Matt Warman MP: Why we need to do more on broadband

How might an MP get a sense of what a typical constituent is actually bothered about? It’s extreme need or extreme enthusiasm that drives someone to make an appointment at a surgery; there’s slightly less commitment to write an email or a letter, but it’s still a serious effort. And where posting a comment on Facebook stands in this ranking remains a mystery.
 
It’s more likely to be the people, I think, who grab a quick word at a church fete, a play’s interval or while you’re out shopping that represent the real feeling on the street. And in Boston and Skegness, for all the media hype about a host of national issues, there is one thing that is more likely to come up than any other: ahead even of the state of the roads, it’s broadband.
 
Lincolnshire’s county-wide roll out is ahead of schedule to hit 89 per cent by April, and in the next few months I’m looking forward to the county, like many others, giving a detailed sense of where the next tranche of properties, taking the county to 95 per cent or beyond, will actually be. For the first time there will be some clarity, I hope nationwide, on who will get what sort of service when. That clarity, from councils, from BT and backed by politicians, is the single thing that I believe will provide communities with the knowledge of whether they should wait for jam tomorrow, invest today to jump the queue, or look at why, in rare situations, superfast broadband will be very hard to come by.
 
This glass half full approach, however, is cold comfort for those who are not already covered: there are myriad complaints, growing louder with every passing day, from deprived communities that this vital piece of infrastructure is not up to scratch. Community groups call for the break-up of BT, while consumers themselves note that their ‘up to x mbps’ service is apparently only measured when they’re not using it. Satellite broadband remains expensive, even if as a last resort it is better than ever.
 
Tomorrow, I’ve secured the latest in a growing line of parliamentary debates on superfast broadband roll-out, following on from both Jesse Norman and Rory Stewart. My hope is that over the course of 90 minutes colleagues from across the house will be able to highlight good and bad practice, but above all to do two things: I want to focus on the innovative ways we can improve current schemes, and go from the current plans to reach 95 per cent to genuine 100 per cent coverage, mixing both fibre and mobile broadband.
 
And above all, I hope one message rings louder than any other: if there is one piece of national infrastructure it is worth continuing to invest in, it is the economically liberating, money-saving, government-efficiency-improving superfast broadband roll-out.

Matt Warman is the MP for Boston and Skegness