5. Will the Leader of the House provide an update on access to broadband in South Wales West? OAQ52915

Yes, indeed. The Superfast Cymru scheme facilitated superfast broadband access to over 77,000 premises across the region, with average speeds of around 77 Mbps, investing over £19 million. The successful bidder for lot 3 of the successor project is indeed BT Plc, and the grant agreement was signed yesterday.

Thank you very much. I think we might be in a ha'porth of tar position, in that case, because I raised some time ago with Openreach directly, actually, its refusal to provide full roll-out to particular businesses in Bridgend, persuading them, if you like, to sign up for more expensive packages than otherwise they would have. But now I'm hearing from residents in Bridgend about inconsistency of the roll-out of broadband in their area—in a single street. I'm thinking of one particular street in Litchard, where there are houses that have been advised they can apply for broadband now, which is great, whereas, doors away, the occupiers are being told that they can't do that, 'pending technology', whatever that means, or, 'situations are being explored'. Again, I'm really not sure what it means and neither are they. Obviously, this discrepancy is surprising in itself because we are actually talking about next-door neighbours here. It's hugely frustrating for residents and businesses. So, if I provide you with the details, would you approach Openreach for me to see if I can get a quicker answer, and then Bridgend residents will hopefully have a satisfactory answer to the problems that affect them?

Yes, indeed. If Suzy Davies wants to provide me with the specifics—. We need specific postal addresses or telephone numbers in order to give specific information back. I will say, though, that, quite often, when you ask your current internet service provider, ISP, 'Is this available?', they'll say 'no'. What they actually mean is that they don't provide it and not that it's not available at your address. So, we do ask people to check online the number of ISPs available in their area, and try them all, because some ISPs simply won't give superfast broadband in particular areas because their particular network is at capacity. So, shopping around is the answer sometimes. But if you provide me with the details, we'll be able to come back to you and tell you the specifics.

The UK Government has been urging Welsh businesses to apply for their gigabit broadband voucher scheme. I'm sure you know what it is, but it's a scheme where SMEs were given £3,000, but it's now been reduced to £2,500 because it's had such a big uptake, for SMEs to have fibre broadband installed in their businesses where they require that support. But, to me, it was quite shocking to find that, to date, only 58 businesses in Wales had been issued with a voucher, compared to 418 in Northern Ireland and over 300 in Scotland. So, this disparity is something that I'm concerned about, given that businesses come to me quite often saying that they can't get access to broadband. This would, it would seem to me, be an ideal place for them to try to get that funding. So, what are you doing to encourage Welsh businesses, and businesses in my area in South Wales West, to utilise the scheme before it ends? Because I understand, from reading an article online here today, that they are thinking of ending it earlier than planned because of such a large uptake across the rest of the UK. But that doesn't help Wales because we don't have enough people applying. So, what are you doing to get Welsh businesses to apply to this scheme?

The scheme is available in Wales, but it crosses across our own ultrafast voucher scheme. So, a large number of Welsh businesses have gone through the ultrafast voucher scheme, which is in the same space but a little bit different, and, actually, officials at the moment are working very hard to see if we can make the two schemes marry together. Ours is more generous, but what we're looking to do is to see if we can get the UK Government voucher scheme to cover off some part of it and then for us to top up the Welsh businesses so that, actually, they have a more generous offer. So, what's happening there is that it's crossing across an existing scheme that we had that businesses are also able to access. We are in the process of trying to make that a simplified set of schemes. It has been quite difficult to get details about longevity, and so on, out of the UK Government so that we can do that piece of work effectively.