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

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what steps he has taken to support the roll-out of mobile communications infrastructure in rural areas.

The Government has invested £150m to build infrastructure to provide coverage to some of the UK premises where there is currently no basic mobile coverage for voice calls or text messages. BDUK has successfully brokered agreements between the key Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to share the costs of using new infrastructure. Last year the Government also introduced planning changes for mobile infrastructure to facilitate network deployment, further supporting extending rural mobile coverage.