I’m afraid that I can’t share the contentment that some have with the progress made under this contract, or in general with broadband in Wales. Vikki Howells mentioned that only one out of every 25 homes has no access to broadband, but it appears to me, through the letters that I have, that whole villages are full of these one-in-25 homes in the area that I represent. By now, letters regarding access to broadband—in my postbag and in e-mail—have surpassed health. I’ve got more letters about broadband than health, and I’ve never seen that as an Assembly Member or as a Member of Parliament. It’s clear that access to broadband has speeded up as the current contract comes to an end at the end of the year, but a number have complained that they haven’t seen the access that they’d been expecting. There was a website showing people when their village was going to have access and when their house was going to be part of it. The publicity money was taken out of that website, so now, people don’t know when that is going to happen. By now, I’m afraid we’re in a situation where I feel that, despite the efforts of the Welsh Government, I’m not sure that we’ve had the service that we expected to have after spending over £150 million on BT and Openreach. I don’t think they’ve performed fully according to their contract, and I will speak in a while about what we should do about that.

For the areas that I represent, adequate access to broadband is now completely essential. You’re talking in general about 10 Mbps, as Adam Price mentioned. By now, the expectations of people about how they can deal with the local economy has gone beyond that. We don’t want to see people having to move from rural areas, to move from west Wales, in order to get nearer to the market. When you have an electronic market, it should be able to be used anywhere in Wales.

Adam mentioned the fact that a study by the library of the House of Commons had found that seven out of 10 wards that had the slowest broadband were in Wales, and that six of them were in Mid and West Wales. But it’s worse than that, because, when I looked at the figures, I was surprised to see the figures that the House of Commons library had. They said that these figures were bad. For example, Trelech in Carmarthen west has 3.8 Mbps, Yscir has 4.2 Mbps, and Llanfihangel Aberbythych has 4.2 Mbps.

Over the summer, I have conducted my own survey, in Meirion-Dwyfor, in Ceredigion, and in Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire, about what is the speed that people are actually receiving in their homes. They are as low as 0.2 Mbps; they would be really pleased to have 4.1 Mbps or 4.2 Mbps. I don’t know where these figures come from; perhaps from the house next door to the cabinet or something. The reality of what you get 100 yards, or more than 100 yards, down the copper line from the Cabinet in rural Wales is completely different from these figures, and there is a desperate need to look at that.