Thank you to the committee, ably chaired by my colleague Llyr Gruffydd here, for this report. It's a report that is particularly relevant to Dwyfor Meirionnydd. I want to focus specifically on the section that mentions connecting those who have been left behind. I must express my great disappointment in the rather dismissive attitude of some providers and others in the field towards the 1 per cent, or indeed more, of people who cannot and will not be able to access the internet. There is mention made of using other technologies, such as mobile phones or satellites, but this demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of our rural communities. Look at Dwyfor Meirionnydd; there is no access to phone signal in many parts, and getting a satellite connection is either impossible due to the mountainous terrain or is more costly and less dependable.

There are businesses in Islawr-dref near Dolgellau, for example, that have tried their best to get an internet connection, but the costs they face are in the tens of thousands of pounds. One business owner and their family are now looking to move to Shrewsbury due to this failure to access the internet and their ensuing inability to run their business. There is a family in Cwm Pennant who are key workers and have to work from home, and while every home nearby has received an internet connection—every one of which is a holiday home or summer home, by the way—they haven’t been able to connect, and they have received a quote for over £74,000 to install the relevant infrastructure. As a family who've lived in that place for several generations, they now have to look to move out of the area.

The community in Brithdir has successfully come together to make up the necessary numbers to receive vouchers so that BT can install the infrastructure there, but despite repeated attempts for a year and more, they are still waiting for the work to be completed, years later. I was in Criccieth last week, and businesses there are losing money because there are significant issues with the phone mast providing a signal to the payment terminals in shops and businesses, with local workers such as builders dependent on the same phone signal to undertake their business too. The whole thing has been down since 18 October, and no response has been made and there is no sign of repairs being made. This is the reality of life in a rural community. And as you can see, these problems, be they related to the internet or phone signal, are common in the areas that we represent, and the way that the major corporations and providers disregard and ignore them is entirely appalling.

So, as my colleagues Luke Fletcher and Carolyn Thomas said, internet access is one of the basic requirements of life in the modern age. Yes, it sounds strange, but it’s true. It is vital, for example, for school work, farming, running a business in terms of sales and marketing, keeping in touch with others and so on. All of us here, I’m sure, is reliant on WhatsApp to keep in touch and share information. If we’re dependent on this work and on this technology, then the same is true of the people we represent in our rural communities. All of us here film items to be posted on the internet, for example, and people in our communities do the same. Children talk to each other; they ask whether they’ve seen the most recent Netflix programme or YouTube, have they seen PewDiePie on YouTube and so on, and the children in Cwm Pennant and so on say, ‘No, I’m afraid I haven’t seen that programme’, and they’re bullied or they’re excluded from conversations.

So, recommendation 3 in this excellent report is crucial, but I’d like to suggest that the Government should not give Openreach a monopoly going forward. That experiment has let down too many of our communities and has given too much of Wales’s public funding to one major external corporation. That experiment has failed. Instead, local co-operative providers and companies should be promoted, learning from the good practice of companies such as Guifi in Catalunya, HSLnet in the Netherlands or B4RN in Lancashire. That is the way ahead. Thank you very much.