4. Statement by the Leader of the House: Superfast Cymru

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:12 pm on 30 January 2018.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 4:12, 30 January 2018

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?