The Roll-out of Broadband in Preseli Pembrokeshire

Part of 2. Questions to the Leader of the House and Chief Whip – in the Senedd at 2:50 pm on 10 October 2018.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:50, 10 October 2018

Yes, so, as I said in response to Paul Davies, you’ll be able to see, once we have the contracts, which premises are and are not included, because we’ve deliberately tendered it in that way. I would encourage business—. I have this conversation—and I’m not sure that I’ve visited alongside you, Helen Mary, so perhaps we should facilitate that as well—and, as I explain, quite often it’s frustrating because businesses wait until the superfast programme gets to them, only to discover that actually it’s not adequate. We run a voucher scheme specifically aimed at businesses and we have a business exploitation team who are very happy to speak to any business about their actual requirements and what the best way of satisfying those is. So, if you do have people who are not in the contract, or actually even if they are, and if you think that they’re underestimating their need for broadband services, then I’m very happy to facilitate the exploitation team coming out to speak to the individual businesses by way of doing it.

Deputy Presiding Officer, if you would just indulge me for a minute, I want to give the example because it’s very common across Wales, so if people are listening, they can hear it: if you run a tourism business and you wait for Superfast Cymru, but you expect more than 40 devices to connect to your system, which is probably 10 people or 20 people at the absolute outside in today’s world, it will not be adequate. So, you need to do something more and so you should contact the business exploitation team.