6. 5. Statement: Superfast Broadband — The Next Steps

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:47 pm on 8 November 2016.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 4:47, 8 November 2016

The Member eventually got around to a very good point, I think, which is we are very frustrated by the information that has been available. I hope the Member thinks that the website has improved very recently. If he doesn’t, then I’m happy to look at individual issues and so on. I make the same offer to Rhun ap Iorwerth as I’ve made to many other Members: I’m happy to come to your constituency and have a look, individually, at some of the issues there. We have worked very hard with BT and we supervise them very closely over the raising of false expectations and then the moving of the goalposts, which I am as frustrated about as he is.

Absolutely, I will say to you that making sure that we communicate properly with those premises that are in the last stages of our ambition to get to 100 per cent—that they are properly communicated with and understand the issues that we’re dealing with in getting to them. As I say, it will be on an individual, premises-by-premises basis by then. So, we will know exactly what the issues are.

The problem, as you know, and I’ll just reiterate it, is that superfast is getting to a number of premises in order to get to specific ones, and that’s made it a lot cheaper and the money’s gone a lot further, but it has led to the frustrations of those who seem to be in the programme and then drop out because it turns out that there’s a geographical or blocked duct or some other difficulty in getting to them. So, I understand and share the Member’s frustration with the information that’s been there.

However, we must be careful not to talk up as a defeat something that is actually a very good programme indeed. It has reached a very large number of people. It has another 100,000 premises to go in this year. There are people who are in the end of the programme and, obviously, it’s frustrating to be in the end of the programme, but we will get to all of them and we will make sure that Wales is 100 per cent connected as a nation.