I found this really interesting, this topic of connectivity in the modern age, and there were a few things that clearly came out and that I will focus on. One of them was the shared masts element, where you don't have to keep, time and time again, putting up different masts to get the same result if one mast is shared by companies. The Minister told us in the discussions that we had that she had had talks with people in the Home Office so that they would do some futureproofing on those masts. We heard from EE that they were developing 40 new sites, and others were developing their sites, and that they were prepared to share those masts in those sites. So, I think it is important that we do that, because we have heard, and Suzy Davies raised it now, that people are concerned about the health implications of putting up multiple masts on multiple sites. So, maybe that would go some way to help with that.

What we must do is make sure that all communities move forward together here. We can’t have people left behind in what is now a digital age. I’ve had e-mails from people who are actually going somewhere away from their home in order to access some connectivity, just so that they can do that. I’ve heard about people sitting in their cars with their children, so that they can complete their homework. That is definitely not satisfactory. And we know that people are moving more and more to doing everything on their phones, and far less on their computers, and I suppose that we are all guilty of doing that.

I know from experience, in covering my area in Mid and West Wales, that there are plenty of notspots, and I’ve got two phones, and they're on two different networks, but it still doesn’t ensure that I have complete coverage wherever it is that I go. And even if I had all the networks and all the phones to go with them, I would still experience notspots. So, we really need to do something about that.

We’ve heard from the providers, when they’ve asked the Minister for reduced business rates, and the Minister quite rightly said that that has to make commercial sense, that we can’t just reduce business rates unless there is going to be a return for that subsidy—because it will be a subsidy into a private business—to give something back to that community. And in terms of small and medium-sized enterprises—and those are the majority of businesses that are in my area—they do have to have connectivity just even to start up. But if we are asking them to grow and to develop, there is no way that that can be done in a digital age without the high-speed connectivity that they absolutely have to have for that to happen.