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

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, pursuant to the Answer of 5 February 2016 to Question 22981, if he will ask Ofcom to publish an assessment of whether the 26 per cent of BT's ducts identified as being empty in the report, Telecoms infrastructure access - sample survey of duct access, published in March 2009, reflected the proportion of BT's ducts that were able to have fibre blown through them without further civil works in the superfast broadband rollout.

I understand from Ofcom that the sample surveyed in the Ofcom report ‘Telecoms infrastructure access – sample survey of duct access’, published in March 2009, provided an indicative rather than representative assessment of the potential spare capacity in BT’s ducts.