6. Statement by the Leader of the House: Update on Digital Connectivity in Wales

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:28 pm on 15 May 2018.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 6:28, 15 May 2018

The Member makes the points that many Members make all the time about the comms issue, and I won't rehearse it, Llywydd; we've been through it many times before, but we have learnt that lesson. So, going forward, it will be a condition of the new contracts, for whoever wins them, that the communication is direct with—. We will have named premises in those contracts; we won't have the fishing pond effect that we have this time. We will know who's in the contract and who isn't, and we'll be able to put a comms policy in place, because we have learnt that lesson very much. Indeed, I have taken a lot of flak on that subject from around Wales, I think it's fair to say.

In terms of the grant claims, we would always go through a vigorous process at the end of any contract. It has severe financial penalties in it, so it's in our interest and the contractors' interest to make sure that we're both on the same page about what's being claimed, why it's being either agreed or not agreed, and what the processes for that are. And, obviously, they claim it, we say 'no', they say 'yes', we go back and forth quite a few times, and now we're going through the whole contract again at the end to make sure that we're all clear exactly on what basis we've paid for which claim, why, and why we've said 'no' or 'yes' and so on.

So, that's the process. I'm very happy that it's very vigorous. It has been informed by my tour of Wales, where some people, I think, even in the Llywydd's constituency the other day, we thought were connected were saying that they weren't. So, we've put our teams back out onto the ground to check, verify those claims once more and to just test the whole process one more time. So, I'm very pleased about that, and, as I said, there are complex issues in the grant agreement around the numbers of premises that could be claimed in each postcode, but it's now obvious that they've connected far more premises in many of those postcodes than we anticipated, or indeed, than they'll be paid for under the grant agreement, so that's a good thing, but we're still very keen that they don't get subsidy for things that weren't in the original contract.