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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, if he will publish details of the proposed site locations for the 124 mobile masts that will be erected under the Shared Rural Network Programme; what the timeframe is for confirming those site locations, and what support the Infralink programme will provide to securing those locations.

The Shared Rural Network programme will be delivered in two parts. The first phase will see the four Mobile Network Operators collectively invest over £530 million in a shared network of new and existing phone masts. This will help tackle partial not spots - areas where there is currently coverage from at least one, but not all operators. The second will see the government invest over £500 million to go even further to significantly reduce total not-spots - those hard-to-reach areas where there is currently no coverage from any operator.

The mobile operators have already commenced work on the first element of the programme which is funded by the industry and includes the 124 Scottish sites mentioned in your Parliamentary Question, and are on track to eliminate the majority of those partial not-spots by mid-2024.

Now that funding has been released for the total not-spot element of the programme, the government and the operators remain confident that combined coverage will be delivered to 95% of the UK by the end of 2025, with areas around the UK starting to see improvements to 4G coverage long before completion.

The exact site deployment plans will be managed by the operators themselves in order for them to best deliver the agreed coverage outcomes. Therefore, I am unable to provide any details on the precise location or number of new or upgraded masts that may be delivered as a result of the programme. However, I have personally encouraged operators to be transparent about their plans.

The programme is working closely with all three Devolved Administrations to ensure that infrastructure is shared wherever possible.