1. Will the Leader of the House make a statement on the start date for the superfast broadband successor scheme? OAQ51624

Thank you very much for that question. I intend to carry out a procurement exercise shortly, with a view to the new project starting in spring this year. I'll be making a statement later this month to set out more detail about the new scheme.

Thank you very much for that response. I do welcome the fact that there is to be a scheme, because we know that the predecessor scheme, which is coming to an end, hasn’t reached all parts of Wales. I know that you don’t have the full facts and the full report as yet, but there are numerous villages that have reported back that there are cables still hanging from poles and that the work hasn’t been completed, and that there are parts of Wales, which were never going to be reached under the previous scheme, that may need a different, smarter solution in order to deliver for them.

So, two questions, if I may: I think you’ve mentioned in the past £80 million for this—is that the figure that we still have, and do you think that that’s sufficient, or will you need to add to that? And how much real opportunity is there for another provider to come in to help in this process, because I do fear that putting all our eggs in the BT Openreach basket has brought us to the current situation where, quite simply, we can’t actually make an omelette from those eggs?

Simon Thomas makes a number of good points that he's made on a number of occasions to me about the way superfast has worked. I think it's fair to say that the Superfast Cymru scheme has been a hugely successful scheme for those people who've received superfast from it, and they are an enormous number of people across Wales. It's in the nature of the beast that we're not inundated by letters from people who are grateful to have received it. Instead, we receive a lot of correspondence from those people who find themselves at the other end of the project, and that's very understandable.

We won't know for a number of weeks yet whether the contract was completely fulfilled, but we have good indications that they did very well, and we're very hopeful that they did in fact fulfil the contract. But the contract did end on 31 December, at midnight, and therefore, obviously, if the work wasn't done by then, the Welsh Government isn't paying for it. So, that leaves people in a very frustrating position.

I will be making an announcement early next week, so I'm going to avoid the temptation to steal my own thunder by pre-announcing it, but we are very aware of the predicament of communities who've been left there, and of the number of people who were promised superfast under the first scheme and who fell off the end for various reasons. We very much have those people in mind when we're looking at the announcements that I'm hoping to make early next week, as it happens.

Please don't pay BT for Princes Gate. During the time I've been told on numerous occasions that Princes Gate will get fast broadband. In fact, last year, the head of Superfast Cymru—I won't name him—wrote and told me that a second pass would see Princes Gate be upgraded to superfast broadband by the autumn of 2017. The response from the leader of Openreach:

'The infrastructure serving your community forms part of a programme we were running which ended on Sunday 31 December 2017. This is a hard stop'—  we're not doing anymore. And it's not just Princes Gate. Cynwyl Elfed, Hermon, Lawrenny, Martletwy, bits of Pembroke—they've all got this. They had the promise, they were told categorically—and Llanpumsaint—they were going to get it, and now they're not. I don't actually hold you personally responsible, Minister, because I know that you really believe in the delivery of this, but I would like you to talk fairly strongly to BT and to Openreach. They cannot make promises to people and then just basically say, 'Tough luck. It's finished. Too bad', because these people have lives to live, businesses to run, kids to educate. Broadband, superfast, is today's universal provision we all need, and I fail to see why my constituency should be so disadvantaged.

I think the Member has made a number of points that are well worth considering. As I said, in considering what we're going to do for the successor schemes, we are of course very mindful of the people who have had promises made to them in various circumstances and , for various complex engineering reasons and so on, haven't been able to be met under the first scheme.

Angela Burns will be the first person to say that I shouldn't be paying for something that is outwith the contract, and of course there has been an end to the contract, and we've been very certain about that end, because, of course, we have to behave in an appropriate financial way with regard to the contract and so on. But our primary intention here is to connect people to broadband—this isn't a financial exercise, it's an exercise in getting the infrastructure out there. So, we've had a number of conversations with Openreach BT about where the infrastructure build has gone to, and bear in mind, they are investing their money in that—they are not paid until those premises are connected. So, they have invested money in building out to those premises and it's in their commercial interest to make sure that people are connected as much as anything else.

We've had some considerable conversations with them about people in the position that you mentioned, for a number of your constituents, and indeed people across Wales who are in the 4 per cent of people who are at the end of the contract. I will be making some announcements next week, which I think may bring some comfort to some of the communities that you mentioned.

Does the leader of the house, with her responsibilities for broadband and for equality, agree with me that marriage equality actually has very little to do with the superfast broadband roll-out? Does she also concur with me that the comments from the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, quite flippantly connecting the two, are little more than just another demonstration of how crass, insensitive and out of touch the Tory UK Government is?

I think the remarks made by the Secretary of State are really quite shocking, actually. Quite clearly, marriage equality is not the same thing as being connected to broadband, in any regard. Obviously, being an LGBT+ community member is a protected characteristic and ought to be treated sensitively as such.

The whole issue of marriage equality in Northern Ireland is of course not one for this devolved Government, but to equate the thing with an infrastructure roll-out is clearly highly insensitive and not something that we would want to see done in any circumstance.