The next item, therefore, is a statement by the leader of the house on Superfast Cymru and I call on her to make the statement. Julie James.

Diolch, Llywydd. Today I want to update you on our plans to extend the coverage of high-speed broadband following the end of the build phase of the Superfast Cymru project. Through Superfast Cymru, we have fundamentally altered the broadband landscape in Wales, bringing superfast broadband to areas of Wales that simply would not have been connected. Since the project began in 2013, the availability of superfast broadband across Wales has more than doubled thanks directly to this project and to our investment. The latest Ofcom report shows that Wales now has the highest availability of superfast broadband—over 30 Mbps—amongst the devolved nations despite the obvious challenges that our topography presents in the roll-out of broadband networks. We must not lose sight of the significant achievement that this large scale engineering project represents. Homes and businesses the length and breadth of Wales are now enjoying the benefits of this investment and accessing digital services.

The Deputy Presiding Officer (Ann Jones) took the Chair.

Members will be keen to understand how many premises in their constituencies and regions were connected through the Superfast Cymru project and how many premises were connected overall. I will release this information as soon as I have it. We are currently reviewing the latest data presented by Openreach and working through our robust testing and verification process. I aim to announce the final confirmed figures in the spring.

Despite the success of Superfast Cymru in transforming broadband connectivity across Wales, there is clearly more work to be done. My own postbag continues to swell with letters from individuals, communities and businesses frustrated by the absence of high-speed broadband where they live or work. This Government shares that frustration and is committed to taking further action to addressing those broadband issues.

We have identified 88,000 premises across Wales that will not be served over the next three years without Government intervention. A detailed map showing these premises is available on the website. As I outlined in my oral statement of 8 November 2016, we have committed £80 million to enable this work. It is important to recognise, however, that the work to be done will get progressively more difficult and a one-size-fits-all approach may not deliver the best outcome. So, today I am announcing a suite of measures and proposals that, when taken together, will help us to realise the ambition described in 'Taking Wales Forward' to bring people together digitally by offering fast, reliable broadband to every property in Wales.

Firstly, I'm pleased to announce that we have now invited suppliers to tender for the successor scheme to Superfast Cymru. We have invited the market to present solutions in three lots with an emphasis on rural delivery, business prioritisation and ultrafast 100 Mbps services. Superfast Cymru delivered access to vast numbers of premises in rural areas, but there is more work to be done in parts of Powys and Ceredigion in particular. To address this, we have encouraged solutions that connect premises in those areas and in areas with lower 4G mobile data coverage.  The tender assessment will also recognise those bidders that target premises suffering the lowest download speeds. Businesses are taking advantage of the opportunities that having a fast connection affords, but we recognise that there are areas that businesses could be better served. We have, therefore, encouraged bidders to pay particular attention to business premises in their responses to the invitation to tender.

The demand for connectivity and the speed of that connectivity continues to grow exponentially. In the home, for example, video streaming to 4K and now 8K televisions are putting ever greater pressure on bandwidth and we need to ensure that the infrastructure keeps up with this demand. We also need to ensure wherever possible that we minimise the need for future public intervention by encouraging sustainable solutions that are scalable in future without the need for additional public investment. We have, therefore, encouraged the market to focus on the delivery of ultrafast and gigabit connectivity in their responses to the invitation to tender. I know that uncertainty around which premises will be connected and time frames for connectivity caused some frustration during the delivery of Superfast Cymru. To help alleviate this, the successful bidder will be required to identify from the outset the specific premises that will be served in any given lot. Not only will this provide greater certainty for residents and businesses in the plan, it will also enable those premises not addressed to focus on alternative approaches.

I am acutely aware that slippage of delivery timescales dogged Superfast Cymru and was the source of endless frustration for those whose dates changed. While it is unlikely that project slippage can be entirely eradicated given the complexity of the engineering involved and the scale of the challenge, we will encourage suppliers to consider how delays will be minimised and premises will be notified when changes inevitably occur. I have to be clear, however, that the funding available is unlikely to deliver fast broadband to every premises that we have identified. The invitation to tender represents one part of a suite of interlinked interventions designed to improve connectivity. Our Access Broadband Cymru and ultrafast connectivity voucher schemes will continue to provide funding in parallel to this work. Both schemes are being reviewed to ensure that they continue to provide the right solutions and complement the new Superfast Cymru successor scheme and the wider broadband landscape.

We also plan to introduce an additional, novel scheme that supports communities demonstrating tangible demand, particularly targeting those communities that are not covered by suppliers in their response to the ITT. We are seeking to establish a broadband outreach team to support this approach and to work with clusters of homes or businesses to harness this demand, define a local project, and procure a solution. There is much work to be done on this approach, but I will provide more detail in due course.

Finally, concerns have been raised about those premises where the infrastructure required to connect them appears to have been deployed by Openreach, yet the work has not been completed. In such circumstances, Members can be assured that the Welsh Government has not funded any aspect of that infrastructure. We have invited Openreach to provide detail on these structures and we will explore how we can support their completion through the gainshare mechanism in the grant agreement so that as many premises as possible can be addressed. In addition to this, I have also agreed to a request from Openreach to extend the build phase of the Superfast Cymru project by two months so that the delayed works to around 2,500 premises can be completed and commissioned. This will not lead to any further costs to the Welsh Government.

While I firmly believe that the success of Superfast Cymru should not be underestimated, and while I encourage Members to consider not only the challenges within their constituencies but also the considerable achievements, I do recognise that we have much to do. Above all, we need to ensure that fast broadband is available to everyone so that Wales can to meet the ever-growing demand for greater bandwidth and increasing digitisation. Together, the successor scheme, the community scheme, and our voucher schemes will provide a comprehensive package of interventions that will help us meet the challenges ahead.

Can I agree with the leader of the house that I think we must celebrate the fact that the Superfast Cymru project has been successful in delivering fibre broadband to many homes and businesses across Wales? The consequence of that improvement, of course, is that there's a sense of injustice that grows for those that are left behind, and the sense of injustice has been made worse, I think, by continued delays, poor communication and a lack of capacity that has left a significant minority of residents wondering whether they will ever get the upgrade that they have been repeatedly promised—or should I say 'scheduled'? I'm genuinely pleased, of course, leader of the house, that you have recognised this frustration in your statement and I'm encouraged that the new scheme will bind the winner of any given lot to set out which premises will be served. I think that's very much to be welcomed and I think that's a lesson learnt from the Superfast Cymru scheme.

As you would expect, I have a series of questions on the new scheme. Of the 88,000 premises included in the new scheme, how many were identified as part of the open market review and how many were previously in scope for an upgrade under the Superfast Cymru scheme? Last week, Openreach, in the committee session, suggested that they do have those details, so I would be grateful it you could provide detail in that regard, in writing if not today. In your statement, you also said that there will be three lots, but some telecoms experts suggest that too few lots may mean that little is gained by splitting them up in this way. So, do you recognise this view? And, if you are awarding a lot for the whole of rural Wales, how will you ensure that the mix of technologies is flexible enough for different areas that have unique requirements due to challenging topography?

An Ofcom-commissioned report into the cost modelling of universal broadband appeared to suggest that one needs to be extremely careful about how the mix of technologies are deployed in rural areas, saying that the cost of fibre to the premises if it is clustered is two thirds less than fixed wireless access, while the cost of FTTP if it is dispersed was around a fifth more than fixed wireless access. So, I would be interested in hearing about how you have considered this Ofcom report in designing the different lots to take into account that, so that public funds are, of course, spent effectively and reach as many people as possible. 

You've also confirmed that the budget for this scheme will be £80 million, which is only around £900 per premises, and this seems to suggest a technology mix where fibre to the cabinet and wireless will be dominant, which is a major stumbling block, I'd suggest, for those residents with long lines in deep rural Wales, such as Powys and Ceredigion, for example. Therefore, can I ask how you will guard against the prospect of rolling out an inferior technology that fails to deliver for the deep rural locations? I'll give an example. If Openreach were to win a lot, it would surely be a step backwards if they were to decide to deploy more fibre to the cabinet to save costs, rather than pushing forward with fibre to the premises for the long-range VDSL technology, which has already been successfully trialled in the highlands of Scotland.

I'm assuming that the three lots for the new scheme are expected to be awarded later in the spring, so therefore the roll-out won't begin until later in the summer or the autumn, and this will be many months, of course, after the Superfast Cymru project has ended, leaving many thousands of premises in limbo in the meantime. So, can I ask why didn't you ensure that the scheme dovetailed with the Superfast Cymru scheme to avoid the inevitable delay that will now occur, and what will happen if you deem that none of the bids are acceptable for one or more of the lots, or if no company is interested in one or more of the lots? 

And finally, you say in your statement that in some communities the infrastructure has been partially rolled out, and many of us have heard reports, of course, as you mentioned, of cables hanging from poles awaiting to be connected. What will happen to those part-built Superfast Cymru FTTP connections that simply ran out of time? Can you confirm that you will use the gainshare windfall to ensure that there is 100 per cent superfast footprint in these communities? 

Thank you for that series of questions. We've considered at great length how we can solve some of the issues that Russell George rightly highlights, and we've gone for the series of lots in order to have very specific provision for specific types of community. That's why there's also a community lot in there, because we want to be able to ensure that we do get the right flexible technologies for different communities. And so, there's quite a bit of work to be done for some of the bespoke communities about how the best technology fix will work, what internet service providers might be attracted once the technology is in place, what the relationship between those ISPs and some of the big providers might be, and so on. 

I'll give him a bit of an anecdotal example, because it illustrates the problem. Oftentimes, if I'm talking to somebody with very slow broadband—0.02 Mbps or some such—they tell me that they don't care about 30 Mbps; they'd be delighted to have 7 Mbps or whatever. They only want to upload their single farm payment, and so on. And therein lies the difficulty, because, first of all, we're talking about download speeds, but often people are talking about upload issues. There are real issues with what happens when you do get 7K and find you can't actually stream Sky and your teenage children can't do their homework, and all the rest of it. And we know from our business advisers that, actually, once people have their foot on that ladder, they're not suddenly satisfied with 7 Mbps; they want to climb that ladder. So, we need to ensure that we have a futureproof system in place that doesn't deliver shadow speeds of that sort. So, a mix will be absolutely essential.

You heard me detailing that we have listened to the whole issue around the scheduling and people falling in and out of scope, and so on. So, we now have a very specific map of identified premises. We've done a lot of work to make sure that we know where those premises are. There is a shadow on the map, which is where we've had some indication through the open market review from providers that they are themselves going to provide superfast or ultrafast in those areas. Russell George will acutely remember how we did it last time, and the fact that we had to then vary the contract for another 42,000 premises when those plans were revised. We've learnt that lesson and so we've structured it in a such a way that those shadow premises will come in or out of the contract when we see whether they're connected or not. So, in answer to your question about that, as it becomes absolutely clear whether there's a commercial roll-out or whether it's part of this extension or not, those people will come in and out of the various lots and we've deliberately flexed it so that we can do that so we don't have that problem. 

The reason we've kept the voucher scheme in place, though, is because—I make no secret of this—£18 million, although it's a substantial sum of money and a big investment from the Government, isn't enough to get to all premises in Wales. There will be still some people who are inaccessible in one regard or another and we will therefore be expecting the voucher scheme to come into play where they pay a part-share of that and we continue to pay a part-share of that, to reach those really difficult premises. I'm completely upfront about that. The topography of Wales is such that it is just—that's just life.

I will say this, though: I'm always amazed by the number of individuals who write to me saying that they recently bought their house and now they're very upset about their broadband speeds. Deputy Presiding Officer, I will say this to the house sellers and purchasers of Wales: why not check first? If it's going to cost you £25,000 to get broadband, why not consider knocking that off the price of the house you're buying? Really, until we get some commercial reality into this, we can't be expected to just get state aid all the time. I completely accept that if you've been in your house for a long time and through no fault of your own, technology has changed and so on, but if you're buying a new house or you're buying new premises, for goodness' sake, why not check before you buy?

It may be that just people assume that we're part of the twenty-first century, so I'm not sure that I'm with the leader of the house there. Progress that has been made absolutely should be welcomed, and I do sense in the leader of the house's statement an acceptance, though, that there is a great feeling of anger and injustice among many individuals and many communities that I and other honourable Members represent. That's a tragedy in a way because this technology, which was meant to lead to the death of distance—actually, to lessen the disadvantage that rural communities face—has actually exacerbated it. It was not meant to be that way. That's what this statement has to be about addressing now. So, can I ask—I welcome, obviously, the rural delivery plan that she's suggested—has she considered, given the broken promises that unfortunately were a constant feature of Superfast Cymru, the introduction of penalty clauses in that contract should those kinds of promises be broken in future?

She mentioned Ceredigion and Powys, where certainly there is a lot more work to be done, but can I also ask her as well to put on the record that other areas of Wales—Carmarthenshire, my own constituency, has one of the lowest superfast connections of all of Wales—will also be covered?

She mentioned the—she said as well that we cannot promise that all premises in Wales will even be connected as a result of these interventions, so can she give us a figure—a percentage? Are we talking about 0.1 per cent or less than 0.1 per cent?

She mentioned the 2,500 properties that Openreach have promised to do further work on because of the appalling position where constituents—and I have and other Members have seen their coiled-up cables outside their doors sometimes and yet they can't get a connection—can she give us any information on where those 2,500 properties are going to be located, when will we know, and will she be able to influence the choice of where that further investment is made? 

And finally, she mentioned there are three packages: rural delivery, ultrafast and business premises. Can I urge her, rather than doing rural at the end of the line this first time, could we have the ultrafast investment focused in areas, in post-industrial communities, in the northern Valleys and elsewhere in rural Wales, so that those areas actually are the test beds rather than that investment of the next wave always happening in urban areas that actually already have a better connection? 

Well, the Member raises a number of really important points, but let me just set the record straight, Deputy Presiding Officer, just on that rural point. I represent the centre of Swansea. There is no Superfast Cymru there. This is a market intervention, so it is primarily a rural or very rural programme. The whole of the superfast first-phase programme was done off the back of an open-market review where we asked the commercial providers where they were going to go, and this is a state aid intervention. So, we are only able to go where the market told us they would not go. So, there is no Superfast Cymru at all in the centre of Cardiff, for example, or in the centre of Swansea or indeed in Wrexham or in large populous areas, because, as you can imagine, that's where the good commercial outlay is. That's where they get the best return for their commercially invested money and so on. So, this has always been a rural or semi-rural programme. So, we will continue to do that.

I wasn't trying to say that we'll have rural delivery or ultrafast. I was trying to say that we are concentrating on rural delivery business prioritisation and ultrafast. The Member made a very good point and I absolutely concur with him about it. There's absolutely no reason why rural communities should have to climb some sort of invisible ladder. There's no reason why they shouldn't leap from nothing to 100, and that will be what we will be looking to do. But I want to be completely honest with Members today and say that it will be very expensive indeed to get to some of the isolated premises in Wales, and it will not be possible with the £80 million that we have on the table. So, for us, it's always going to be a trade-off between getting to as many people as possible and making sure we have bespoke solutions for communities of people who are in a particular area that we can get to. That is always a difficult trade-off. It was for the first programme and it is for this one. That's why I've been touring Wales talking to communities—I'm very happy to come to any that you know of—about bespoke solutions for them so that we can get that out there.

But we are hampered in a number of ways as well. There is a difficulty about the way the UK Government continues to view broadband and spectrum as a cash cow for sale to the highest bidder—that is a big problem for public services in Wales—and also that they are still reluctant to regard it as utility. So, we start all of the problems of wayleaves and so on, because this is still regarded as a luxury, which it clearly is not any more. So, for example, there is no right to cross land. So, if you were getting an electricity supply, you would have the right to cross land. You would have to pay a good sum of money for the wayleave that was necessary, but you would be able to do it. We cannot. So, we have thousands of premises in Wales stuck behind wayleaves that we need to negotiate on a commercial basis, and that is a continuing difficulty. So, there are some ideological issues. Sorry to use that word—I know it can be emotive, but it is absolutely the case. I think this should be public infrastructure like roads, it's so essential. Unfortunately, the UK Government still regard it as a luxury product that people would have as an optional extra, and that is hampering the way that we roll it out.

We've tried, in structuring this new tender, to cover off some of the issues that people have raised with me as I've toured around Wales.

Minister, you were right to say that this is a key utility and we should acknowledge that without the direct market intervention of the Welsh Government thousands of my constituents would be now without broadband. But of course there remain the frustrations of those who are left behind. I had a lively public meeting on Friday night in the community of Bynea just outside Llanelli, where there is palpable frustration at the way they've been treated. You mentioned earlier that, when people are buying their homes, they should check first that they are going to be connected. People in Bynea did check, and they were told it would be connected. They have screenshots, they have e-mails from Openreach right up until the end of December with a date saying that this was going to be connected, only to be told that that is not now going to happen, with the maddening explanation for some of them that they've been connected to the Swansea exchange, not the Llanelli exchange, which was being enabled and which just defies all common sense.

I welcome the schemes that the Minister has set out. Can I ask her specifically if she could look at the case of my constituents in Bynea and work with me to see what can be done to help them, because I really do think they've been treated very shabbily indeed?

The Member makes some very valid points, and I've rehearsed in this Chamber many times the frustration of people who are left at the end of the superfast project. The connection was always scheduled, never promised, but, nevertheless, after something's been scheduled for a very long period of time it can feel very much like a promise. I'm not trying to get out of that on a semantic point, but it is a very important point the Member makes. I'm more than happy to either come with him to the community or to explore as a paper solution what can be done for a specific community there.

There are some issues around connections to which particular exchange, and if it's a fibre-to-the-cabinet connection via the copper networks then one of the difficulties has been that BT has not reconfigured its copper network in order to have the broadband roll-out, and that's one of the things we are also—. Many people have brought this up with me over the years and that is something we are trying to address in these next three lots. But there is a big issue about the UK Government's approach and Ofcom's approach to the BT copper network and what needs to be done to reconfigure that in order to facilitate some of the broadband connections as well. But I'm more than happy to come and talk to the community in question.

I welcome the statement and I'm happy to commend the leader of the house for the energy and commitment that she has brought to this part of her duties. I think it's fair to commend Ministers when they have been successful at what they're doing, and I appreciate the practical difficulties that she's had to grapple with. At the end of the day, no reasonable person could disagree with what she said about it. It may be practically impossible to connect every single house or premises in the country, regardless of cost, although we do accept that for other utilities like electricity connections and so on, and, indeed, the universal postal service, although that doesn't require the kind of infrastructure investment that this requires.

I agree with everything that she said and indeed everything that other Members have said in the course of this debate and I shan't repeat anything that's been said before. I'd just like to ask in respect of the delivery slippage timescales of which we've heard much.

One of the things that has been referred to, I think by Lee Waters, a moment ago, is the frustration of people who have been told one thing only to discover that the truth is another. I wonder if, in the future, there could be some obligation placed upon the suppliers or the providers of these services to publicise the precise actions and plans that they're putting in place to minimise time slippage and to have some kind of system—we can't entirely eradicate delays because nobody's totally in control of events in these circumstances, but we need to have some sort of system of better communication and more honest and transparent communication that, perhaps, could be organised from the centre more easily than simply waiting for the companies to act of their own accord. The broadband outreach team, for example, which she mentioned in the statement—could that be broadened to include the monitoring of delivery slippage and timescales, noting cases of particular problems and working with providers to expedite the resolution of difficulties?

Thank you for those important points. I will just address—. I didn't address, when I answered Adam Price, the 2,500 premises that are in this shadow area—apologies. So, I'll just do that, because Neil Hamilton raised a similar issue.

There are several groups of people who we're trying to deal with. There is the group of people who were being promised Superfast Cymru and then have gone over the edge of the contract. We've done an enormous piece of work with BT Openreach over the last few months to identify where those premises are and we've negotiated with them that those people will be connected, if they're 98 per cent—I'm not going to be held to the percentage—but very close to completion, and that will be done at no extra cost to us under the grant scheme of the contract. So, we've extended the deadline of the contract, but with no cost on that, so it's part of the original scheme, but with no cost on that. That's been negotiated specifically because of the frustration of people who can see it arriving and then it stops just before.

Another piece of work is being done to identify where infrastructure has been put into the ground—I hasten to say, at no cost to the public purse, because all of the upfront investment is done by Openreach BT; we only pay once it arrives at the premises—to identify where that is. I'm afraid it's called 'stranded resources'—you get very jargonistic when you deal with these people quite a lot. And to understand exactly where that is and what investment it might take to make something of the investment that's already there and that's an ongoing negotiation. Indeed, I know all kinds of jargon I didn't know before about this stuff.

And then there are some places where no build has occurred. You’ll have heard me say in this statement that I absolutely accept the points about comms that absolutely everybody has made. That's partly occurred because of the way we did the first contract, which was an all-Wales contract. We only specified the number of premises, I didn't specify where they should be, who they should be, or anything else, and in order to get to that number of premises, it was necessary for the contractors to overbuild, because if they were going to hit a problem halfway through and they couldn’t make it, they didn't want the very considerable penalties in the contract. So, they were overbuilding. So, what we're now doing is investigating where that overbuild is to see if we can capitalise on it. So, from the point of view of the public purse, it's a good thing, although I do not take away from the frustration of the people at the other end of some of that overbuilding and some of the comms.

In this new contract, we are asking them to specify the premises, so they will be telling us exactly where they're going and how, and then we will have timescales, and they will be monitored. As I've said, there's no way that slippage of delivery timescales can be eliminated, because it's a contract, and an engineering one, but, this time, we will know why, and that will be communicated properly to the householder. It may well be that, having said that we're going specifically to get to 32 Acacia Gardens somewhere, actually, it turns out to be impossible because who knows what engineering problems there might be along the way, but that will be communicated clearly, that premise will know exactly where they are, and we can refer them to the voucher schemes and all the rest of it.

I just also wanted to say, Deputy Presiding Officer, that we're not technology dependent here; we're very open to any technology that will get us to wherever we want to go.

Thank you very much. I will just now very gently remind the next set of speakers that it should be a very short statement before you ask your question. Paul Davies.

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. It'll come as no surprise to the leader of the house that I, too, continue to receive representations from constituents regarding the lack of delivery when it comes to broadband services. I have whole villages in my constituency, like Mynachlog-ddu, for example, where some infrastructure has been upgraded, but not completed. I know that other Members have made reference to this today. I note from your statement that you intend to explore how you can support the completion of these infrastructure projects, so can you give my constituents, like the ones living in Mynachlog-ddu, reassurance that they will receive the broadband services they deserve? And what mechanisms will the Welsh Government be using to make sure that these services are actually being delivered on time or within acceptable timescales? Finally, Deputy Presiding Officer, could the leader of the house tell us what specific criteria will be used to determine the areas that will be targeted under this new successor scheme she's announced today, especially when she receives the latest data around the number of premises that have not been connected through Superfast Cymru?

Thank you for those important things. So, as I've said a number of times already, the structure of the new contracts will be very different to the structure of the old contract, so we will have defined premises. We're not, at this point, saying which premises, we're asking the market to tell us where they can get to with this money and how they can do it, and they are being asked to specify the premises that they can get to. When we get that back in, we'll be doing a contract evaluation to see what gives us the best value for money, what gets us to the most premises and so on. There will be some trade-off between very rural, isolated premises and villages, such as the one that you speak of and many other Assembly Members speak of as well. There are some villages where we have partial superfast, perhaps in the centre of a village, with scattered houses going out from a village in a classic geographical pattern that, if you did urban geography, you will have learnt about. There are some issues around how we get to some of the scattered communities, and that's when I'm talking about bespoke solutions for some of them, and that might be a range of things: it might be wireless; it might be closed LANs; it might be a number of things that we can investigate.

If the Member wants to write to me highlighting specific communities where there is a cluster problem of that sort, I'd really like to know that, so that we could be sure to take those into account. Deputy Presiding Officer, that's an offer I make to all Members in the Chamber—that we'd very much like to understand what that looks like.

We will be able to tell you whether you're in the 2,500 premises, because we've had those identified. So, again, if you want to ask me very specifically about any premises, then we'll be able to tell you back where that is. Obviously, I don't have all of that information with me today, but if you tell me a phone line or a postcode, then we can tell you that information back.

I welcome today’s statement from the Cabinet Secretary, and I look forward very much to corresponding with her regularly over the next months and years too, saying that I don’t consider her to be a stranded resource in any way whatsoever, and I’m grateful to her for responding to my correspondence.

If I could just ask the Cabinet Secretary very briefly about this £80 million that she’s mentioned that’s available: what’s the source of that funding? Are we still using European funding for that purpose, and are there assurances that that funding will be available throughout this period?

I welcome what you’ve had to say about the 2,500. I’m sure that many of the things that I’ve been corresponding with you on will come into that. When will we get some feedback, through a written statement or something similar, that that work has been completed, so it’s clear to us that we are moving on to the next phase?

Could I ask very briefly about businesses? A number of businesses, particularly in rural areas, only need 10 MB, or whatever they are. They are businesses, but they are not data transfer businesses; they just use broadband to run their businesses. When you have a data transfer businesses, well, yes, that business should invest in that itself, but I just want some clarity that the support available in this programme is sufficient for those SMEs that exist in rural Wales, because far too often they’re told by BT, 'You have to pay for yourself', whereas I feel, as I’m sure you do, that public infrastructure is for businesses going about their daily business. I’m not talking about data transfer businesses, as such, here.

On that final point on public infrastructure, you have mentioned Ofcom yourself. I’m of the view that Ofcom should actually set a certain speed as a right for all where that’s entirely practical. Clearly, they haven’t done that, for political reasons. Are you having any discussions with Ofcom on this, and does the Welsh Government have a view on changing our approach into a statutory approach providing statutory access to broadband?

Yes. Simon Thomas raises a number of very pertinent issues. I will update the Senedd as soon as I have the figures on the outturn, which, as I say, will be about 16 weeks from the end of the contract. As soon as I have them, I will of course update Members with those. That update will include numbers of premises connected in each constituency, and also the uptake figures.

I just wanted to use this opportunity to talk a little bit about the uptake figures, because Simon Thomas specifically asked what the £80 million is, and he's absolutely right: it's a mixture of European funding, a small amount of UK Government funding, and Welsh Government funding. It's also got the gain share funding in there, and I'll just remind Members that as soon as we go over 21 per cent uptake on any one resource, we start to get a gain share, and that gain share goes off into the future. So, the more people that get connected the more money we have, and I cannot emphasise enough that for those of you in low-uptake areas—and I will be contacting Assembly Members individually to talk about what can be done—we need to get that uptake taken up, because obviously, the more money we have, the more I can spend on getting to more premises. But the European funding is secure for this stage of the project; we're not worried about that. We're spending it as fast as we can go, and we have the gain share to make the money up, alongside others.

In terms of Ofcom and the UK Government, we've had many conversations with them about the right to this service. We have not been able to win the argument about this being infrastructure as yet, but I have not given up. I am currently engaged in a conversation about 5G spectrum sales and how that might be done. There are clear issues there for automation and autonomous vehicles and all sorts of stuff. I don't want my Vodafone signal to go out in mid Wales driving my autonomous car, and neither does anybody else. So, there are some real issues there to be considered, and we are still in very active engagement with the UK Government. We also have to negotiate all of this with BT UK, because this is all done under state aid exemptions from the European Union, so it's quite a complex process to negotiate, but we have done it. 

In terms of the businesses, there is a bespoke business exploitation fund. We're very happy to come out to any business—it doesn't matter how tiny—and talk to them about their needs. It is surprising how little some of them understand about what will come when superfast comes, and sometimes it is just really obvious that they need an ethernet connection, and we can help them with a voucher system to do just that, or indeed if they need superfast, we can be sure to have them registered on our radar. So, it's worth pointing them out.

I'm not going to repeat everything said, but I do welcome the progress, and I'm even old enough to remember the dial-up system in the 1990s. But we did have Openreach at committee stage last week, and I raised the issue about what constitutes a business model for them in terms of new properties. The answer I got was 30 properties. We all know that in rural areas, that in itself is now going to be the problem of the future. So, to that end, I want to ask the Cabinet Secretary what conversations you're having with planning authorities, when they're giving planning permission for new builds, and at what point—and I asked this of Openreach—they're looking ahead in terms of new developments, so that we can already track progress in this when it comes to new builds. Because it has to be treated like any other utility is treated, and I look forward to that. The reason I ask that is because, in the rural areas where we have a minimum of 30 properties being considered as investment by Openreach, there is a risk of further depopulation of those communities that are already being depopulated because of access to services.

The Member makes an extremely important point. I've had a range of conversations already, both with the Cabinet Secretary for public services and with my colleague the Minister for Housing and Regeneration about what we can do. Certainly, a large number of house builders in Wales routinely put up less than 30 properties, but there is a range of things that can already be done: it can be included in a section 106 agreement when the council adopts the roads, for example. It's much easier to put the infrastructure in in the first place than it is to retrofit it.

We've done some stuff. I did some work on this with the late Carl Sargeant, actually, about building regulations and what can be done inside a house to facilitate some of this. One of the ironies of this is that our new insulation standards and so on mean that we create, effectively, a Faraday cage quite frequently, and so signal doesn't pass through it. So, if you're using a mobile phone inside your house, you'll be very frustrated unless it's been wired in a particular way. So, there are some big things around building regulations to make sure that we actually enforce some of the standards. That work is ongoing.

Also, my colleague Lesley Griffiths has a piece of work with planning colleagues—there's a piece of research, which we're due to receive any minute now, about mobile, and some of that also includes what we're doing for broadband infrastructure in some of our more rural communities to make sure that new-build houses are connected. But I'll also make the point I made before: if it affects the house prices that small builders can get for them, then they will take notice of that because it affects their bottom line. So, if, when you buy your new-build house in wherever, you find that's going to cost you £10,000 as part of our ultrafast connectivity scheme to connect your small business that you plan to run from your garage, then you're going to be very cross. So, I enjoin people to ask that question first and then price the house accordingly.

Thank you, Minister, for your statement. I share the concerns about the ability of the planning process to actually deal with some of these issues for new housing estates, but in addition to that, of course, we need to look at our permitted development rights, so that people who might need a mobile solution to their broadband needs can also get one. I think we need to be forcing operators to share masts, and in addition to that we need to raise the potential heights of masts that can go ahead without permitted development rights here in Wales, which are obviously much lower than they are in other parts of the UK at the moment. So, I do think there are some things that can be done on that front.

One other opportunity, as well, Minister, that you haven't referred to is the ability to reap some benefits from the public sector broadband aggregation scheme. I've got schools in some of my communities with fantastic broadband speeds, and none of the properties around them can benefit from those speeds because they're not allowed to connect somehow to the cabling that's managed to get the fantastic speeds into the schools. It's absolutely ludicrous. So, we need to be able to overcome some of these challenges, so that where there are high speeds being piped into some of these communities that are getting very poor speeds from the BT Openreach network, there are opportunities to connect.

I've got the misfortune, Minister, as you will know, of having a community with the lowest access to speeds of over 10 megabits per second in my own constituency, in rural Denbighshire, in Llanbedr Dyffryn Clwyd, where just 6 per cent of the households there are able to access a decent broadband speed, whilst 90-odd per cent are able to access a better one elsewhere. I've appreciated your interest in my own constituency. One thing that concerns me, though, about your statement is it would appear to me that you've extended BT's contract for works that were already scheduled but they didn't complete. Are BT Openreach going to face a penalty for failing to complete the work that they promised to complete by 31 December? Because that's not clear from your statement.

The other thing that concerns me is that you're making this statement now, but we knew what the end date of the contract was going to be. It was going to be 31 December last year. Why on earth didn't you make a statement before 31 December to allow people to put together possible bids, to think about these things so that we don't have this long waiting period now while we're waiting for other potential suppliers to come forward with ideas? I think it is disappointing that you haven't brought something forward sooner than today.

Well, addressing that last point first, of course we've been running the consultation with the market since last summer, because the build phase started in June of last year for this, and so we've had extensive consultation with the market about the structure of this and who might be available. So, I can assure you that this is not the first time that anybody in Wales who is interested in this will have heard about it. In fact we've had extensive consultation with them.

The Member raised a series of interesting points. I'm very well aware of some of the communities in his constituency, and indeed across Wales, that have very low connection in a particular community, and, as I said, we're going to be trying to look at the lowest connections first to try and lift them. As I said to Adam Price, I'm not asking people to climb the ladder; we're trying to leapfrog them to the top. So, that's one of the aims of the new sets of contracts that we'll be looking to put out.

In terms of the public sector broadband aggregation, that's an interesting issue that I've discussed many times with my colleague the Cabinet Secretary for Education, and indeed we've had some cross-fertilisation of the Superfast Cymru scheme to connect some of our rural primary schools to speeds that are suitable for running Hwb and all the rest of it. So, that's an ongoing conversation. I'm pleased to say that that programme is going very well indeed and we're very pleased with it.

There are some very serious—which I won't go into here, to test the patience of the Deputy Presiding Officer, but I'm more than happy to have a meeting with the Member—. There are some really big legal issues around connection to PSBA if you're not inside the Government protocols, because it's a secure network to level whatever it is, and there are some issues. But we are looking at some community schemes that we might be able to run off the back of that. There are some thorny legal issues even in that, but we are looking to see if we could broadcast, for example, a Wi-Fi signal that would be accessible to certain communities and so on. So, we're on that, but there are numerous hurdles to face. But I'm happy to have that discussion with him.

In terms of the contract itself, we've extended the build phase to the 2,500 at no cost to ourselves. I can assure you that we will be holding BT and Openreach's toes to the proverbial fire in terms of how many premises they got to, and, as I said, we are going through the very vigorous verification and testing process as we speak to verify the figures. They are telling me that they made the contract. I very much hope that's true, but I will be very certain by the time I report back to the Senedd next time.

Thank you. Nick Ramsay.

I will keep this very brief, Deputy Presiding Officer—

You will indeed.

—because I can see you've got that glint in your eye. Two quick questions—[Interruption.] That was a compliment, sort of.

Rather backhanded.

Firstly, leader of the house, a success—. A positive start. A success with a constituent from near Newcastle—not the Newcastle, a Newcastle just north of Monmouth—who has faced a long delay with accessing a fibre to the premises connection, which I know is complex. It turned out that the reason for the delay in that connection was that the records that were being kept by BT broadband were wrong, and that they thought that he couldn't actually receive it. But it turns out that he could get it, so his frustration was unnecessary. Can you tell us how you're going to deal with those sort of problems in future? Because, if we are able, if constituents are able to receive broadband, it's even more frustrating if, after they get it, they discover they could have had it all along.

Secondly, and finally, your visits and your tours of the deepest, darkest rural parts of Monmouthshire aside, there is a perception that Monmouthshire, along with some other rural areas, is often at the back of BT's broadband queue, certainly when it comes to supplying superfast. I think in Monmouthshire the figure is 20 per cent below target at the end of the first programme. Can you tell us what you're going to do stop this happening with future phases? Basically, you've heard this criticism from AMs, now, over many months and years, and it's clear that we'd like to see the next phase managed by BT a little bit better than it has been in the past.

Thank you very much for those comments. Just to emphasise yet again that rural areas are not being left out; they are the ones served by this contract. So, I can assure you that I've a postbag full of people who are very cheesed off indeed with commercial roll-out in the centre of Swansea who I cannot help at all, because this is a rural programme, delivering broadband to areas that would never have got it without Government intervention. I do think it's important, as—. Obviously, I'm happy to deal with the frustrations of those people who haven't got it, but I will emphasise, Deputy Presiding Officer, that we have got it to not far short of 700,000 premises in Wales who would never have got a service under any commercial roll-out. So, this is an incredible success for Wales. That takes nothing away from the frustration of those at the end, but it nevertheless is a huge success, and we have the biggest connectivity of any devolved nation, so it's a very important thing to say.

There was no target for Monmouthshire, so they can't have been 20 per cent below it. There was no such target. The target has always been for the whole of Wales. I've never specified any target for any area of Wales in the first phase. We are going to be addressing that in the second phase. We will have specific targets for specific communities and premises in the second phase because now we know exactly where they are, and we're able to get bids back saying exactly who will get to what premises. So, that will not be the case in the future; we will have a different programme. But, in the first phase, there was no target for Monmouthshire; it was only ever for the whole of Wales.

I'm more than happy to continue my tour of Wales to listen to specific issues and to have specific solutions put to me. We will be continuing all our voucher schemes, which are able to be combined into community schemes where necessary so that we can continue to get to as many people as possible.

Finally, and briefly, Mark Isherwood.

I won't revisit the cases and concerns I raised with you in committee last week. However, how much of the £80 million that you've committed to the successor programme to Superfast Cymru do you anticipate coming from the refund from BT linked to their achieving targets under the clawback clause you have with them? And how certain are you that the money you're anticipating will come back to you?

Well, we're not—. We're not—. We're projecting the gainshare on the amount of take-up that we have, so we know exactly what that will be. And, as I keep enjoining Members, if you can get more people to connect, then I'll get more money. But I'm not spending money in anticipation of that; we're spending the money we know we have because we know what the percentage connection is. As that percentage connection rises, that money will rise, and we've committed to put that money into this programme and not elsewhere. We're not obligated to do that but we have committed to do that, and so we will be doing that.

In terms of the percentages, I don't have those in front of me, but, as we let the contracts, I will be putting a statement to the Senedd saying what we're doing on the contract letting, and that will become clear.

Thank you very much, leader of the house. Thank you.