Mike Freer
Main Page: Mike Freer (Conservative - Finchley and Golders Green)(9 years, 8 months ago)
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Mark Field
That concern has certainly been put to me by many of my constituents as well. In today’s debate, I am trying to focus on what the Government might do, given their ambitious programme, which, as I said, has made some real headway in relatively depopulated, rural parts of the UK, but which has left behind, ironically, the sorts of areas that the hon. Lady and I represent.
Mike Freer (Finchley and Golders Green) (Con)
In my constituency, we have an area called a “notspot”, in that it is a group of houses at the end of the copper line, and the speed degrades the further away people get from the exchange. In terms of asking what the Government can do, does my hon. Friend agree that we need a proper investigation into what the cause is? He is being told that there is a lack of demand, but when I met BT, I was told that BT cannot find the location to put the boxes on the pavement, so we are being misled. Does he agree that the Government need to get a grip on why suppliers cannot supply in London?
Mark Field
I very much agree with that. I confess that when I was doing the research, I assumed that the word “notspot” was a typographical error. I then recognised exactly what was being suggested, which my hon. Friend has rightly pointed out.
Yes, there is a particular problem for London. London is a wonderful capital to live in, but it is an absurdity that, within a few hundred yards or even less of first-rate digital broadband, individuals should find they have difficulties. Of course, we all take for granted that we will have instant access to the internet—I recall going on a holiday only 10 years ago to a distant part of Africa and the frustration one felt about the situation. Of course, we recognise that back in the 1980s and 1990s, these things did take a hell of a long time to get up and running, and all of us as consumers now have expectations that are very different from those of the past. Those expectations will only become greater as time goes by.
It strikes me that only the sort of thinking to which hon. Members have referred will enable London to continue to compete effectively on the global stage and meet the future bandwidth demands of all its citizens. My seat suffers particularly from the technology divide and it is frustrating to receive regular reports from constituents that they are caught between the cheaper, slower, copper broadband and the unaffordable leased lines. Many SMEs, in keeping with current business practice and as a way of making economies in what remains a difficult economic environment, use cloud-based services. Those services need, as an absolute essential, faster and reliable connections and the failure to provide sufficient connectivity is a fundamental issue undermining our global competitiveness.
Even the much politically celebrated success that is Tech City—based, sadly, just outside my constituency, around the Old street roundabout—is having difficulties getting the broadband speeds it needs to continue to thrive and grow. I know that those concerns are shared by the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch, who has the good fortune to have Tech City in her patch. I know that in the past, she has called for a comprehensive review of superfast broadband provision.
Closer to home here in Westminster, the West End partnership, which brings together public and private sector stakeholders in central London, has identified the poor broadband service as the single biggest threat to London’s international competitiveness. It puts at risk the continued attraction of investors and the continued growth of the digital, media, tech and creative sector, which has provided some quarter of a million jobs in central London alone.
London has the biggest concentration of digital businesses in Europe, with some 23,000 firms and over 390,000 employees, according to a Greater London authority study of two years ago; I suspect that those figures may underestimate the reality today. However, economic growth in the sector has not increased relative to other sectors in the past decade. That is likely to relate to the fact that broadband speeds are lower in London than in some of our European rivals and connection is generally of a lower standard than that available to a number of our Asian competitors.