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

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment he has made of progress in increasing mobile signal coverage to all areas.

Through the Mobile Infrastructure Project we are investing up to £150 million to improve coverage in areas with no coverage for voice calls or text messages. The project aims to address coverage in the final 0.3-0.4% of the population without basic coverage, and once built most sites in the network will have capability to provide 3G and 4G coverage. The latest site to go live on air was in North Molton in Devon, providing coverage to over 200 premises over approximately 30 square kilometres.

The Government is also looking to improve coverage in areas where there is a signal from one or more of the UK network operators, but not all four. We are working with the industry to find a voluntary solution and on November 5 the Government launched a consultation on proposals including national roaming, infrastructure sharing, reforming virtual networks and a coverage obligation.