Mobile Phone Reception

Part of 2. Questions to the Leader of the House and Chief Whip (in respect of her policy responsibilities) – in the Senedd at 2:32 pm on 18 April 2018.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:32, 18 April 2018

Yes, the mobile action plan is actually attempting to do just that, to pull the operators together and to make sure that the jigsaw fits, if you like. Not wanting to politicise this, but there are some fundamentals here. One of the big issues is roaming. The mobile phone companies don't like the idea of roaming, and Ofcom backs them up on that. And we understand entirely why, commercially, they don't want roaming in big population centres and so on. But in rural areas, it's probably the only hope because you're never going to get coverage of five different networks across the whole of the rural land mass of Wales and elsewhere in the UK. And so, we have been pushing the UK Government to look again at roaming for outside major conurbations, for example. And the frustration is that if you have a SIM from outside Britain—if you have a French SIM, it will roam quite happily. So, it will happily look because the EU insists on roaming. Likewise, if you take a British SIM to Europe, it roams around happily. So, we do push that, and I share the Member's frustration on that.

We will have geographical coverage by one provider—98 per cent geographical coverage I should hasten to add; there will still be a 2 per cent that's not covered—which will be great because I hope the residents will speak with their feet and swap to that provider. But that doesn't help the tourist industry. You can't be saying to your tourism customers, 'Welcome to Wales, please be on this provider or else you can't access anything.' That's clearly useless. So, we continue to push pretty much how useless that is and to use our public networks and public infrastructure to get it out as far as we possibly can. There are problems, as I say, with the devolution settlement on that.