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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment his Department has made of adequacy of the coverage of internet speeds required to access the digital economy in (a) 2020 (b) 2025 (c) 2030.

My department is working hard to ensure that everyone in Britain has the connectivity they need to be part of our future digital society.

We have committed to the vision of a full fibre Britain, the gold standard of broadband that will deliver a step-change in speed, service quality, security and reliability, with capacity for 1 Gigabit per second connections. The Local Full Fibre Network programme will invest £200 million for locally-led projects across the UK to leverage local and commercial investment in full fibre. Also, we are conducting an in-depth Future Telecoms Infrastructure Review to determine how to deliver the competitive conditions to encourage the long term investment needed to secure ubiquitous world-class digital connectivity, that is seamless, reliable, long-lasting and also widely available and affordable to UK businesses and consumers.

The BDUK Superfast Programme reached its target of 95% coverage of the UK by the end of 2017, and is continuing to support delivery with at least a further 2% coverage. We are currently investing £1.7 billion of public money in superfast broadband coverage across the UK, offering speeds of over 24 Megabits per second. .

To ensure no one is left behind, in areas where superfast broadband is not available, we are also introducing a broadband Universal Service Obligation so that by 2020 everyone across the UK will have a clear, enforceable right to request high speed broadband of at least 10 Megabits per second. We will keep this under review to make sure that it keeps pace with consumers' evolving needs.