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

To ask Her Majesty's Government, in the light of the proposal to deploy smart meters requiring wifi in homes, what progress has been made with the rollout of broadband.

There is no direct link between the smart meter programme and the superfast broadband rollout programme, because the smart meters programme will not be using fixed broadband connections (they will instead involve transfer of small amounts of data over wireless technologies). However, i can confirm that the Government broadband programme is making good progress with over 600,000 new premises now having superfast broadband available for the first time as a result of the Government’s investment and that will rise to over 1 million by the end of Summer 2014.