9. Debate: Digital Connectivity

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:25 pm on 12 November 2019.

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Photo of Lee Waters Lee Waters Labour 5:25, 12 November 2019

Thank you very much to all Members who contributed, and I must sympathise with Mark Reckless—there is an awful lot of jargon and complexity in this area, which I've been working my way through over the last year myself. To answer some of his factual questions, we have invested £200 million of our funds and EU funds in Superfast Cymru, and the successor project is costing £26 million, and that does produce significant economic spin-off.

He asked what 'outside-in' meant and he asked what 'stranded assets' were. Well, 'outside-in' is the principle of making your Government intervention on the most difficult to reach and then moving inwards to urban areas, where inevitably, because of the population density, there is a commercial incentive for companies to put their own money into, whereas rural areas—because of the issues I discussed in my opening speech, both the complexity and the slower return on investment—are less attractive to commercial companies. So, the principle that we support, and the UK Government until now has supported, is that the investment to be put in should be on the outside first, and then moving in to fill in the gaps on to the inside, rather than simply gold-plating coverage that urban areas already have.

'Stranded assets' are the unintended consequences of our Superfast Cymru broadband scheme. We set testing targets for BT, which they struggled to meet for some time, and in the end, in the rush to reach the goals we set—because, as I said, Julie James did negotiate a stiff contract with them—they oversupplied. So, as a result of that, they hit their numerical target, but then they had all sorts of cables sprouting out of trees, as said in many colourful public meetings I've attended and as Members here have recounted, which are very frustrating for residents when they can see wires in hedges and poles near their houses, but they can't connect to them, because from BT's point of view, they've met their targets, they've had their funding, and there's no real commercial case for them to connect them because the grant scheme had finished.

The fund that I've announced the intention to set up today will be available to those communities to look at connecting those stranded assets as well as to rural communities who can't attract the commercial investment, to see if there are more innovative ways we can get them connected in the short to medium term, while we wait for the UK Government to come behind us to try and get full fibre connectivity. And some communities may not ever get full fibre connectivity. And I've been in public meetings where people will tell you that they don't have mains gas and mains sewerage, but they expect fibre-to-the-premises broadband, which is not realistic. The cost of doing this per household is in the tens of thousands of pounds.

Bringing me back to Russell George's opening speech, and I do struggle with this a little bit, because the Welsh Government, for good reason, has stepped in and has intervened and has achieved. And the Conservative response is rather churlish, accusing us of all sorts of failures, for stepping in on their own Government's responsibilities. This is a non-devolved area. You should be doing this. We're doing our best. I'll give way to Mark Isherwood first.