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

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what steps he is taking to promote roaming and mast sharing in areas without comprehensive mobile telephone coverage on all networks.

On December 17 Government announced a landmark deal that locks in £5bn of investment by MNOs and will deliver 90% geographic coverage from each mobile operator by 2017. The agreement will be made legally binding through amended licence conditions and will improve mobile coverage across the UK. This will halve partial not-spots (where some but not all mobile network operators provide coverage) and reduce complete not-spots by almost two-thirds.

Details of the agreement are available online at https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-secures-landmark-deal-for-uk-mobile-phone-users. It is now for MNOs to determine how best to deliver the agreed coverage improvements.