Superfast Broadband

Part of 2. Questions to the Leader of the House – in the Senedd at 2:21 pm on 24 January 2018.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:21, 24 January 2018

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.