Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what the timetable is for the village of Harewood in Elmet and Rothwell constituency to be included in the roll-out of superfast broadband; and what is policy is on BT Retail advertising broadband speeds well in excess of those actually available to customers.

The superfast broadband rollout is planned for Harewood under an extension of our current Contract 2 deployment programme with our partner, Openreach. This has been delayed due to a number of technical issues but we are expecting these to be resolved very soon.

From March 2019, Ofcom will require providers to tell customers ‘minimum guaranteed speed’ and ‘more realistic speed’ estimates for peak times. If a customer's broadband speed falls below the minimum guaranteed speed, the provider will have a month to improve speed, after which customers will have the right to exit their contract without paying a penalty.

Guidance from the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) also states that, from 23 May 2018, numerical speed claims should be based on the download speed available to at least 50% of customers at peak time, and described as ‘average’.