Part of 2. Questions to the Leader of the House and Chief Whip (in respect of her portfolio responsibilities) – in the Senedd at 2:23 pm on 6 December 2017.
I'm very grateful for your response, Cabinet Secretary and leader of the house. I'm also grateful for the fact that you're going to be visiting my constituency to talk about the Superfast Cymru roll-out in rural Denbighshire in particular, where, as you will be aware, the current statistics suggest that it's lagging behind significantly in terms of progress when compared to the rest of Wales, with just 84 per cent of premises actually connected versus 92.5 per cent across the rest of the country. That does have an impact on rural businesses in particular, many of whom already face difficulties because of rurality in getting their goods and services out to the marketplace. I appreciate that we've got the ultrafast voucher scheme in place, but many suppliers of alternative services are simply not able to supply either in those localities, so what are you doing to work with the industry to come up with something that is more commercially viable in order to extend the opportunities that superfast and ultrafast broadband speeds can provide to businesses in these situations in my own constituency?