Telecommunications Infrastructure (Leasehold Property) Bill — House of Commons, 2021-02-24
Topic: Technology
Timothy James Farron (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): I too wish to support the Bill and the amendments made in the other place. I am deeply concerned, though, about the practice of the Government’s moves to meet their own self-imposed universal service obligation. In my constituency, we are looking at around 1,000 properties—domestic properties, never mind businesses—that will not meet the USO. Indeed, even when we factor in those properties that can be supported via 4G to receive that kind of basic broadband connectivity, hundreds of properties in places such as Coniston, the Langdales, north Windermere, Ambleside, Hawkshead and Cartmel Fell are left still unable to access the Government’s targets or avail themselves of them, and have no source of appeal and no form of redress. The only thing they can do about it is to shell out tens of thousands of pounds of their own money, if they are able and willing. It turns out that the Government’s universal service obligation is not universal, and is not an obligation. That is going to, and does, hit rural communities such as ours all the more I am also concerned that, as has been mentioned by others in this debate, the Government’s commitment to full fibre roll-out has fallen by the wayside to a significant degree, and a breaking of manifesto promises is now clearly taking place. The commitment to £5 billion being spent in this Parliament has dropped to less than a quarter of that amount—less backhaul, more backsliding. That is deeply concerning for rural communities such as ours that thought they could rely on the promise that was made to them. The Government’s reappraising of its targets—that is, the breaking of its promises—will mean that rural communities such as mine miss out the most, which is deeply regrettable. Through conversations with BT and others, we now calculate that nearly half of my constituents will not get ultrafast full fibre broadband for at least another decade. That is not acceptable, and not in keeping with the spirit of this Bill I will focus on two final points. The first is that our experience during this pandemic tells us something very important about the nature of work. Here I am, speaking to Members from Milnthorpe in Cumbria while simultaneously being in the House of Commons. People working at home and making use of broadband connectivity has been transformative, and in one sense we are very grateful to be in this situation at this time, when we have this technology available to us. Imagine what it might have been like 20 or so years ago, when this technology was not available However, with so many more people working from home, we begin to realise that the Government’s fixation and focus on download speeds is somewhat misleading—maybe not intentionally, but it is misleading. For so many people in business working from home, it is upload speeds that matter. They are the benchmark of whether or not we are genuinely, properly connected. I can think of people in our big town of Kendal with upload speeds of less than one megabit per second, who are meant to be working from home, running companies of many dozens of people with large turnovers. That is not conducive to communities like ours. I have one of the most entrepreneurial communities in the country, with one of the highest numbers of people working for themselves when compared with any other community elsewhere in the United Kingdom. We are really proud of that, yet the Government hobble us by not having ambitions that are ambitious enough to allow people to work from home and within their communities, and to enable them to contribute to our economy. Let us focus on the reality of connectivity and realise that the Government’s own ambitions are still very unambitious, given the new world that we find ourselves in. My final point is this: we are very proud of, and very grateful to, our mountain rescue services, and indeed all our emergency services here in the lakes and the dales. Only recently, a leading member of our mountain rescue teams here in the Lake district suffered very serious injuries rescuing a member of the public, and we remember how vital their service is, both the service given voluntarily by the mountain rescue services and that given by the professional emergency services. We owe them so much, and one of the things we owe them is decent connectivity. In three parts of my constituency, and in many other parts of the country, we have promises from the Home Office for new emergency service masts. In my community, that means the Langdales, Longsleddale, and Kentmere. Those Home Office masts are vital to the safety of people in those communities, and to the emergency services that often operate in those communities. They are also vital because they then provide a platform for commercial delivery for mobile telecommunications in vast, underpopulated—but not unpopulated—areas The Home Office continuously puts off the erection and bringing into operation of the Longsleddale, Kentmere and Langdale masts. At the moment, we understand that the Home Office has no plan to activate those masts for another three or four years. Will the Minister put strong pressure on the Home Secretary to act swiftly to make sure that our emergency services, the people they come to aid and the wider community in the lakes have the benefit of those masts and have them quickly?