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

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay on 25 January (HL5336), why the "robust plans in place" failed following Storm Arwen, with many areas left for extended periods without broadband services.

Telecoms equipment is usually highly resilient and major outages are extremely rare. However, most telecoms equipment needs a power supply and this can be disrupted by extreme weather events, such as Storm Arwen.

While telecoms operators were quick to respond following Storm Arwen, deploying emergency response teams and providing back-up generators (on a prioritised basis) to affected sites, the scale and length of the power outage meant that some sites remained offline until power was restored. This resulted in a delay to the restoration of services for a small number of customers.

As part of our standard procedure for large incidents, DCMS is working with Ofcom and the telecoms sector to complete a Post-Incident Review on the Storm Arwen response.