broadband and other forms of connectivity, but that the access is symmetrical: upload speeds should be as accessible as good download speeds. To say nothing of entertainment, frankly the people of Westmorland and Lonsdale have as much right to be able to witness the indifferent and erratic form of Blackburn Rovers via their television screens as anybody else in the country—hurrah for the three points we scraped last night. To be serious, we are now in a world where it is taken for granted that we have that sort of access. In communities like those of pretty much all of us here today, that is not the case. We are gathered here because we believe that and it is our experience locally.

I have a couple of related non-broadband points that others have also raised. According to Vodafone, my communities are in the bottom 2% for mobile connectivity, so broadband is not the only issue. Others have talked about Digital Voice. I was in the debate this morning led so admirably by my right hon. Friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael). Only a week and a half ago, much of Cumbria was completely snowed in and blocked. We had all sorts of impacts when it came to electricity being down. If your electricity is down, so is your router—you ain’t got no broadband; your digital access has gone. Maintaining that copper backstop is a lifesaver. We are used to extreme weather in my neck of the woods and we toughed it out, but there were people who were not vulnerable at the beginning of that experience but became vulnerable by the end of it, simply because so much depends on digital access. When it is wiped out, people are seriously vulnerable.

Let me say something about Project Gigabit. It is absolutely right that rural communities as a whole are left behind when it comes to connectivity of all kinds, and this Government need to bear a significant amount of responsibility for the failure to tackle that. One broadly positive thing that they are doing is Project Gigabit. I do not want to say that there is anything wrong with what the project is doing; I am concerned about some of what it is not doing. There are 61,000 properties in Cumbria within the scope of Project Gigabit. We know that at least 1,000 of those will not get connected within that in-scope area. Those are the very difficult-to-reach places.

Many people in and around the communities of Sedbergh—Sedbergh town itself, and the communities just beyond it—are now deeply concerned that they will be among the properties that are in scope, but not connected, which seems wrong. To go back to what I said about symmetrical access, we also know that the access and connectivity given to many homes connected by Project Gigabit might mean very high download speeds, but low upload speeds, which is a huge problem for people who are studying or in business.

I want to highlight again some of those people who are likely to be in scope but not connected. Hill farmers will almost certainly be among that group, and they have seen a 41% decrease in their income over the last three years under this Government. The very people who have no money to pay for the connection themselves will be in that tiny fraction, but that is still a significant number of people who will be outside Project Gigabit.

In my last minute, I want to talk about those properties that will be in what is called “deferred scope”. They are not being connected via Project Gigabit now, but they may be in the future—the next two, three or four years. I was at a meeting in Murton village hall on that very snowed-in weekend with the communities of Murton, Hilton, Ormside, Warcop and the surrounding areas, which are places in the “deferred scope”.

Were the Government to be flexible and allow the return of the voucher scheme, a wonderful community interest company, which I mentioned here before, called B4RN—Broadband for the Rural North—will be able to provide £33 a month access, with gigabit upload and download for absolutely everybody and with 100% of properties within scope. All it takes is for the Minister to agree to the ask that I have made of the Secretary of State in the last few days: that the Government would, through BDUK, re-offer the vouchers for those communities and be flexible, so that those communities are connected to the best speed at the best connection as quickly as possible.

There are so many pressures facing rural communities—house prices, the loss of housing stock as second homes and Airbnbs take over, a decline in school numbers, and therefore often a decline in communities themselves. We need to tackle all those things separately, but hyper-fast broadband for all parts of rural communities is one way to fight back against the isolation and deprivation in so many of our communities.