Contribution
As this is the first time that I have seen you in the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker, may I say how glad I am that you were elected? I voted for you, so there. [Laughter.] It is a secret ballot, so you can’t check.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Northfield (Laurence Turner) on his election; it is good to see him in his place. I think I am right in saying that King’s Norton is part of his patch, but he may not be aware that one of the shields on the wall of this Chamber is for a former Member for King’s Norton who was killed in the second world war: a very brave man who fought for his country and who died making it possible for everybody to evacuate. Ronnie Cartland was his name; he was a Conservative, but his first rebellion was when he was angry that the Government were not doing enough for distressed areas, including in my constituency in south Wales. I feel I have an affinity with my hon. Friend’s constituency, although I hope I have not prompted him to rebel instantly.
I am delighted to have the opportunity to have this debate. I will be very clear: the vast majority of companies operating in this sphere are doing so entirely responsibly. They are doing a great favour for the nation in rolling out broadband of the kind of speed that everybody wants. I note the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Cat Eccles) made about other countries in Europe; of course we aspire to that coverage for everybody across the UK.
The vast majority of companies are operating responsibly but, frankly, a few are behaving like cowboys. As a Government and as a Parliament, I think we sometimes need to say to cowboys that they are drinking in the last chance saloon. I have made that abundantly clear to some of the operators. I know that some operators are striving to co-operate with one another and with BT Openreach to ensure that no unnecessary street furniture suddenly appears and that there is full consultation with the local community before a road is dug up for a new duct or a new pole appears. Companies that are abiding by the code of conduct and fulfilling their obligations are almost as fed up as my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Northfield and other hon. Friends; indeed, I am sure we could fill the whole Chamber with hon. Members who are equally fed up with the few companies that are bringing the whole system into disrepute.
That matters, because in the end the most important thing is that the wider strategy is right. We want to deliver good-value, very high-speed, more than ultrafast, gigabit-capable broadband based on fibre to the whole UK as fast as possible without having to provide vast amounts of taxpayers’ money. We therefore need to do so on the basis of commercial roll-out. Of course it is right that that should not be on the basis of monopoly and that competition, where possible, should drive choice for consumers and cheaper prices. That part of the strategy is absolutely right.
The part of the strategy that the previous Government were a bit more relaxed about—in fact, Ministers used to say categorically that they were completely relaxed about it—was overbuild. That has meant several companies digging up the road one after another, as has happened in some parts of the country. It has also meant several companies deciding that they need their own set of poles, or poles appearing in an area that had never previously had poles and in which ducts had been laid out but not used.
I am not completely relaxed about overbuild. I am concerned about it, because I know that a lot of constituents up and down the land are concerned. However, I want to make sure that commercial operators that are abiding by the rules and the code of conduct have every opportunity to continue to do so, in order that their commercial investments are not disrupted unnecessarily and we can deliver the infrastructure that we need across the whole United Kingdom. In the end, I want the cheapest possible prices for people and the highest possible capacity across the network for every property in the land. I would issue one slight corrective in this debate. Sometimes people say that this is a battle between urban and rural, but in fact some of the issues in urban areas are completely different from those in rural areas, and some are identical. I am not sure whether that dichotomy is fair.
My preference is for ducts wherever possible. That is not always possible, for a whole series of different logistical reasons in different areas. It is an undeniable fact that providing connectivity via poles is likely to be something like 10 times cheaper than doing it via ducts, so I fully understand why commercial operators want to install poles. I understand that that could mean that there will be poles in areas that have never had them before, and, in some areas, that is something that we will have to live with.