Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what steps her Department is taking to ensure that mobile operators improve signal reliability in rural and semi rural areas of West Sussex.

Our ambition is for all populated areas to have access to higher quality standalone 5G by 2030. This ambition includes villages and rural communities as well as towns and cities.

Standalone 5G is a more reliable, secure, generation of technology which has the potential to deliver significant benefits to communities across the UK.

Government continues to work closely with the mobile network operators to ensure that continued investment into the expansion and improvement of mobile networks translates into benefits for communities right across the UK. We are also addressing barriers to deployment where they exist and recently launched a call for evidence to help determine where planning rules could be relaxed to support the deployment of digital infrastructure.

There are statutory obligations on communications providers to take appropriate and proportionate steps to ensure their networks and services remain available, and Ofcom has powers to investigate, rectify and penalise communications providers for any infringement of their duties. Ofcom is undertaking a review of the resilience of mobile services to power cuts and considering whether to update the expectations on mobile operators on the level of power back up required.