Tim Farron

It is a pleasure to serve under your guidance this afternoon, Mr Dowd. I congratulate the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) on introducing a very important debate. I will focus my remarks on my constituency. Project Gigabit has done an awful lot of good in Cumbria, but there are issues, even in postcodes within scope. For example, across Cumbria around 900 properties in my constituency are deemed within scope, but will not be connected because of their rural isolation. Many of those will be hill farms that desperately need to be connected, not least so that they can bid for funding through the environmental land management scheme. Perhaps of greater concern are the places that are in scope, but in deferred scope. I want to name four parishes in my constituency, near Appleby: Hilton, Murton, Warcop and Ormside. Those are communities on very low speeds at the moment. Some people are forced, against their better judgment and almost against their will, to give money to Elon Musk to use Starlink instead of the very limited broadband opportunities that are available to them. While those communities are within scope but in deferred scope, they wait for the contract holder, Fibrus, to give them a date, and because they are within deferred scope, nothing is happening on the ground to connect them. Also, they do not have access to the voucher scheme, which would allow them to work with our absolutely brilliant Cumbrian Broadband for the Rural North, otherwise known as B4RN, an award-winning community interest company that has connected so many homes throughout rural Cumbria to gigabit and greater broadband speeds. So I want to press the Minister—this is my one ask of him—on whether he will ensure that those parishes I have listed, Ormside, Warcop, Hilton and Murton, are either given a date for connection under Project Gigabit, or are descoped so that vouchers can be made available and B4RN can then step in and fill the gap. We had a public meeting in the snow in Murton last December—next weekend it will be 12 months ago—where BDUK made all sorts of promises of which it has fulfilled absolutely none. Will the Minister give personal attention to either descoping those communities so they can get broadband through the B4RN and the voucher system, or give Fibrus—and more importantly BDUK—a kick up the backside to make sure they bring the communities into scope, and give a date in the next few months so that those communities, which are very remote in many other ways, are connected properly to gigabit broadband speed?