Jake Berry
Main Page: Jake Berry (Conservative - Rossendale and Darwen)(8 years, 8 months ago)
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Neil Parish
I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. There have to be other initiatives, or other existing systems. Can we use church towers or mobile phone masts, if there are any? Do we need more of those, or do we need to link the broadband or internet connection to other systems? Otherwise, we seem to be getting only to those areas that we can get to and not to the hardest-to-reach areas. I am not yet convinced, even with the latest contracts, that we are getting where we need to be.
Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)
My hon. Friend is absolutely correct about reaching the hardest areas. A key driver for the final 10% is getting more competition into the market for broadband provision. Was he as concerned as I was to read in The Times this week that BT Openreach had been referred to Ofcom? The article claimed that it was to some extent fiddling figures to avoid having to proceed as quickly as possible with the installation of fibre-optic cables. That must be of concern to him and to rural residents in my constituency, in places such as Water, Lumb, Lower Darwen and Whitworth, who have been waiting a long time to be remembered as the final 10%.
Neil Parish
Yes. If we look at the contracts with BT in particular, there is money that is supposed to be delivered into the contract, but that always comes at the end. I do not know what the situation is in my hon. Friend’s area, but there is certainly little under the Devon and Somerset contract.