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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, whether any of the planned Extended Area Services masts in Ceredigion will be made available for use by the Shared Rural Network.

As part of the government funded element of the Shared Rural Network (SRN) programme £185m in funding will be made available to the Home Office and the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to upgrade Extended Area Service (EAS) masts being built as part of the Emergency Services Network (ESN). This will help eliminate ‘total not-spots’ - the hard to reach areas where there is currently no coverage from any operator. The Home Office will make sites available, where possible, for the MNOs to deploy on them although we recognise that, in some cases, upgrades may not be possible due to technical, financial or other reasons.

There are 12 EAS sites in Ceredigion and these are all being considered for commercial connectivity via the SRN. We are currently working with the Home Office and MNOs to facilitate sharing as quickly as possible and the majority of the procurements have now been completed. In addition I am pleased to update that the Home Office and DCMS are exploring the possibility of the site in Llanafan being part of a EAS/SRN pilot scheme which will test the processes we, the Home Office and the MNOs have put in place to allow sharing on these sites to begin.