The last week has seen the publication of two reports into the state of the rollout of broadband in the United Kingdom, neither of which make happy reading for government ministers. Both Ofcom and the Institute of Directors have been critical – either explicitly or implicitly – of the government’s glacial rollout of broadband and the substandard connections that plague thousands of British households and businesses. The status quo is unsustainable and it is clear we desperately need to see a step change in both availability of broadband and quality of service.
The government cannot run away from its share of the blame for this situation. Firstly they ditched the previous Labour administration’s commitment to achieving a roll out of universal broadband by 2012. Then they handed all the contracts for the development of broadband infrastructure – worth £1.7bn – to BT without anything like the array of incentives and penalties that would be necessary to guarantee satisfactory performance.
In so doing Tory ministers failed to inject a healthy degree of competition into the UK’s digital market. All of this has meant that while thousands of British businesses are having to make do with dial up and poor quality broadband connectivity, many of the UK’s international competitors have raced ahead. According to a parliamentary report into the UK’s digital future, Britain is ranked just nineteenth in the world for broadband speed. And while Ireland generated a 10 per cent increase in average speed in the last quarter, the UK’s fell by 3.7 per cent.
A response to one of my recent parliamentary questions makes clear that the availability and take up of faster broadband speeds would add up to £17bn to the UK economy by 2024. And as the Institute of Directors make clear, faster broadband speeds make UK businesses more competitive and better able to offer more flexible working to their staff.
So we should be aiming high to deliver faster internet speeds across the board. That is why Labour has been calling for a strategic shift to fibre to the premises, something which I am pleased has been prioritised in Ofcom’s recent review. To keep pace with the rising consumer expectations our broadband infrastructure must be hardwired for the future, and there can be no doubt that this must be based on rolling out fibre to the premises.
It is also clear that households and businesses need better protection from bad quality service on broadband, and that they need more choice. Openreach must be much more responsive to consumers rather than just simply meeting minimum standards. Ofcom are right to seek to improve the level and availability of information for consumers, and to argue that Openreach needs to be far more operationally independent from BT. With the option of full-scale separation still on the table, BT know that they are not yet in the clear.
Tory ministers are becoming increasingly distracted by the full-scale open warfare they are now engaged in over the question of Britain’s membership of the European Union. As one of the most prominent government advocates of Brexit, the culture secretary must not allow himself to become even more distracted. Since the prime minister announced the date of the EU referendum, John Whittingdale has made a number of media appearances. In none of these did he make even passing comment on his day job as culture secretary, unless the bet he made with Piers Morgan is taken as referring to his ministerial responsibility for gambling.
With millions of British consumers still without the broadband access they need, the country cannot afford a distracted secretary of state. Instead, they need a culture secretary willing to stand up for them and clear up the mess created by the government on broadband.
Every day that British households and businesses remain digitally excluded is an opportunity for growth that the UK economy is missing and an opportunity government is responsible for squandering.
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Maria Eagle MP is shadow secretary of state for culture, media and sport
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