| Lawrie Quinn | Broadband |
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The Minister for E-Commerce and Competitiveness (Mr. Stephen Timms): My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I join him in paying tribute to all the community campaigns that have developed throughout the country and encouraged people to sign up for the broadband demand registration schemes that some operators have implemented. BT tells me that it has now upgraded 104 exchanges for broadband as a result of its demand registration scheme, and it plans in the next few months to announce targets that, if they are met, will take ADSL coverage to 90 per cent. of UK households. Service providers have found that the initiative of community campaigns has built demand that makes their investments in broadband worthwhile in a large number of communities around the country, and my hon. Friend is right to draw attention to the importance of the achievements of those campaigns, many of which are continuing
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Lawrie Quinn: Is it not the case that the flexibility of the project that my hon. Friend has outlined underpins the development of broadband in Britain? When his group is looking for good quality examples throughout the country, will it make particular reference to the mobile set up that has been brought forward by the Discovery project of North Yorkshire county council, which goes out to some of the most rural and isolated parts of the county, including my constituency, and affords the linkages while debunking some of the myths about the so-called digital divide?
Mr. Timms: That sounds like a welcome initiative. There is much work to be done in communicating the benefits of the technology and ensuring that business users and other users understand them.
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Lawrie Quinn: My area, which is England's largest rural county, North Yorkshire, is, as I said in my earlier intervention, making a considerable impact in delivering broadband to rural areas. The experiments in e-enablement of the electoral process allow hon. Members present today to vote via the internet or other mechanisms. That is reaching all parts of the country.
Mr. Robathan: Yes, but I am sure local govt candidates in the hon. Gentleman's Labour association would have been pleased to see him in person, rather than in e-form. [Interruption.] It is suggested that the hon. Gentleman's e-form is better than his person, but I would not dream of commenting on that. Personally, I voted by post a couple of weeks ago.
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Lawrie Quinn: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for allowing me to intervene again. Given his broad welcome for the project, can he confirm that the £30 million that the Government have allocated to regional development agencies to develop broadband access, particularly in rural areas, would be continued and developed further by his party?
Mr. Paice: That was a one-off.
Mr. Robathan: Indeed. Moreover, I wonder whether the £30 million could be better spent. I shall deal with that in detail and answer the hon. Gentleman, but I should prefer to do it in my own order than in his.
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Lawrie Quinn: Does not the commercial impediment - the fact that the market could slow down and capital investment be unavailable to the providers - require the sort of stimulus that RDAs have been able to provide through the £30 million grant? Does my hon. Friend agree that that needs to be sustained in the long term to ensure that the roll-out is more effective and consistent?
Brian White: I am going to return to the issue of the investment climate for broadband, but my hon. Friend is right about the role that the public sector has to play. The Minister has already spoken about the role of public service aggregation and other such contracts to stimulate the growth of broadband. He also spoke about his experiences in Canada and the MUSH economy, which stands for municipalities, universities, skills and hospitals. He spoke about how Canada used investment in those public services to drive the broadband agenda forward. I commend that as an example of good practice.
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Lawrie Quinn: In Finland, the whole community grasped the need to invest in the nation's infrastructure and included broadband and the internet in that infrastructure. Does my hon. Friend agree that we in this country need to take that cultural step to adjust to these new opportunities and perhaps to get over the hurdle of the state aid argument?
Brian White: I have a Finnish wife and I would entirely agree with that. Stockholm city council created a company that it wholly owned. The company raised capital on the stock exchange, cabled the whole of Stockholm, opened it up to competition with different companies and within 18 months repaid the loan capital.
It now gives the citizens of Stockholm a rebate. Such an initiative is not allowed in the United Kingdom because Treasury rules prohibit local authorities from following such a route. We need to address that sort of barrier if we are to move forward with broadband.
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Lawrie Quinn: Does my hon. Friend agree that the work being carried out by the British Computer Society, especially on a project called the European computer driving licence, and by the Communication Workers Union, the telecommunications trade union, has been instrumental outside Government Those groups played a key part in the stakeholder group in developing the training options to which my hon. Friend alludes?
Brian White: My hon. Friend underpins my point: many good things are happening, but we need to ensure that they are joined up. That is one of the points identified by the stakeholder group, and we need to work on that.
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