Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:23 pm on 11 October 2016.
Can I say to Darren Millar how very much I’ve missed his righteous indignation; it’s been absent from the Chamber for a little while now, so it’s nice to see it back in full flood. Sadly, it is a little over-zealous in this instance, because I think he failed, really, to listen very carefully to my previous answers to Members. So, I’ll just reiterate them. We haven’t moved the goalposts, we haven’t changed the outcome of these, what we’ve done is we’ve added premises in during subsequent open-market reviews in order to get to as many premises in Wales as possible. The original targets were for 96 per cent of the premises that were built in Wales in 2011. Clearly, you don’t have to be a genius to know that other premises have been built between then and now. Also, it’s a market intervention—it isn’t an infrastructure project, it’s a market intervention. We have to make sure that we only go where the market doesn’t go, and so we are obliged to go through open-market review processes in order to add other premises to that.
In the first open-market review, several telecommunications companies, for example, identified that they would commercially roll out to a number of industrial premises across Wales, and it became clear that they weren’t actually going to make good on those promises, and that’s why we conducted the second open-market review, in order to be able to include those premises. That’s what the second tranche was about. I’ve explained that to Members lots of times; I’m happy to explain it again.