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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what progress has been made on establishing trials to provide mobile connectivity to passengers on the Trans-Pennine rail route as set out in Budget 2017.

The Government’s Trans-Pennine Initiative (TPI) has three objectives: to trial delivery of high capacity fibre using the rail corridor, to trial provision of high speed connectivity to the train and to create a 5G testbed at Network Rail’s ‘Rail Innovation Development Centre’ (RIDC).

At Budget 2017, the Government allocated £35 million to projects that will support improvement to rail passenger connectivity, including the TPI. We are in the process of concluding a review of the responses to the Call for Information on the design phase of the project, after which we will determine the next steps including expenditure.

DCMS launched a Call for Information on the mobile connectivity aspects of the proposal, which closed in the summer of 2018. We are in the process of concluding our review of the responses received, after which we will determine the next steps.