Rural Phone and Broadband Connectivity

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Anne Marie Morris]

That is an extremely good point. BT may claim that the development is in an area that they do not expect to expand enough to justify the commercial cost, but that is not an argument. We know that development will continue. Broadband should be built in at the start: it is no good waiting for it to be a challenge later on. As for businesses, I find it rather horrifying that 35% of business people who work from home still rely on mobile broadband and 45,000 businesses still rely on dial-up. That simply cannot be right.

I have reached my sixth point. The House will be pleased to know that the list is shortening. I think that the promise that everyone will get at least 2 megabits per second poses a real challenge to the Government, because, in my view, that is not enough.

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Anne Marie Morris]

I will not, because I am short of time.

I think that we should take account of the demand for a minimum of 5 megabits per second rather than 2. I gather that the average speed that we have managed to deliver is just over 5 megabits per second, so let us aim for that. I think that the Federation of Small Businesses is considering 10 megabits, which may be a bit hopeful at this stage, but a speed of 2 megabits per second is not fit for purpose. Whether people have enough supply to carry out even some of the most basic tasks, such as reading e-mails, depends very much on the level of demand.

Last on my wish list are two technical points. One is the challenge posed by the wiring between the cabinet and the home. All the rhetoric is about getting superfast broadband to the cabinet. I have asked Ministers, BT and just about everyone else I can think of who is responsible for upgrading the connection, but they have all looked sideways and said “Not me.” Well, it certainly is not the home owner. We need to clarify who is responsible, because if we do not deal with that, getting the wire to the cabinet will not solve the problem.

My final point is about take-up. I know that the Government consider that to be one of the real challenges, which is why they have launched an advertising campaign. If take-up is too low, BT will not have a commercial incentive. However, I think that we need to view the position differently. It is not just a question of advertising. The whole concept of the importance of broadband needs to be hard-wired—forgive the pun—into our planning system, and into how we view buying, selling or renting a property. The information about what is available needs to be there up front; it needs to be part and parcel of searches and the general inquiry someone makes when looking for a new home.

Let me summarise my key points and requests to the Government. First, we should look at how we can make the sector more competitive, and consider having the Competition and Markets Authority and Ofcom look at it. Many Members have raised that point. The challenges and problems we face are in part to do with having effectively a monopoly supplier in BT, because unless it is in its interests and it can make money out of it, it simply does not happen. Secondly, please can we move to more than 2 megabits per second? Thirdly, can we look at improving the self-help? If we can improve the information flow so that people understand what can be done and when, that will be great.

That is a very brief summary, but I hope the Minister has taken on board many of those points.

--- Later in debate ---

[Guy Opperman]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend, and I can give examples of that situation. Corbridge Computing Ltd was as excited as I was when Corbridge, a substantial town in my constituency, was told on 19 September 2014 that it had received upgraded broadband. The company asked for the installation the next day; it is just metres from the exchange and various cabinets. To this day, however, it has still not been provided with any upgraded broadband. I could give similar examples, for instance at Dissington Hall. I will open its new rural enterprise hub, which is just outside Ponteland, this Friday, and it is hoped that new businesses will start up there, but to begin with there is the difficulty of not having the internet support that businesses obviously need. In a moment, I will discuss the problems that exist in the village of Matfen.

The reality is that we have false dawns and the situation is extremely difficult, because the lack of communication, and the inability of the roll-out to perform as we were originally told it would, leads to a loss of enthusiasm and support among local communities and constituents.

[Caroline Nokes]

My hon. Friend mentioned the failure of the roll-out to deliver what is expected of it. Does he share the concern of residents in a new development in my constituency, called Abbottswood, which is right on the edge of Romsey? On moving into their new properties—there are 800 new homes in total—they expected that they would have high-speed broadband, but, unlike the rest of Romsey, they have nothing.

[Guy Opperman]

That relates to the point I genuinely want the Minister to respond to. Where there are new developments up and down the country, it must be part of the section 106 agreement of planning that the housing developer installs broadband as part of the planning agreement. It seems utterly illogical that we have either residential or mixed-use developments being brought forward without this fundamental precondition. If nothing else comes from this debate, we must surely address that issue.

I make the point to the Minister that in Northumberland we have not slept on our laurels. We have explored alternatives. Many people in the county have satellite solutions, or line-of-sight solutions such as Wildcard, which serves all the village of Newton. In those circumstances, such providers have genuinely made a difference locally.

Sadly, however, value for money is the key driver of Government policy. I understand why that is the case in a recession, but the consequence of value for money being a driver of policy means that the last 5%—or, as in rural constituencies such as mine, that of the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath), and those of the hon. Members from Cornwall and Devon, those hard-to-reach areas or total not spots—are always the last ones in the queue, because it is so much easier to address the areas with limited broadband, or those that are easier to connect to the exchange. The Government must look at the way in which they structure agreements in the future, so that a change in emphasis takes place. Without that, I foresee difficulty in getting the roll-out to the hard-to-reach areas.

I have repeatedly had meetings with the Minister, the Secretary of State, Broadband Delivery UK, which I met last week, and BT Openreach, the head of which I met only yesterday in the House of Commons. I welcome the fact that a genuine difference is being made, because it is important. I see that when I look at the example of Matfen, a village in my constituency that has had particular difficulties. People there were encouraged by BDUK to seek significant demand registration under the iNorthumberland procedure, to encourage greater funding and to encourage BT to tailor its roll-out to those areas. The consequence is that they sign up to these things but are then told that they are not going to be part of the roll-out that they thought their sign-up was so good for. In the case of Matfen we are exploring, and will be in various meetings in February, how to find a way forward in phase 2 of the roll-out, because these things create false expectation among our communities, which is not good. I appreciate the work BDUK and BT Openreach are doing to try to turn this problem around. When I spoke to executives from BT Openreach yesterday, they made it clear to me that Northumberland was a future priority for them, and my constituents will be delighted if that is genuinely proven in the developments that we hope will take place.

We will need to look at not only the planning point I raised earlier, but how LEPs, and rural growth funds can support provision. We still have silos, whereby BDUK, BT Openreach and the Government are working in one silo, and the LEPs and others are working in another. It is extraordinarily difficult to get everybody in the same room, getting a holistic group view on the particular problem. Let me finish by mentioning the problem of towers and masts. My constituency has more than 50 masts belonging to various different parts of government, but it is extraordinarily difficult to get all those masts to sign for the provision, ultimately, of broadband.

--- Later in debate ---

[Eric Ollerenshaw (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow yet another Yorkshire MP. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman) on instituting what I think has become an annual debate, with the annual roll-out of the Minister.

I am sure the Minister has a good idea of some of the things I am going to say, but before I go into what are essentially concerns about rural roll-out, I will add my voice to the view expressed by my hon. Friends the Members for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris), for Hexham (Guy Opperman) and for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Sir Robert Smith) about the need, if we are building these thousands and thousands of new houses to try to make up for the previous Government’s failure, to make this fourth utility part and parcel of the build scheme. It seems incredible to me that it is not. I understand that the Government are looking into it, but it should already be in planning policy that these connections should be part of future building schemes.

At the moment in Lancaster, where we have large regeneration schemes going on, people are moving into flats or houses and discovering that they have no connection and that individually they have to find a way to get connected. That is amazing in the 21st century, especially in apartment and flat-style properties, and it is something the Government need to get a grip on through planning policy.

[Caroline Nokes]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is surprising that developers are not more keen to ensure that their properties have the capability to be connected to the network, which is a selling point?

[Eric Ollerenshaw]

I agree, but that is not happening. The market is not yet delivering. Where it is not delivering, the Government should be delivering, in terms of planning regulations at the very least.

On the roll-out of broadband, to be fair, the Government took the decision in 2010, which we all welcomed, to do something for that section of the rural community that had been left out for so long, as my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) pointed out. Villages in Lancashire are being connected. It may be fast or slow in certain areas, but some of those contracts are being delivered. As the Minister knows, I, like other hon. Members, was concerned about the missing 5%. I was approached by a group led by Professor Barry Forde of Lancaster university, who said that the BT contracts could not work because of the copper to fibre issue, so BT would be unable to deliver the speeds that it had promised. [Interruption.]