Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what recent progress his Department has made on Project Gigabit.

We continue to make good progress on the delivery of Project Gigabit. According to the independent website ThinkBroadband.com, over 86% of UK premises can now access a gigabit-capable broadband connection.

At the beginning of this year, we signed four additional Project Gigabit contracts with Openreach and last month, we announced the first Project Gigabit contract in Scotland. In total, more than £2 billion of contracts have now been signed to bring fast, reliable broadband to hard-to-reach premises across the UK.