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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what plans the Government has to improve BT Openreach's customer accountability; and if she will make a statement.

Openreach is accountable to its wholesale customers (the communications providers, such as Sky and TalkTalk), who in turn are accountable to their retail customers (individual consumers and businesses).

Ofcom has worked to improve Openreach’s accountability by:

• Imposing service quality rules that require Openreach to deliver faster line repairs and installations for telephone and broadband customers; and
• It has announced proposals to introduce automatic compensation to be paid by communications providers to their customers when they suffer quality of service problems including delayed repairs, delayed provisions and missed appointments.

In March this year, we agreed the legal separation of Openreach from BT, which is in part aimed at making Openreach more responsive to its wholesale customers" rest of answer remains the same.