Now, unfortunately, the UK Government have not taken the view of treating broadband as a key utility. I agree with what Paul Davies said: in modern times, we expect the ability to connect quickly to a fast online service to be able to reach the services that we all now take for granted. That is why there should be a genuine universal service obligation. Just as Royal Mail has to deliver a postcard down the end of a farm track in the same way as it does in a row of terraces in an urban centre, or electricity has to be provided to everywhere that wants it, the same should be the case of broadband, but it is not. The UK Government has refused to treat broadband in the same way as it treats other utilities. I think that that is a mistake, and I certainly welcome the support of the leader of the Welsh Conservatives to make the case to his own Government for a change of view. And we would certainly work together on that one.

They have announced something they call the universal service obligation, which is not quite what it seems on the surface, because it is a right to request a connection, not a right to have one. And the amount of money that is able to be claimed is far short of the amount of money that would be needed. You’re only able to request a download speed of 10 Mbps and claim up to £3,400. Anything on top of that has to be funded by themselves. Now, that is not by any common sense definition a universal service obligation. We think it should be set at 30 Mbps and there should be no threshold financially of that order.

So, I think it is legitimate to point out that it’s not devolved. We do recognise its vital impact; that is why we have been willing to spend devolved moneys on trying to intervene where the market and where the Government have failed. We have spent £200 million of Welsh Government and EU funding in the last five years on the Superfast Cymru broadband scheme, and that is money that is not available for schools and hospitals and public services, because we've had to intervene where the UK Government has not. So, I think it’s only fair to recognise the efforts the Welsh Government has made in an area where it shouldn’t be having to do any activity at all, because it is the responsibility of the UK Government.

The second point to make is that there is failure of the market here. Paul Davies mentioned the phenomenon we're seeing, where service providers are falling over themselves to get even faster speeds to people in urban settings and are not interested in providing any speeds to people in some rural settings. Now, that is a market failure. We hear often from the benches there of the importance of allowing the market to be supreme, and this is what happens when the market is supreme: there is exclusion.

Now, we did put on the table a further £80 million in what is known to Members who correspond regularly as lot 2. We said there was £80 million for the market to bid for, to reach those properties that had not been reached under the Superfast project. And of the £80 million we made available to be bid into, only £26 million has been bid for by Openreach, able to spend by 2021. So, the market itself is not interested in getting public subsidy to reach those premises they’ve yet to reach under the previous programme that we funded. So, we have a problem. It’s not that the money isn’t there or that we’re not willing to spend it, even though it’s not devolved. It is there. We’ve made that choice, but we simply don’t have the private sector partners willing to spend and reach deep into the areas that we want to reach. Paul Davies has mentioned that, even though Pembrokeshire under Superfast has the third highest level of spending in the whole of Wales, with £15 million in Pembrokeshire alone, under the next scheme, only 300 or so premises are going to be included in lot 2, and that is deeply disappointing. It’s certainly not a situation that we want to see.

But I think that we need to confront the fact that the market’s appetite, even with subsidy, for reaching premises with fibre-to-the-premises broadband is coming to an end. And many of these premises—let’s bear in mind, 20 per cent of premises in Wales don’t have a gas connection, and yet we are expecting them to have fibre-to-the-premises superfast broadband, and it’s simply not going to happen in the short term. Now, if the UK Government is willing to step in and have a genuine universal service obligation, then that could be done, but the Welsh Government alone cannot do that, and I think we need to be honest about that and confront it.

So, my third point is: what can we do? And we are working closely with the UK Government; we’ve agreed to top up their gigabit broadband voucher scheme, so there is a much more generous subsidy available now in Wales than there is in England, because the UK Government and the Welsh Government have worked together. And it's under that gigabit connectivity programme that the school that Paul Davies mentioned, Ysgol Llanychllwydog, will be connected, we expect, by the start of the academic year. But that is a project that's been done directly with the UK Government. That's not something that the Welsh Government has been involved in, but hopefully they'll be able to get a connection for when they're back after the summer break.

We are looking now at non-conventional interventions, as I say, because we do think that fibre to the premises is reaching the limits of what the market is willing to provide. There's a very interesting project in Nick Ramsay's constituency, in Monmouth, where they're using what's called tv white space to deliver speeds of up to 10 Mbps. This is using the old analogue tv signal where gaps were left between the channels to allow for interference, and in that white space they're able to transmit broadband signals up to 10 Mbps. I've been to visit the village scheme that Monmouthshire council are doing a very good job in running, and it looks very promising. The advantage of using the tv signal is that it is able to reach across hills and into valleys in a way that fibre to the premises is clearly going to find very expensive and very difficult to do. So, a project like that, I think, does have significant potential, and we'd certainly be willing—[Interruption.] I'm happy to take an intervention if I'm allowed, Llywydd.