Mobile Phone Signal (Fownhope) — House of Commons, 2015-01-06
Topic: Technology
Edward Vaizey (Conservative, Centre-right): I agree with my hon. Friend. DEFRA put up £10 million at the beginning of this Parliament, which DCMS matched, to help smaller rural and community broadband providers to provide broadband in areas that were not part of the national programme. DEFRA is and will continue to be an effective partner in our broadband roll-out programme, which is developing all the time. I do not want to give the impression that we are doing that on the back of an envelope, because we have a clear programme. It is right for my hon. Friend to highlight the difficulties faced by him, his constituents, and indeed the Prime Minister, but it is also worth stating —perhaps I can turn to the glass-half-full element of the debate—that we are making significant progress As my hon. Friend is aware, phase 1 of our rural broadband programme involved a £500 million fund from the Government matched by local authorities and Openreach, to enable up to 90% of premises nationwide to get superfast broadband speeds of at least 24 megabits a second. That programme has already gone out to more than 1.2 million homes. We expect soon to announce the milestone of 1.5 million homes, and we are on course to reach 4 million homes under that programme in good speed. Indeed, in many areas the project is ahead of schedule. As my hon. Friend is aware, in his area about £35 million went into phase 1 of the Hereford and Gloucestershire Fastershire project, covering some 113,000 premises. Latest figures suggest that the programme has already reached 35,000 homes. That figure will be higher by now. The vast majority of those 110,000 premises will be reached this year, although some will be reached in the year after. My hon. Friend will also be aware of phase 2. We secured an additional fund of £250 million, which was again matched by Openreach and local authorities. In the Fastershire area of Herefordshire and Gloucestershire, that amounts to almost £20 million to target a further 33,000 premises; so, just under 150,000 premises all told in phase 1 and 2, reaching coverage of approximately 93% of all premises in Herefordshire and Gloucestershire One important point to make is that, when we have these debates, my hon. Friends and other hon. Members will, understandably, point to where things are not going as well as anticipated and where the problems are in order to highlight those problems. As I say to them again and again, however, we are on the same page. These funds have not come from nowhere. They have not been magicked out of the air in the past week. We recognised, in the very first weeks after the election, that rural coverage for broadband was a big problem. We were not prepared to accept the previous Government’s commitment to provide speeds of 2 megabits under a rural broadband programme. We recognised immediately that by the time the programme rolled out people would be demanding faster speeds. We set a target of 24 megabits, which is more than adequate. Most people nowadays would expect, if they think about how they use broadband—accessing iPlayer, or indeed receiving payments from the rural payments agency—speeds of about 7 megabits or 8 megabits to be more than adequate. We have recognised absolutely the need to provide broadband for rural areas. The programme is, despite some of the critiques that have been levelled at it, going extremely well. We will see even more of a step change this year than there was last year The other element of the equation is phase 3—I am still dealing here with fibre broadband, but as my hon. Friend pointed out that is very relevant for mobile broadband coverage—where we have set aside £10 million to test out different technologies. Critics of Openreach will be delighted to know that a number of smaller providers have secured those funds to test out new technologies to reach the very hardest-to-reach premises. When we talk about hard-to-reach premises, we are talking about perhaps a house at the end of a long track, where it would cost £20,000 to £25,000 to provide a superfast broadband connection. In terms of value for money, one could argue whether that is an effective use of taxpayers’ money. If we can find new technologies that would bring down that cost substantially, it is incumbent on us to examine them. Those programmes are under way. We will evaluate them and come up with a sum that we think is adequate to get to our often-stated target of reaching 100%. We have not been specific about when or how much money, but that is our ambition.