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4.23 pm
Mr. James Paice (South-East Cambridgeshire): The 100 minutes to which my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (Mr. Key) referred has already passed for the Minister, but I shall try to leave him a few because he clearly has many questions to answer.
I want to follow much the same vein as my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Maples), looking at the subject as a self-confessed ignoramus, but very much aware that my constituency has major problems. My constituency surrounds Cambridge and we can literally see, on the other side of the road, the Cambridge science park enabled and active, while elsewhere knowledge-based businesses are disadvantaged. I do not like to refer to them as small businesses: they are often small because they have only a handful of people, but are major businesses in turnover and their impact on the economy.
The case for broadband has been made well by so many hon. Members, including the Minister, that it does not need repeating. As has been said, it is simply a matter of competition. Whether or not one argues that broadband is necessary, the fact is that, if some have got it, everybody must have it to compete. That applies to businesses competing not only within the UK, but internationally.
I want to concentrate on connectivity, as it is called in much of the documentation that I have read, and on the use of Government money—a point that I mentioned in an intervention on the Minister. I challenge him to answer this question: does he believe that the totality of public money spent on broadband is being used to the best advantage? I refer not only to the £30 million that has been mentioned several times, but to the £1 billion-plus that is being spent in the public sector on connection, of which the Prime Minister made so much in his statement in November.
On the education sector, which has occupied much of the debate, the regional broadband consortiums with pooled local education authority funds are an important issue. In giving evidence to the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on 8 April, the Under-Secretary of State for Education and Skills, the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr. Twigg), said that it was intended that all schools would be connected terrestrially in the long term. While some of them may be using satellite services, he made it clear—admittedly, only the uncorrected evidence is available—that he expected all their provision to be terrestrial.
I confess that I am not sure whether radio counts as terrestrial—I assume that it does not—but it is clear that terrestrial provision involves copper or cable, including
fibre. Very large parts of the country do not have a cable connection, and neither will they get it in the foreseeable future, if we continue to proceed in the same way. My hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon referred to BT thresholds. Fortunately, we are all connected by copper through the universal service obligation, but the trigger levels in my constituency are set at varying levels, including 300 people, 350 people and others. BT has tried to explain why different trigger levels apply to different exchanges, but I confess that I have no idea about the justification for setting different levels. It seems to me that provision will either be viable in relation to a set number of connections or not. I do not fully understand that issue.As the Minister well knows, pioneering work is taking place in Bottisham in my constituency using the radio antenna-based system. However, even those involved in that pioneering work, which was established a year ago, have faced major problems. They received no grant from the regional development agency, as it was not yet at a stage at which it could give any money for the project. The only grant came from the Countryside Agency, which is not a body that one readily expects to invest in such work. However, another problem arose thereby—the radio-based system was such a success in the villages for which it was originally founded that the neighbouring villages all wanted to join in and link up through more radio antenna, although the Countryside Agency has now put its hands up and said, "Sorry, there is no more money; this is not really our field, although we were happy to put a little money in to try out the project and set it up." Once the system got going and those involved received the initial grant, which allowed them to reduce the connection fee from about £150 to £49, the rate of subscription from businesses and private individuals quadrupled. That is a clear link, but my constituents are paying the price of innovation. Although those involved have overtaken the field, a lot of villages are now unable to set up the system.
There is another problem that affects rural constituencies throughout the country—the existence of cabling only in some locations. Cables were often installed in village centres, but did not cover much of the outlying ground. My village is a case in point. Of course, not every village that is cabled is connected to broadband. NTL, the operator in my area, has yet to do that work in many cases. The additional problem is that, if part of the village is connected up via cable, it dramatically reduces the potential for the rest of the community to be cabled or to meet a trigger level for BT or any other system. In some cases, partial cabling is more disadvantageous than no cabling at all. The only dedicated, discrete exchange in my constituency to have met the threshold is that of the city of Ely. Hon. Members will probably be surprised that that was not done ages ago.
Mr. Paice: I have to say to my hon. Friend that it is a long while since Ely had a Liberal MP. I cannot even claim the victory of having ousted him. The Boundary Commission ousted him from Ely, but it was my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Cambridgeshire
(Mr. Moss) who finally removed him from this place. I am pleased to say that, ever since, the whole of eastern Cambridgeshire, as well as most of the rest of the county, has been represented by Conservative Members.My hon. Friend forces me to digress. The point is that in my very large constituency—it is roughly similar in size to that of my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon—only one exchange is enabled. Some parts of the constituency are enabled because they use exchanges from over the border, but large chunks are not, and many exchanges have neither thresholds nor any real likelihood of their being set.
I turn to the situation in schools in Cambridgeshire. The regional consortiums expect all but three of the schools in the county to be connected by August 2004. I am not sure which those three are, but I suspect that they are not in my constituency. The Minister said that Government expenditure in the order of £1 billion will open up opportunities for communities, but the advice that I am receiving suggests that there are serious implications. My hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury mentioned the whole issue of the network and regulations. Another issue is cost. Will the Minister clarify how he expects all the schools in rural and more remote areas to be linked up? Clearly, it will not be done by cable. The only options are radio, satellite or the leasing of copper from BT. I suspect that leasing copper will be the commonest approach, because it is already there. The problem is that it is not a capital but an ongoing cost. Without wishing to get into the problems of educational funding and school budgets—
Mr. Paice: I shall resist the blandishments of my hon. Friend.
If the connection is made by leasing copper, it becomes an annual charge on the education budget for the local education authority or, indeed, the individual school. Is long-term provision being made for that, or will the cost have to be absorbed within the schools budget, as in so many other circumstances? I hope that the Minister can shed some light on that.
It seems to me, having not only listened to hon. Members who have spoken with immense knowledge, but gained information from elsewhere, that one problem is that we are concentrating on today's technology. The hon. Member for Milton Keynes, North-East (Brian White) said that we must not concentrate on ADSL. He is right about that, but perhaps we should not concentrate on radio or satellite either. At serious risk of showing my lack of knowledge, my information suggests that fibre will have to be used to accommodate the much faster speeds of connectivity that we will face in the not-too-distant future. The Minister was a little dismissive about future developments in technology and tended to concentrate on today.
Choosing fibre means ducting. I revert to the Government's expenditure of more than £1 billion to develop their services when only £30 million is available for developing broadband in a huge swathe of the United Kingdom that represents approximately a quarter of the population. That raises the question of
value for money. I agree with the Minister that the Government should not subsidise such work, but they should consider using public money to facilitate development throughout the country. I am not convinced that that is happening.I am not a fan of development agencies, but nevertheless, the East of England Development Agency has a programme. It received the grand sum of £3.2 million for East Anglia out of the £30 million to which I referred. It contributed another £2.6 million from its resources. It received more than 100 applications from the eastern region for the original consultancy grant of up to £10,000. Yesterday was the closing date for applications for projects, and I am told that there were more than 30. The development agency anticipates that only a handful will get the go-ahead because of the availability of resources.
There is no long-term prospect of more money. Earlier, the hon. Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Lawrie Quinn) chided my hon. Friend the Member for Blaby (Mr. Robathan) about the Conservative party's budgetary proposals, yet we are considering, to all intents and purposes, a one-off sum of £30 million from the Government. That is not a lot of money compared with £1 billion for connecting public services. Rather than arguing for more money, there is a case for the Government's spending the £1 billion more productively.
I strongly endorse the competitive approach and stimulating demand to encourage innovation. I have no doubt that once we have the facility, demand will expand dramatically. It is easy to declare in the House that we should encourage businesses to sign up, register and so on, but it is difficult to effect that. Something that is not there will not necessarily grab interest. Once broadband is available and the business down the road starts using it, or children return from school and ask why they cannot do their school work at home on broadband when they can do that at school, it will drive up registration and connections locally.
I strongly welcome the Minister's personal commitment, obvious knowledge and the announcements that he made today, but much of the £1 billion has already been spent or at least allocated. Although the Minister did not use the hackneyed phrase, "joined-up government" when he spoke of the committee that he will establish and chair, it is a little late for such an approach. Much of the public money has been spent.
There is no obligation on those who are spending the public money on connecting public services to have any regard for what can be done for the rest of the community. It is fine for the Minister to say that there is no reason why the infrastructure provision for public service could not be available to others, but in many cases it is not. There is no obligation on providers to make it so. The quicker the Minister deals with that in his new committee, the quicker connection will happen.
I suspect that the pass has been sold. As the Minister said, he was appointed only a few months ago and is trying hard to catch up and regain the ground that the Government lost. For many areas, of which my constituency is typical, there is no genuine prospect of new infrastructure, be it fibre-based cabling or large-scale radio systems. The figures that I cited from the
East of England Development Agency show that the majority of projects will not receive the funding that they need to get off the ground. I suspect that the areas where village schools are connected use leased copper. My information is that most of them will use the full 2 megabytes committed by the Government. While I do not pretend to understand it fully, I am told that there is a big question mark over whether the infrastructure for backhaul is as substantial as the Minister would have us believe.I do not doubt the Minister's commitment but I fear that, for my constituents and for many others in rural areas, there is no real likelihood of getting access to broadband in the very near future, unless he picks things up and shakes them vigorously to make things happen. My hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury made a number of proposals. I would like to think that the Minister will give us a commitment that, in every village that has a school—that is by no means every village—the connection to the school will also be available for the rest of the community and that public money will be spent constructively. That will be a considerable step forward, although it will still leave many villages unconnected. On that basis, I hope that the Minister will give us some commitment.
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