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

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:45 pm on 30 January 2018.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 4:45, 30 January 2018

Well, addressing that last point first, of course we've been running the consultation with the market since last summer, because the build phase started in June of last year for this, and so we've had extensive consultation with the market about the structure of this and who might be available. So, I can assure you that this is not the first time that anybody in Wales who is interested in this will have heard about it. In fact we've had extensive consultation with them.

The Member raised a series of interesting points. I'm very well aware of some of the communities in his constituency, and indeed across Wales, that have very low connection in a particular community, and, as I said, we're going to be trying to look at the lowest connections first to try and lift them. As I said to Adam Price, I'm not asking people to climb the ladder; we're trying to leapfrog them to the top. So, that's one of the aims of the new sets of contracts that we'll be looking to put out.

In terms of the public sector broadband aggregation, that's an interesting issue that I've discussed many times with my colleague the Cabinet Secretary for Education, and indeed we've had some cross-fertilisation of the Superfast Cymru scheme to connect some of our rural primary schools to speeds that are suitable for running Hwb and all the rest of it. So, that's an ongoing conversation. I'm pleased to say that that programme is going very well indeed and we're very pleased with it.

There are some very serious—which I won't go into here, to test the patience of the Deputy Presiding Officer, but I'm more than happy to have a meeting with the Member—. There are some really big legal issues around connection to PSBA if you're not inside the Government protocols, because it's a secure network to level whatever it is, and there are some issues. But we are looking at some community schemes that we might be able to run off the back of that. There are some thorny legal issues even in that, but we are looking to see if we could broadcast, for example, a Wi-Fi signal that would be accessible to certain communities and so on. So, we're on that, but there are numerous hurdles to face. But I'm happy to have that discussion with him.

In terms of the contract itself, we've extended the build phase to the 2,500 at no cost to ourselves. I can assure you that we will be holding BT and Openreach's toes to the proverbial fire in terms of how many premises they got to, and, as I said, we are going through the very vigorous verification and testing process as we speak to verify the figures. They are telling me that they made the contract. I very much hope that's true, but I will be very certain by the time I report back to the Senedd next time.