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

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:27 pm on 30 January 2018.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 4:27, 30 January 2018

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.