Helen Morgan

I wish to speak about rural regeneration and the need to back business and create economic growth in rural areas. Around a fifth of the British population live in rural areas, which have great untapped potential, but we do not see the infrastructure in those areas to allow them to reach that potential and provide the economic growth we need. To illustrate the point, I have picked five areas, the first of which is digital connectivity. The previous Government’s Project Gigabit seemed like a really good idea: to roll out fibre broadband across rural areas, in places where it would otherwise not have been commercial, and connect businesses and homes so that people could do the things that they need to online—whether that is work from home, start a new business or connect their existing business. In Shropshire, the contract was awarded to a company called Freedom Fibre, which was going to roll out fibre broadband to 12,000 properties but stalled at 3,500 after it could not get the funding it needed to connect the rest. The remaining properties will now be connected by Openreach, but not until 2030. That matters in rural places where, for instance, someone with a farm might allow other businesses to run from redundant buildings that are past their sell-by date and no good for keeping animals. However, those places do not have fibre broadband, which means they are not suitable places for start-up businesses to operate from. The absence of broadband is really beginning to hold us back. It is the same story with mobile coverage. Ofcom reports that 1.45% of postcodes do not have “good” voice capability. Everyone who lives in North Shropshire knows that is complete rubbish, because it is impossible to make a phone call from lots and lots of places, including while driving down the A5. Prees Green is a particular blackspot where I tend to get cut off when speaking to my husband on my way home on a Wednesday night. There are all sorts of places where it really is impossible to make a phone call, and that is holding businesses back. In fact, the River Severn Partnership found that 15.33% of postcodes are without good coverage, and the Rural Services Network says that 65% of rural residents across the country experience unreliable mobile signal. That really matters to people trying to run a business, particularly if they are on the road with that business or trying to work from home. It is holding us back. We need the Government to put in place a regulatory environment for the businesses that connect us digitally to ensure that rural places get the service they need. At the moment, they are being held back by the lack of availability. I will give the House an example. I spoke to a business owner last week—they were actually talking to me about cash and getting to the bank, which I will come to later—who cannot accept payment cards at their premises because they are without a decent signal and any network. They have to give their bank details to their customers, who then go home and make a bank transfer—hopefully. That business is taking on all that risk because it cannot operate a simple swipe-and-pay system. The lack of digital connectivity has that kind of impact on businesses in my area. It also really affects how farmers—there are over 1,000 farms in North Shropshire—do their business. Theirs are often the worst-connected properties, but farmers need to be online to deal with the regulatory environment within which they operate, and they might need to use GPS to work their farm machinery. All that is a problem if the digital connectivity is poor.