Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:06 pm on 11 October 2016.
Okay, well, thank you for that, and thank you very much for your kind remarks. We’re very proud of the fact that we've got Wales to be one of the leaders in digital connectivity right across Europe, and it's a matter of some concern to us that we get people to take up the benefits of it now that we've spent the money in rolling it out.
In terms of business take-up, one of the reasons that we have got our marketing back in-house is that we want to target it. BT were doing it previously, but, obviously, it's caught up in their commercial roll-out as well, and we very much wanted to emphasise the point that I was making earlier to Dai Lloyd, that many ISPs are available; you can shop around, you can get a better service for your business and so on. But also, our business advisers are running sessions right across Wales alongside this to demonstrate the benefits of broadband for businesses that hitherto haven't had it.
And if I can just tell you this little anecdote, because you'll appreciate it, I often meet with people who say they haven't got any, ‘I just want 1 Mb—please, anything’, and I say, ‘Well, no, we don't want to do that. We want to get you to the point where you can do things that your business requires.’ ‘No, no, we’d just like to have the ability to download things.’ I always use the analogy of people who don't have electricity wanting enough electricity to have a light bulb in the middle of their house, but, actually, as soon as they've got that lightbulb, realising how many other things they should’ve asked for and, not having had the house wired in the first place, it's then much more expensive. So, it's a similar analogy—1 Mb will not get you very much at all; you cannot do cloud servicing, for example, off 1 Mb.
So, what our business advice is now doing is it gives you a sort of menu at the back of what service you need to do what. So, you know, if you are a hotel venue in Wales, and you want to just offer those internet services that give you 2-for-1 vouchers and so on—there are a lot of companies that do that—because you want to fill up your venue on hitherto difficult-to-fill-up days—Tuesdays and Wednesdays, for the sake of argument—then, great, you can do that. You can get online and you can get people to book that way and so on, and lots of people take advantage of that. But, once you've filled up your hotel, you realise that the people who are there will want to streamline television on their devices, they want to upload their photographs, they want to tell their friends how great it is, and if they can't do that in your rooms, because you have no Wi-Fi, because you don't have enough broadband to allow people to log on all at once, then they will put a very nasty remark on TripAdvisor about your service and you'll suffer for that. And so what we're trying to make people see is what is available to them before they have the broadband in the first place, rather than them wait to get it and then try to upgrade it, because that's more expensive. So, that's the purpose of the business intervention. That's just one small example; there are many, many others that we could go into. So, that is what the take-up driver is for. That's what the marketing is for, and it's very targeted, and Members will hopefully see it happening in their areas, on their local radio stations. We'll have billboards up and so on. Lots of the business organisations in the area will be invited. So, I hope you will see that happening very much.
And then, lastly, in terms of the geographical disparity, as you put it, I'll answer this again, even though I've answered it for every Member so far. We don't control the contracts on a local authority area; we control the contract for Wales. So, BT have to get to the number of premises in Wales that they need. I have no control over where that is. I don't know why it's more difficult to get it in Torfaen, but it could be something like the ducts are blocked, the cabinets could be at capacity, the previous phone network line hasn't been up to speed. I have absolutely no idea; there are all kinds of issues that come up in this contract. Rurality is not the only problem here; sometimes the streets are a problem, sometimes there are problems with, you know, all kinds of blockages and so on. But they have to get to the premises number for Wales that we have set, and then we will use the gain share money to get to the rest. So, it doesn't matter whether the percentage in Torfaen is lower at the moment. At the end of this administration it will be at 100 per cent.