Broadband Services

Part of 2. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:26 pm on 29 June 2021.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:26, 29 June 2021

In terms of responsibility, it is completely clear that this is not a devolved matter; it is the responsibility of the UK Government. In the fashion that you would expect, given their ideological predilections, they thought that they could rely on the market to provide a service of this sort. Clearly, the market has failed, and the market will always fail in those places to which Jane Dodds has referred. The market will take care of densely populated areas where there's money to be made and will never provide a service in remote and rural Wales, where the cost of delivering fast broadband to a particular property will always exceed the money that is to be recouped from the people who live there. That is why the Welsh Government stepped in. That is why we were part of Superfast Cymru in the previous Senedd term—over £200 million invested and 733,000 premises provided with fast, reliable broadband.

Access to full fibre broadband, at 21 per cent of premises in Wales, is higher than in England or in Scotland. It was, I think, disappointing that the UK Government's plans, which were to provide gigabit broadband to all premises in the UK by 2025, have since been scaled back. Instead of it being a 100 per cent commitment, as first announced, it's now been reduced to 85 per cent, and the problem is, as Jane Dodds was suggesting, I think, that those extra 15 per cent will continue to be those people in those rural and remoter parts of Wales where the costs involved are very significant. We will go on, with our successor programme to Superfast Cymru, and with the other programmes that I have outlined in my earlier answers, Llywydd, to supplement what is available from the UK Government, spending Welsh money where UK money ought to be more generously invested, in order to go on trying to find ways of providing the sort of high-speed, reliable broadband connections that we've all learnt to be so important over the last 15 months, and which are particularly significant in those rural communities.