Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:20 pm on 30 January 2018.
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.