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

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:36 pm on 30 January 2018.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 4:36, 30 January 2018

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.