Rural Phone and Broadband Connectivity — House of Commons, 2015-02-03
Topic: Mixed Topics
Guy Thomas Opperman (Conservative, Centre-right): That relates to the point I genuinely want the Minister to respond to. Where there are new developments up and down the country, it must be part of the section 106 agreement of planning that the housing developer installs broadband as part of the planning agreement. It seems utterly illogical that we have either residential or mixed-use developments being brought forward without this fundamental precondition. If nothing else comes from this debate, we must surely address that issue I make the point to the Minister that in Northumberland we have not slept on our laurels. We have explored alternatives. Many people in the county have satellite solutions, or line-of-sight solutions such as Wildcard, which serves all the village of Newton. In those circumstances, such providers have genuinely made a difference locally Sadly, however, value for money is the key driver of Government policy. I understand why that is the case in a recession, but the consequence of value for money being a driver of policy means that the last 5%—or, as in rural constituencies such as mine, that of the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath), and those of the hon. Members from Cornwall and Devon, those hard-to-reach areas or total not spots—are always the last ones in the queue, because it is so much easier to address the areas with limited broadband, or those that are easier to connect to the exchange. The Government must look at the way in which they structure agreements in the future, so that a change in emphasis takes place. Without that, I foresee difficulty in getting the roll-out to the hard-to-reach areas I have repeatedly had meetings with the Minister, the Secretary of State, Broadband Delivery UK, which I met last week, and BT Openreach, the head of which I met only yesterday in the House of Commons. I welcome the fact that a genuine difference is being made, because it is important. I see that when I look at the example of Matfen, a village in my constituency that has had particular difficulties. People there were encouraged by BDUK to seek significant demand registration under the iNorthumberland procedure, to encourage greater funding and to encourage BT to tailor its roll-out to those areas. The consequence is that they sign up to these things but are then told that they are not going to be part of the roll-out that they thought their sign-up was so good for. In the case of Matfen we are exploring, and will be in various meetings in February, how to find a way forward in phase 2 of the roll-out, because these things create false expectation among our communities, which is not good. I appreciate the work BDUK and BT Openreach are doing to try to turn this problem around. When I spoke to executives from BT Openreach yesterday, they made it clear to me that Northumberland was a future priority for them, and my constituents will be delighted if that is genuinely proven in the developments that we hope will take place We will need to look at not only the planning point I raised earlier, but how LEPs, and rural growth funds can support provision. We still have silos, whereby BDUK, BT Openreach and the Government are working in one silo, and the LEPs and others are working in another. It is extraordinarily difficult to get everybody in the same room, getting a holistic group view on the particular problem. Let me finish by mentioning the problem of towers and masts. My constituency has more than 50 masts belonging to various different parts of government, but it is extraordinarily difficult to get all those masts to sign for the provision, ultimately, of broadband.