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

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:32 pm on 30 January 2018.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 4:32, 30 January 2018

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.