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

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what analysis his Department has undertaken of the benefits to businesses of availability of superfast broadband across the UK.

The UK Broadband Impact Study - Impact Report (November 2013), an expert report by analysts SQW (with Cambridge Econometrics), estimated that the availability and take-up of faster broadband speeds since 2008 will add about £17 billion to the UK’s annual Gross Value Added (GVA) by 2024. This level of uplift contributes an average of 0.07 percentage points to real annual GVA growth over this period. It also demonstrated that the benefits will be shared across the UK, helping the rebalancing of our economy.