1. Will the Leader of the House make a statement on the availability of mobile phone reception in Mid and West Wales? OAQ51977

Thank you for the question. While we don't hold specific information on mobile reception in mid and west Wales, I do appreciate the difficulties that the area suffers. We have successfully lobbied Ofcom to include coverage obligations in their forthcoming spectrum auction of the 700 MHz band, which we hope will lead to better service availability. 

I thank the Cabinet Secretary—I'm not sure what she is when she does this, leader of the house or Cabinet Secretary, but she's a member of the Cabinet, anyway. Thank you for that reply. I really struggle to understand how we can actually move on many parts of rural Wales to the automated future, the robotics future that we've been talking about in Welsh public life only today if we don't have a viable and reliable mobile phone signal. You can't do your automated farm, for example, if you don't have that. You can't have automated cars if you don't have that. We can't have developments, even if we do see a new train line between Carmarthen and Aberystwyth, without a reliable mobile phone signal for the track engineering and everything else.

You say you don't actually know the availability of this, and I understand it's not devolved, but there are ways of plugging the gap. The Scottish Government has a 4G infill programme. It has looked at changing planning regulations, trying to do the best it can about mast sharing, forcing companies to work together and, indeed, some public Government investment in filling in the notspots. Is that something that the Welsh Government is considering, and could we see a 4G/5G national programme, similar to the broadband programme that you've been rolling out over the last couple of years? I'm sure your postbag deserves a few extra letters on these matters as well.    

The devolution settlement is very complicated here and the edges are difficult, and so what exactly is devolved and what isn't is a constant source of conversation between ourselves, the UK Government, Ofcom and the industry about who can do what. So it's not quite as straightforward as the Scottish situation, unfortunately, would that it were. There have been some improvements. I'm not arguing at all that it's wonderful, but there have been some improvements as a result of our conversations with Ofcom and their pressure on the industry. Currently, the proportion of premises across Wales with outdoor mobile coverage is around 90 per cent. We've seen an increase of 33 percentage points in outdoor 4G availability between 2015 and 2016, reaching 53 per cent.

The last 4G spectrum auction licence, which I've just been talking about, was awarded to Telefónica O2, and carried the coverage obligation of at least 95 per cent of the population of Wales by the end of 2017, and we fought hard to get that in there. In late 2015, Ofcom did announce their forthcoming auction of spectrum in the 2.3 GHz and 3.4 GHz bands. That's a very high capacity spectrum that will be used for increasing capacity of existing 4G coverage. We're pressing Ofcom for the forthcoming auction of the 700 MHz spectrum to include a geographic coverage obligation, or if it doesn't then a time-limited obligation to give it back to us if it hasn't been implemented. I've spoken in this Chamber before about the land banking effect of the spectrum auctions, and how difficult that is for us. 

So, we are putting a lot of pressure on them. There are some other things going on. On the roll-out of the Home Office system, we understand that planning applications are now with local authorities and are going well. That will afford an extra ability to cover it. And also, of course, the rail franchise. We will be putting obligations on the rail franchise holder to spread mobile phone coverage along that network, and we're also looking at our road network. So, we are using the devolution settlement, such as it is, to the best of our ability and putting a lot of pressure on the UK Government and Ofcom about the way that the industry rolls out. We also continue to have the mobile action plan forum, which I chair, and 'Planning Policy Wales' is out to consultation as we speak about the issue with the mast sizes and spaces. So, there is a lot of activity going on, but I share the Member's frustration at the slowness and the difficulty.

The last thing I will say is that we have targeted in our broadband Superfast 2 project those who are excluded from 4G spectrum in order to try and boost them up in a different way.

Leader of the house, I do appreciate the answer that you've just given to Simon Thomas, but, of course, the reality is that in great chunks of mid and west Wales, there are areas where people do not have access to either broadband or mobile. To be fair, I absolutely recognise your commitment to sorting this out, and I know that you've taken on literally probably almost 100 of my constituents to try to get resolutions.

However, 90 per cent of mobile reception sounds great, but, of course, it's not 90 per cent of one provider. And so, sometimes you can get a bit of this provider, but your provider doesn't work. So, for example, I've got a household where—I don't know if I should mention the providers—if they were on EE, they can get it literally just by their door, but that's it, nowhere else in their area. So, actually that's not the best provider for them to be on. I wonder if a way forward might be to put together a task and finish group to look specifically at how we can jigsaw-puzzle together in rural areas all of the communication methodologies to ensure that our citizens really are digitally enabled going forward, because it's vital for business and for homework, kids, the whole lot. We all need our digital fix. 

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.