Public Accounts Committee
Oral evidence: Supporting mobile connectivity, HC 650
Monday 22 April 2024
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 22 April 2024.
Members present: Dame Meg Hillier (Chair); Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown; Mr Mark Francois; Ben Lake; Anne Marie Morris; Matt Warman.
Gareth Davies, Comptroller and Auditor General, Louise Bladen, Director, National Audit Office, and David Fairbrother, Treasury Officer of Accounts, HM Treasury, were in attendance.
Questions 1-64
Witnesses
I: Sarah Munby, Permanent Secretary, DSIT; Emran Mian CB OBE, Director General for Digital, Technology and Telecoms, DSIT; and Dean Creamer CBE, Chief Executive, Building Digital UK.
Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General
Supporting mobile connectivity (HC 555)
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Sarah Munby, Emran Mian and Dean Creamer.
Chair: Welcome to the Public Accounts Committee on Monday 22 April 2024. Today, we are looking at mobile connectivity, which allows many people to access the internet and to communicate while on the go in locations where wired-in broadband connection does not exist. Good connectivity across the UK means that people have the freedom to choose where they live and work, but we know that it is not all perfect. That every area of the UK is covered by good mobile connections is vital, because so many people lose out if they have poor infrastructure.
Today, we examine the issue with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. We also have a map, useful for anyone watching, that shows 4G and 5G coverage across the UK by Westminster parliamentary constituency—a massive thanks to the National Audit Office and Ofcom which between them provided the data and put it in a form that is usable to see. Anyone watching can look at our X account, @CommonsPAC, to find the map and to see 4G and 5G coverage in their area. The Government have set a target of delivering 4G mobile coverage to 95% of the UK by 2025, so we are keen to hear how that is going. In the past, we have also looked a lot at broadband connectivity and at the emergency services network, which the Home Office is running, all of which have some connection with how the UK gets online.
I welcome our witnesses: Sarah Munby, the Permanent Secretary at DSIT, which she established only a few months ago, as the first Permanent Secretary of that new Department; Emran Mian, the Director General for Digital, Technology and Telecoms at the Department; and Dean Creamer, who is the Chief Executive of Building Digital UK, or BDUK—we had your predecessor in a number of times on broadband. You have been in post since September, six months or so, so not so new. Before we go into the main session, Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown has some questions about connectivity of a different sort in his area.
Q1 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: Good afternoon, Ms Munby and the other witnesses. I think you have been prewarned that I wish to raise the issue of poles relating to broadband systems in my constituency. You will be aware that your Minister, Julia Lopez, had a cross-party meeting the other day which was well attended. Putting poles all over the place is an issue that affects not just my constituents, but other constituencies up and down the country—it has happened in the north as well. The issue in my case is nothing to do with the roll-out of gigabit broadband, because in this particular village there was a perfectly adequate system installed in underground ducts. The village is in the middle of the AONB and has hardly a pole in it. The villagers were in absolute uproar about this. This issue is to do with the Electronic Communications Code (Conditions and Restrictions) Regulations 2003, which need to specify that where there is an existing system, the apparatus—in my case the underground system—must have large enough ducts and inspection hatches to allow for competition, if that is what the Government wish. My constituents did not wish it in my particular case, but the Government may well wish to make sure that all systems in future are compatible with competitors’ apparatus. After all, Openreach have to do it on their systems, I believe, so I do not see why other companies could not do that as well. The Electronic Communications Code (Conditions and Restrictions) Regulations 2003 need to be amended in my constituents’ view to cover that.
Planning legislation also needs to be amended. It was the case prior to the previous revision of these regulations that in AONBs and national parks these poles required full planning permission. It drove my constituents into orbit that the planning authority had just 28 days to comment on permitted development and, effectively, no changes could be made to the system. What also needs looking at is the planning system and whether these should require full planning, at least in national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty. If not, the system should at least be strengthened so that planning authorities can have a meaningful dialogue with these very aggressive firms, such as FullFibre, which operated in my area. I had a very angry public meeting on a Friday, and by Monday morning they were putting poles in the ground. They are extremely aggressive. Could I ask that your Department looks at this? We have had a letter from your Minister following that meeting, but I gently suggest to you that the letter is fairly generalised and does not cover the specific problems.
Sarah Munby: Thank you. I am fully sighted on that correspondence and your latest letter to the Department, which we will ensure we reply to in due course. I can make a couple of points that may be helpful today. The first is on the issue of shareability. It is useful that we have Dean with us today. It is important to emphasise that all of the publicly funded infrastructure that is put through Project Gigabit or its predecessors, which I believe funded a significant amount of the infrastructure you are talking about in your constituency, is required under the existing mechanisms to have the capability for at least three alternative operators to use the same infrastructure. If, for any reason, that is not the case in the particular scenario you are looking at, Dean would very happily send in his troops and ask for that to be expanded, because that was a requirement at the point of all contracting. It is worth exploring whether there is anything that needs to happen there. I am very happy to work with you in that.
Clearly, however, that is only about enabling shareability and not forcing people to use the infrastructure that is already there, which comes to your questions about planning. I think ultimately your correspondence and the interest of other MPs is driving a great deal of focus and interest in this topic, but ultimately this is a ministerial question rather than an officials one, because this is about making a trade-off in an AONB. On the one hand we want both initial and competitive roll-out of broadband, and on the other hand we want to preserve the area. The observation I would make that makes it perhaps not so easy is that we are talking about a significant chunk of the overall land mass, particularly in England. Once you include national parks, you are talking about a quarter of the land. For the areas where we are most concerned about broadband infrastructure, it is an even higher proportion. We should be realistic that creating more onerous planning obligations is likely to slow down the competitiveness of build. So, understood—you are right. A different decision could of course be made, and that could be implemented either through a planning route or by modifying the regulations you mention. We are looking at that seriously along with the ministerial team.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: I am going to make a couple of observations. Unless FullFibre, this very aggressive firm, were not telling the truth, they say that it is impossible to use the existing apparatus, because the ducts are too small and there are not sufficient access points for them to be able to use it and reach every house they need to, as this thing has been buried underground. Clearly, if the existing regulations cover that, they are not working in this case. I asked Ofcom to put in an emergency stop—whether they have powers to or not, they declined to do so. So could I ask if you would do that? Secondly, on planning, there was no competition issue, because there was an existing system and the new system was going to cover, more or less identically, the old system. If you do not wish to go down the full planning route, which I could understand, the permitted development route needs toughening up so that a planning authority has at least some means to influence the outcome in a particular case because there is a provision in that code, which I have quoted, which simply says that if it costs more, they will not do it. That gives them a get-out-of-jail-completely-free card. They will not do anything that they do not want to do because they will say it will cost more. The system is not working as it should at the moment. Having said that, Ms Munby, I do appreciate your looking at it and I would appreciate it if you would continue to look at it.
Sarah Munby: Understood.
Q2 Chair: Before we move into the main session, this is an alphabet soup of acronyms, so we are going to try to use the full titles of everything. Otherwise, we will lose ourselves and certainly anyone watching who has not familiar with it. I have my crib sheet here. Please try to spell out any names.
Let us first move on to the shared rural network programme and get our first update since the NAO’s fieldwork on the coverage. There is supposed to be 88% coverage of 4G, Mr Creamer, by June of this year and one of the mobile network operators has managed to deliver on that, but three have not. Where are we at with that now?
Dean Creamer: First, I want to say, having run a number of major projects in government over the last decade, usually from start to finish, that it was refreshing to have a fresh NAO Report coming mid-way through this one. We agree with the recommendations in the Report. They were very helpful and have helped us to prioritise our plan over the next six months. In terms of where we are, would it be helpful if I explained how the obligations and the targets sit together? Because they are different things. There is a Government target to get to 95% by 2025. That is supported by the licence obligations, where the MNOs each have to get to 88% by 2024 and then to 90% by 2027. They are not directly related, but the obligations support the delivery of the target. In terms of the target, the latest information we have is that we are now at 93.2%, which I think is up about 0.5 of a percentage point since the last Ofcom—
Chair: So 93% now? And that is the one that is supposed to be at 95% by December of next year?
Dean Creamer: Yes.
Chair: So it is the last 2% of that?
Dean Creamer: Yes. There are about 1.8 percentage points to go. Coming into this fresh, the key question for me is to get some confidence that the MNOs are able—
Chair: Sorry, the mobile network operators.
Dean Creamer: Correct. I want to see confidence that they can hit the required run rate to get to 95%. There was clearly a slow start at the beginning. What we have seen over the past five or six months is that they are averaging about 0.1 percentage point a month. If you look at the time between now and the end of 2025, they have demonstrated they can, in theory, hit the run rate required. The question is: can that be sustained? That will be the challenge for the next few months.
Chair: One of the operators, I think it was EE, met the target.
Dean Creamer: It has said it has met the target, but that needs to be confirmed by Ofcom.
Q3 Chair: Okay. And the other three did not, so there is discussion about whether there should be an 18-month extension. What you have just talked through is the 18-month period to December 2025. Is that a hint that that 18-month extension will be granted?
Dean Creamer: They have not yet missed it. It is assessed in the summer. Ofcom will start those assessments then; they will be concluded in the autumn.
Q4 Chair: To be clear, the target is for June, but there is a bit of a lag to the assessment, isn’t there?
Dean Creamer: Correct.
Chair: How long is the lag?
Dean Creamer: As far as I understand, it takes a couple of months. As I said, I think we will probably get an understanding of Ofcom’s views in the autumn, but that will be a matter for Ofcom.
Chair: Early September-ish time.
Sarah Munby: Everything that has been said is exactly right. Ofcom will take its view on the questions of whether the licence obligations have been met and what, if anything, it wants to do about that. That is an important but separate question, from whether the 95% target will be met. It is entirely possible for some of those 88 per cents not to be met by June 2024, but to be still in good shape to hit the 95% target in December 2025. That may well be the scenario we find ourselves in.
Chair: And that is at that run rate of one percentage point.
Dean Creamer: It is 0.1.
Chair: Sorry, 0.1 percentage points a month.
Dean Creamer: Correct. What I would say as well is that, in terms of the way the programme has been structured, there was clearly a big gap between that first licence obligation and then the target, so there is significant contingency, if you like, built into that, which is now being used. The other thing I would say is that the MNOs did not ask for two years; they asked for 18 months. That was not accepted, and we have not agreed that. We have said that Ofcom will make that assessment as expected.
Q5 Chair: Okay, so you are leaving that in Ofcom’s hands basically.
Dean Creamer: Yes, because there is a really important point here, which is part of learning the lessons from the previous infrastructure programme—the mobile infrastructure programme, which I know you will be familiar with. That was run by Government rather than by the MNOs. The purpose of learning that lesson was actually for the MNOs to be responsible for—
Chair: The mobile network operators. Sorry, I am going to insist because otherwise we will get lost.
Dean Creamer: Yes, sorry—responsible not just for delivery, but for the liability of not meeting it. Actually, if we then start taking that decision, we start to tamper with that system, which is effectively a legally binding obligation on the mobile operators.
Q6 Chair: Just to be clear, what are the sanctions if they do not?
Dean Creamer: Technically, they are very high. Ofcom has the power to fine them up to 10% of global incomes, but of course Ofcom would point out that they do need to be reasonable in coming to their judgment.
Q7 Chair: Then there is the shared rural network programme. For those following, that is the one that would reach lots of notspots in rural areas. We have a very useful map which, as I highlighted at the beginning, outlines a lot of those. A lot are in rural Scotland’s mountainous areas. We have seen some quite strong letters to the Minister from various local councils. One of the concerns they have is the cost of maintaining the masts in those areas for the general benefit. Of course, if there is an accident on a mountainside, people need to be connected. It is an expense for a very low population area. What, if anything, are BDUK or the Department doing to support those councils that will have to fuel and maintain those masts once they are established?
Dean Creamer: The councils will not be liable for the costs of those masts. The liability sits with the mobile operators. The bit that gives me confidence about this programme is that the public costs are capped. We have agreed to provide up to £500 million of investment across both the total notspot programme and then part of the total notspot programme that is the masts they are using as part of the Home Office programme, but our money is capped. The private money goes first—that is £500 million—and our money comes after, and we will not be spending more than we have promised.
Q8 Chair: Just to be clear, if you are Highland Council, I think they have had—It might be another one that has had 30 applications; I will find that in a minute. Wester Ross has had over 30 pre-planning notifications just by Virgin Media 02 to put telephone masts in place, so there are quite a lot of masts going up in some council areas. Highland Council is suffering a budget cut gap of £113 million over the next three years. It is looking at how to save, but it is suggested that it has to deal with “the provision of fuel for generators in remote locations and also the cost of locating and remedying the faults that will inevitably develop in infrastructure built in remote mountain areas, subject to extreme weather, including high winds, snow and ice.” That is just a little snippet from their letter, which gives an idea. You are saying that they will not have to pay for that; it will be fully funded.
Dean Creamer: Not for the maintenance of the infrastructure. That will be by the Home Office for the Home Office sites and accommodation of the Home Office, and the mobile network operators for other sites. It may be that they are talking about the cost of resourcing the planning for them, because there are a lot of planning applications. I think about 70% of the planning applications fall to Highland Council, so it is a big chunk of the planning.
Q9 Chair: I was going to come to that. At the moment, DSIT or BDUK are not providing any extra support to a council like Highland, which has quite a small budget to have to deal with that number of planning applications.
Dean Creamer: Yes, but we are very happy to talk to them about it, as are the MNOs.
Chair: When you say, “happy to talk to them about it”, what does that mean?
Dean Creamer: What it means is I think the MNOs had offered some additional financial support, I think.
Chair: So the mobile network operators will be helping to pay for the planning around the masts.
Dean Creamer: My understanding is that they had made an offer. I met Highland Council on Friday. The suggestion I had was that it was not just the case of money; it was actually about expertise as well, and there were different elements within the planning requirements. Some of it is about the volume of planning, but some of it is the specialist expertise that is required. What we have agreed to do is work closely with them to understand what the challenges they are facing are and how between us, because this needs to be a one team effort—
Q10 Chair: We have segued into planning, but while we are on the planning issue, you can talk about providing expertise, but if you have got an expert in this sort of planning, they have to be willing to travel up to Highland Council.
Dean Creamer: We won’t solutioneer. We have asked the council what they need from us, and we are very happy to work with them on a plan.
Chair: We do have a shortage of planners in the UK.
Dean Creamer: Yes, and that is a challenge to this programme. In fact, with some of the assumptions that were made about how quickly it could be done, it has taken a lot longer to get planning than was originally anticipated in the programme.
Q11 Chair: In terms of the business cases that DSIT has had to put together for all of this, do you think you looked enough, Ms Munby, at the cost-benefit analysis of putting masts in very rural areas? There is a high cost to the public purse. It is a cost for mobile network operators to begin with, but when that money runs out it is the taxpayer that kicks in to support it. A number of councils have written to the Minister—I won’t list them all—about support from a helicopter, which they describe, and I have sympathy with this, as a scandalous expense for masts that is not providing any connectivity benefit for local communities. Is there seriously a proposal to fund helicopters to support masts in certain areas, and did you include that in your business case?
Sarah Munby: I don’t know the specific answer on helicopters. Dean, if you do then please come in.
Chair: Or someone behind you might.
Sarah Munby: I will say a little bit about the business case overall, because it is an important bit of context for understanding the business case for individual masts. The business case for the programme overall cannot always be disaggregated into individual masts, because it was a deal between Government and the network operators. Getting the network operators to put in £500 million of funding to fund the partial notspots programme—the bits where there is already one operator but we want there to be more and better coverage—required this thing to be viewed in the round, and for there to be Government commitments made to providing funding to extend coverage in total notspot areas. That is the part of the programme that is funded by Government.
Chair: So the business case is as a whole, and you are not looking at any individual business cases.
Sarah Munby: Let me come on to that. It is worth saying that what you cannot do is say, “The partial notspots bit of the programme that is paid for by the private sector looks like jolly good value. The total notspots programme that is paid for by the Government is trickier. We don’t want that.” The two exist together—that is just context.
On the question of individual mast business cases, I am going to ask Dean to comment about how we think about that now in the context of the evolving total notspot programme. Before I do that, it is worth noting that the benefits won’t always be to those who currently live in the area. A lot of this is about people who are travelling through the area—either driving or walking—who today might not have access to, for example, emergency service calls. It is about ensuring that we are equalling access across 95% of the UK.
You are right that with any programme the very last steps are the ones that have the weakest value for money. That is where the 95% comes from. It is about saying, “Look, go much further than that and you really are going into areas where there isn’t anybody there.” But before that, you are catching areas that have low population density, where local premises may have other routes, including wi-fi, to access coverage, but where those who are visiting or travelling through the area don’t currently have access to mobile services, including emergency services. I will ask Dean to comment on how we are thinking about those mast-by-mast, individual cost-benefit assessments.
Chair: And are you using helicopters to maintain masts?
Dean Creamer: In some cases the mobile operators may need to use them. If those sites are off grid, it may be the cheapest or the most efficient way to get the fuel to those sites. I can say a bit more about that in a moment. In terms of benefits, there are £1.3 billion of benefit expected in the business case at a high level—the Report drew that out. In terms of how those numbers add up, it is driven largely by consumer and employee premises coverage numbers. That is a big part of it. Another part of it is the benefit to consumers and employees from being out and about. There are then a number of other benefits around roads, farming and healthcare.
The next stage of that is that once you know where those sites are, each of the clusters as they go through planning will have to have a business plan. That business plan or business case will need to demonstrate what the individual and specific benefits for those locations are. That is where you get a bit more specificity about whether it is around farming or public safety—how people are using those sites. There are a range of benefits that kick in at the point at which the planning applications come in. That is the point where we expect planning to be a really important part of testing the benefits of those sites.
Q12 Chair: You probably will have seen—certainly Ms Munby will have—the letters to Minister Julia Lopez, as the Minister responsible, from January and March this year. One of the other concerns that the Highland Council and some of the other councils in the area have is that it is despoiling certain areas of the country. In your business case, notwithstanding the targets you are trying to meet, will there be an opportunity to say, “Actually, this particular rural area does not need a noisy generator and a big mast because the number of people who might be walking in that area is not worth the noise and pollution of the mast”? Basically, some people go to the countryside to get away from all that, and the very small risk that someone is going to have an accident and need access to a mobile phone is not worth the business case. Is that something that you are factoring into those later individual masts?
Dean Creamer: That is absolutely the case. In fact, it is not just about the planning. When Digital Mobile Spectrum Limited, which is the company working for the mobile operators, is looking at the total notspots in those really remote areas, it is also now sitting down with those community interest groups that have expressed concerns. The John Muir Trust is one of those. We are sitting down with those interest groups and talking it through. We are showing them the 260-odd potential mast sites and asking what their concerns are across those. Over the course of the next couple of months to June, DMSL is conducting a site-by-site analysis of the value of each site, as well as what it means for coverage and value for money. One of the big challenges is whether a site is off grid or on grid. If we can get to a place where the vast majority of sites are on grid, from an environmental and a financial perspective that would be a massive win.
Q13 Chair: You won’t need generators in that case. There is a lot of talk about diesel generators in these letters, but have you looked at wind turbines? Solar panels might be a bit optimistic in some parts of Scotland, but have you looked at those options?
Dean Creamer: For each of those sites the mobile operators are looking at the range of options available. The incentive for this is that because they will be picking up the long-term operating costs of these sites, they are very much incentivised to make those as efficient as possible.
Chair: Okay. We will move on to other areas of the country that have challenges with notspots, to tease this out further.
Q14 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: Can I raise an issue, Ms Mumby, that, because technology is moving on all the time, is not raised much in the Report? I am told that low-orbit satellites, such as Elon Musk’s Starlink, could fill many of the notspot gaps in broadband roll-out and in mobile phone technology. Possibly, that would make this dash for mast roll-out not necessary. What is your view on that satellite technology, and whether we should be thinking about that with greater urgency, rather than mast roll-outs?
Sarah Munby: You are right: Starlink or OneWeb’s operations can effectively offer access for very remote areas. We are actually investigating that very actively on the ground. We have a programme, which is usually referred to as the alpha trials. It is 15 sites, 11 of which have been announced across the country—for example, there are ones in Shetland, in Blakeney Point, in Devon and in Cornwall—in areas where there is a particular problem. They are defined as areas where there is a very serious issue in giving broadband access. That is usually the problem that we are trying to fix. Those trials, which are up and running now, are going very well. That would be the summary picture. There have been reliable and high-speed connections, and the local feedback has been very positive.
We are looking at two things. First, we are looking at how that market is commercially evolving. It is fair to say that at the moment it does not present a cost-effective alternative to the sort of solutions that we are looking at through this programme. We need to keep watching the market to understand how prices change and at what point it becomes a meaningful alternative. Prices are dropping quite fast at the moment, and there is increasing competition in that market, with the potential for more constellations as well.
That is one aspect: a clear-eyed observation of what is happening in the commercial market. The second aspect is thinking through from a policy perspective, following the trials, what more you would do, if anything, to use satellite solutions to support the areas that are very hard to reach with traditional infrastructure.
Q15 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: I am sure you are aware that Virgin Mobile have signed a deal in the last few weeks with Starlink to use these technologies in very hard-to-reach areas. The satellite-enabled mobile phones are available, I think, for about £450 from the likes of B&Q and Peter Jones—John Lewis. Clearly, the commercial market is evolving very quickly in this sphere, so I am wondering what you will do to make sure that the regulatory market keeps up with that.
Sarah Munby: I do not think that, at the moment, we have seen serious regulatory consequences of that emerging market. To over-simplify, in essence, it is another route to provide coverage for people, so a lot of the existing regulatory mechanisms will apply. It is worth saying that, although you talked about the up-front cost, which is one of the barriers, the subscription costs are also significant at the moment. So it is not as simple as paying £450 and then you are off to the races. You would be paying a much higher fee in perpetuity, at the moment. That is why I would not cheerfully abandon the existing processes to move over to what is today a much higher-cost model.
Q16 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: I understand that the basic package is about £15 a month, but if you want to get a more sophisticated package, involving the traditional method of receiving 4G and Starlink combined—whichever happens to be the most convenient at the time—it runs to several hundred pounds. So it is a bit and a bit, which is what you are saying about the running costs.
Can I move on to 4G and 5G coverage? Helpfully, we have blown-up maps, and we are going to make them publicly available. That will mean that every Member of Parliament, on behalf of their constituents, will be able to point to these maps. Before I do point to the maps, I will give an example of an email, which was received recently—in the last day or so—from a constituent, Marion Hebblethwaite, who lives in Coln St Aldwyns. Conveniently, that is where one of the yellow dots is situated on the map—I have a few yellow 4G notspots; more than most in the south of England, although not Devon or East Anglia. This is a real example of where disadvantage is caused by not being able to get a mobile signal. She says, “Because there is no mobile signal, I cannot get a smart meter, so cannot charge an EV at a cheap rate. Currently paying around 27p instead of 7p—all because we don’t have a mobile phone signal.” That is one simple example, from a domestic point of view—there are many others from a business point of view—about rolling out these 4G and 5G signals.
I am worried that you seem to be concentrating, rightly, I am sure, on the big areas—the Scotlands and Waleses of this world—but the hard-to-reach notspots in my patch and other rural areas, such as Devon and East Anglia, seem to be being left behind at the moment.
Sarah Munby: Dean, I might start with you on how the programme defines notspots. I wonder whether this question actually goes to where it appears there is coverage, but it turns out there is not, so I will address that point.
Dean Creamer: The SRN programme is in two parts: it covers partial notspots and total notspots. I think the bit that you are talking about, Sir Geoffrey, is the partial notspots. As part of mobile operators’ investment—as I said, they start up front and are doing this at the moment—they are required to close partial notspots. Those will be the ones in the areas that you are referring to. I think I am right in saying that Vodafone recently announced that they had connected up to 200 masts and many more upgrades.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: Can I stop you there? This map very helpfully divides total notspots and partial notspots, and you are quite right: the area that I am referring to is a partial notspot—that is true. I am sorry for interrupting.
Dean Creamer: In that sense, the programme doesn’t just do those rural areas. The mobile operators will be doing the partial notspots. That is the work they are doing now, and that is the work that gets assessed in the summer as part of the Ofcom assessment.
Q17 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: Can we turn to the other map, on 5G, which I gather is more problematic? I am told that you need a higher-frequency signal in 5G because it tends to get interrupted by trees and buildings and so on. Unfortunately, my constituency, which is right in the middle, is almost totally white, so it gets virtually no 5G signal at the moment. I am a bit concerned that, while quite a lot of public money is going in to support the roll-out of the 4G network, the Report states that 5G seems to be more or less totally dependent on the private sector. If 4G is being done with a bit of help from the Government, what is your confidence that 5G will be rolled out with very little help from the Government?
Sarah Munby: I will start on this one, if I may. It is not a matter of us having a different policy stance on 4G and 5G. There are two factors here. One is that we are much further down the road with 4G, so we can see where the market is not going to cover and, therefore, where public support is really needed. What you really wouldn’t want to do is put a lot of public money into building infrastructure to support coverage that was just going to come from the private sector within a reasonable timeframe. That is why currently we are putting public money on to 4G.
The second factor is that currently the business case—the full picture, meaning not just the commercial case but the case including social benefits for expanding 5G coverage dramatically—is not there. It may come, and we have been doing a lot of work, which we can talk about, on making sure that we understand and can develop the business case for 5G. But until that is a proven reality, we are not at the point yet where it would be appropriate to spend public money putting lots of 5G coverage into new areas.
Q18 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: That is really helpful. I am rushing on quite quickly because there is going to be a vote. May I quickly ask you about data and take you to paragraph 2.12 on page 24? The independent assessor had difficulty getting data. When taxpayers’ money is involved in helping with funding and with getting sites, surely there ought to be a mechanism to make sure that all this data is available to the assessor on a timely basis.
Sarah Munby: Dean, do you want to talk about the progress we are making on data?
Dean Creamer: Yes. I think there were three areas where we wanted improved information. The first was on better coverage information from the mobile operators’ plans for partial notspots as well as the total notspots. We have much better information on that now. We have information on their forecast for coverage going forward, which is very helpful for us, and we expect an update on that in May. That will allow us to track their forecasts against what Ofcom says are their actuals on a month-by-month basis. That is much better.
The second area was on costs. One of the things that we need to have is a really good understanding of—we get every receipt, I should say, so it is not a case of information not being shared, but it needs to be shared in the right way so that we can manage the profiles for the programme. That funding agreement for those costs was signed earlier this year. It had not been done by the time of the Report, but it has now been completed, so that is done.
On the third area where we wanted more information, as BDUK moves into delivery and gets some of the challenges that we are seeing, part of our role is to convene partners to solve problems and fix things, so we need really good information on a site-by-site basis on some of those challenges. We are now getting those and that is part of the work we are doing with the Highland Council and with the mobile operators. Those have improved and put us on a much better path going forwards.
Q19 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: Can I take you to paragraph 4.13 on page 44 and ask you about roll-out along our major roads as one programme, and along our railways as another programme? What progress are you making there?
Dean Creamer: Sure. They are two separate things. Railways are not part of this programme—
Sarah Munby: I will come to railways in a second if you take roads.
Dean Creamer: On roads, I think this is an area where we need some more information. We are working with both Ofcom and the operators on that. It is quite a complicated analysis. However, I would say that if you look at the Ofcom “Connected Nations” report, since the start of this programme coverage on roads has improved by about 11 percentage points, so there has been a significant uplift in coverage on roads. We are not clear at the moment on the extent to which SRN has been responsible for that, and that is what the further work is needed on. There has been improvement on roads, but we need to do some more work to understand exactly what that correlation is.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: Can I flag up that at Fossebridge on the A429, which is a major arterial road in this country, you know for sure that every time you go into the bottom, you will lose mobile signal? It is infuriating when you are in a complex conversation and you know that you have to say everybody, “I will lose signal in three minutes’ time. I will phone you back.” Surely it would be possible to do something about that where these known notspots are.
Chair: You would have a much easier ride, Mr Creamer, if you just sorted out the Cotswolds.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: Ms Munby, railways please.
Sarah Munby: We would never allow ourselves to be influenced by those sorts of considerations, I hope you know. I will give you 30 seconds on coverage on railways. It is really not an easy problem. You have tunnels and deep cuttings where it is hard for signals to reach. You are talking about coverage inside essentially a Faraday cage that is hard for signal to penetrate. It is hard for signal to get through the safety glass used on modern trains. Fixing the coverage issue on trains requires really costly and complex installation of infrastructure effectively along the side of the track. It is much, much more difficult than fixing a road, just to give you a picture.
It is also an area particularly affected by what I think was underlying your previous question: a lack of really granular data. This is not about data at the level of map; it is about data at the level of metre. It is about, “This cutting has a problem” versus not. We have asked Ofcom specifically to improve visibility and reporting of coverage data around railways so that we can understand the nature of the problem in a more granular and specific way, but that is not to suggest that we do not fully understand that there is a challenge.
Quite a lot of work has been done via DFT and the rail operators. In particular, Network Rail has a programme called Project Reach. It is ultimately a DFT lead, but my understanding is that that is now at the preferred bidder stage, which is about specifically going in and using as commercial as possible mechanisms to address some of the major gaps across the system. However, it is doubtless that as we see where the gaps and the best cases for intervention are, collectively with DFT we will want to do more in this space.
Q20 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: On that programme that is being bid for at the moment, when we had a hearing on HS2, I asked whether it would be possible to run a cable along the catenary above the trains. Is that what that programme will do? For every electrified railway in this country, it should be relatively easy to fix.
Sarah Munby: I don’t think it is quite as simple as that, but I suspect that we would need somebody technical to explain the distinction.
Chair: While we are on the subject of railways, can we move to Anne Marie Morris MP?
Q21 Anne Marie Morris: The issue of the railways is very much a shared responsibility between you and DFT. Can you clarify who makes the business case to determine which bit gets done and which bit does not?
Project Reach is certainly a good concept, but it has taken too long. A lot of money has been spent in the south-west to try to deal with the long line from the west country up into Paddington, and it was not taken forward in the end because technology choices have changed—it will now be elsewhere—leaving a great stretch with absolutely nothing, very long journeys and, frankly, the only route from the south-west to London. You would expect the business case to prioritise railway lines like that. Is that something that you and DFT look at when you decide how it gets done?
Sarah Munby: You mean the question of where the money is better put into. It is fair to say that the business case for investment needs to wash its face against both investment in other aspects of the railways, of which there are many that our DFT colleagues could speak to, and the business case for investment in other aspects of broadband. Up until this point, there hasn’t been a business case for big public investment of the scale that we are talking about here that has sufficiently washed its face for Ministers to decide to do that. That could be on either the DFT or the DSIT side.
Emran Mian: To clarify, the business case is owned by Network Rail and therefore by the Department for Transport. The challenge about the business case from a purely mobile network operator perspective is that it is very high cost, for the reasons that the permanent secretary went through, and, for any individual mobile network operator, the gains are relatively marginal in terms of what they would be able to recover from customers or users. So the case that has to be made is on a whole-track or whole-train basis, and that is why it’s Network Rail that is taking it forward. So I expect it would be the Department for Transport permanent secretary who would be accounting officer, ultimately, for the business case and for the spend.
Sarah Munby: Yes. Apologies. That is exactly right. I meant the broader question of other business cases that could exist. This one is very clearly within the DFT’s accountability.
Q22 Anne Marie Morris: On technology, are there particular problems that the DFT need to be aware of when they are making their business case, with regard to effectively your issues about getting that connectivity running along a railway line where people are moving, the train is moving, and you are moving from signal to signal?
Sarah Munby: Could you just repeat that? I didn’t get what the question was.
Anne Marie Morris: You have a money issue. Is this value for money? You also have a technology issue. One thing that has been pointed out—I think it was by the NAO—is that actually trying to measure whether the end result worked is quite difficult; you would almost have to put a monitor in each of the different carriages. When you are trying to provide your service to something static, that is a lot easier than dealing with something that is moving. So my question is this. What are the technical challenges that on your side of the fence—as opposed to the DFT—you are having to overcome, and what are you doing about looking at not only what is the right technology, but how you would then deal with this travel piece, to make sure that connectivity follows the train and the passenger as they make their journey?
Sarah Munby: Clearly understood—thank you. On the measurement piece, you are right: that is non-trivial. That is why we have asked Ofcom to do specific work on the question of not just how you improve measurement overall but how you improve measurement of what is happening on the railways. We would have to ask them to comment on the technicalities of that. On the question of the technical solutions through the track—that is exactly the problem I was talking about—ultimately the best people, the ideal people, to solve that problem are, of course, those working in the industry, and your best chance of success is to have the kinds of incentives that we are talking about here, where you get the operators to act. I think that is the basis on which Project Reach is designed.
Q23 Ben Lake: Ms Munby, can I ask you a little bit about the way in which you collect and measure the data on coverage for premises? I know that the outdoor section of coverage is well recorded. Do you still collect data on the level of coverage for indoor—for premises?
Sarah Munby: Yes.
Q24 Ben Lake: You do. I ask because my constituency at the moment has a percentage for outdoor of 98.1% for one MNO and then 81% for all four MNOs—
Chair: Mobile network operators.
Ben Lake: Yes, sorry. Of great concern to many of my constituents is the fact that they cannot always get the signal indoors. Many of them will use 4G as an alternative way of getting access to wi-fi and broadband for their households. So the Department, as far as you are concerned, collects that data. Is it as up to date as the outdoor metric?
Sarah Munby: Let me unpack my answer a bit, because I think I have oversimplified; thank you for explaining. The coverage data that we collect or, indeed, that Ofcom collect—it is ultimately an Ofcom responsibility that we are talking about here—is based on the reported coverage that the network operators provide. That gives rise to the sorts of maps we are looking at here, but several lines of questioning, including this one, have gone to the fact that you can be in a place that is marked as having coverage but your actual experience, particularly if you are inside an individual building, may be poorer. As part of the wireless infrastructure strategy, we specifically asked Ofcom to do more work on the best way of understanding the very micro, because we are not talking here about areas where you would put up a big new mast to deal with a gap; we are talking about a gap that might be just a few buildings, for example, or half a street. The issues can be things like the tree coverage or the particular construction material in the buildings. So no, we don’t have a— We would have to test every house in order to have a specific answer to that question.
What you will see in the last “Connected Nations” report in 2023 is that Ofcom has made some quite big steps in terms of using what it describes as crowdsourced data—that is essentially looking at lots of pings; it is not crowdsourced in the sense of individual people reporting—to look at the speed of connection in different areas. You will see some maps in there showing what the speed problem looks like by postcode.
The thing that we would really like to see, of course, is very granular analysis of total or partial notspots. That is quite difficult because your ping-type processes will not show you where there isn’t reception, and you cannot just say, “Well, because there haven’t been any pings in that area, that means there’s no reception,” because you are talking about tiny areas. It could also just be that nobody happens to have made a call there. Ofcom is thinking through that problem, and in the next “Connected Nations” report in 2024 we would expect to see another big stride forward in terms of understanding coverage at a level of granularity that these maps cannot offer because they are based on modelled coverage rather than real-world experience.
Q25 Ben Lake: Thank you, that is very useful. On the subject of partial and total notspots, Mr Mian, can I just ask you to comment on something that was picked up in paragraph 13 of the NAO Report—namely, that the mobile network operators “may no longer be able to deliver the level of coverage required within their current grant funding because costs have risen significantly”? Who will pick up on the extra costs incurred for the extended area service element of the programme?
Emran Mian: As my colleague Dean went through earlier—I might look to Dean to cover the detail of this—the way in which we have structured the programme is that we are looking for the investment from the private sector operators up front. We are looking to push them as hard as possible on how far they can go on coverage using the infrastructure that they put in place. It is then that we step in with public investment to ensure that we make the full progress towards the 95% of coverage. There are challenges, I think, about cost overruns. Dean, I wonder whether that is one for you to take.
Dean Creamer: I am very happy to pick that up. Mr Lake, you are absolutely right: we have had significant cost challenges on the total notspots programme, both on the bit that is being run by DMSL and on the Home Office element. The good news, in that sense, is that the additional costs are borne by the operators, in that they have to deliver their licence obligation, essentially, so they are incentivised to use the public money as efficiently as possible to get as far as they can. That is a good thing, but we won’t be picking up additional costs from the public purse if the MNOs cannot get as far as they were hoping.
Sarah Munby: I think that you were asking specifically about the Home Office mast component of the programme. It is worth saying that that is slightly different, in that that is directly publicly funded. Where there are cost overruns there, we need to look carefully at whether we can deliver the same benefit with fewer masts, for example—we think that we probably can—and how we can manage the programme to deliver as much benefit as possible within its current cost envelope. Of course, Ministers could also choose to add more funding, but currently in that programme, we are seeking to optimise the individual masts that we pick on in order to provide that substantial coverage improvement within the current cost envelope.
Dean Creamer: We have six of those Home Office masts live now. Two, I think, are in your constituency, Mr Lake, so you should be familiar with them.
Ben Lake: Oh, indeed. I’m very happy with those.
Chair: We will come on to the Home Office in a moment.
Q26 Ben Lake: Just on those sites, actually, and the 262 sites now across the UK, the Report mentions how BDUK had to cease progress on a certain number of EAS sites due to the fact that costs had increased—
Chair: Extended area service sites.
Ben Lake: Forgive me, Chair. And it is also keeping other potential sites under review, as you have just confirmed. In terms of achieving the overall 2025 departmental target, how many of those 262 sites would you need to actually activate?
Dean Creamer: That is a really good question. The way that the 95% target works is that we expect the majority of that to be met by the partial notspots, so we think that the 88% obligation that the mobile operators are running will get us just above 94%, but it might be somewhere between 94.3% and 95%. So, it could get all of the way there, and it might get most of the way there. There is probably around half a percentage point of coverage that might be needed from those Home Office sites. The total notspot programme is the back-ended bit, so that will not contribute particularly to the 2025 target. As I say, we think at the moment that about 170 sites gets you about 0.8% coverage, so in theory there are enough sites in the hopper, if you like, but the thing that we will need to watch very closely is that we get those quickly enough to deliver for 2025. That is what we are doing with our colleagues in the Home Office.
Q27 Ben Lake: Can I come back to the point about coverage indoors—the premises target? Paragraph 10 of the Report confirms that at the time of publication it was not possible for the Department to inform the NAO whether or not we were on track for the premises target. Do we have a better idea now whether we are on target?
Dean Creamer: For the premises target?
Ben Lake: Indoors.
Dean Creamer: Actually, as part of this programme, it is technically outdoor coverage for those premises. That part of the programme is not assessed until the 2027 point, so it will not be assessed in the summer; it will be assessed at the end of the programme. That requires all the mobile operators to have achieved their premises targets at that point. As I was saying earlier, we would like better visibility of progress towards that. I can say that the mobile operators have said they are very confident of achieving those targets, but we would like some more granularity about their forecasts and where they are now.
Q28 Chair: What is stopping them providing that information in more real time? Is it an Ofcom regulation?
Dean Creamer: No, it is not regulation. We just need to agree with them that they are comfortable to provide it. One of the challenges in information sharing in this space is that we want them to be fiercely competitive and this is a programme where they are all having to work very closely together. One of the challenges is getting sufficient confidence to share what is effectively commercially sensitive data.
Chair: If they shared it with the Department privately, then at least you would know.
Dean Creamer: Yes.
Chair: Is that what you are looking for, then?
Dean Creamer: Yes.
Sarah Munby: It is fair to say we already have some numbers on both the roads question from earlier and the premises question. I am not going to share them today, because they are not verified and we are not confident in them, but the direction that they show very much supports what Dean is saying, which is that we don’t think meeting those targets is likely to be the biting constraint on the programme. We think those will be delivered.
Q29 Matt Warman: If we think about how important the Home Office emergency services network is to the delivery of your programme, do you think you get sufficient access to data on their roll-out, and do you think you have a sufficient understanding of what is holding them back? Do you feel like the Departments could work closer together in enhancing the Home Office’s relationship with the networks?
Dean Creamer: I have been pleasantly surprised by how good the working relationship is between the two teams. My team work on a daily basis with the Home Office team. We have shared access to an hourly updated tracker on all elements of the programme and where they cross over.
Q30 Matt Warman: That hasn’t always been the case, though, has it?
Dean Creamer: No, it hasn’t. When I joined, it was made clear to me that that relationship had significantly improved, and my experience of it is that that is the case. I point to the fact that the Home Office attend my monthly programme boards and our quarterly reviews with the mobile operators. They are very much embedded in the programme, and their reporting forms the basis of the assessments that I make at my monthly programme boards.
Chair: I should interrupt you because—it is my mistake—I forgot to ask Mr Warman to declare an interest at the top of the meeting. It might be helpful if he declared it now.
Matt Warman: Yes, sorry. I should declare that between 2019 and 2022, in various configurations, I was the Minister for some of this stuff. Sorry.
Chair: No, my apologies, Mr Warman.
Dean Creamer: So from that perspective I think it is much improved and is working well.
Q31 Matt Warman: When did the kind of relationship that you have now come into being?
Dean Creamer: My understanding is that it was forged over the passage of the last eight to 12 months.
Q32 Matt Warman: What was holding it back before then? Because it seems pretty obvious that if you are sharing the delivery of a programme you should be in the same room for most of the time.
Dean Creamer: It was before my time, but my sense is that personalities change and move on. There is very much a one-team esprit de corps between us and our colleagues in the Home Office on this. We will fight hard to keep that.
Sarah Munby: It is a matter of public record—I do not think that I am saying anything that the Home Office would not say itself—that that programme is in significantly better shape than it was, from a Home Office perspective. The relationship with us has been improving, alongside a number of other improvements in that programme.
Q33 Matt Warman: Do you think that that reliance has ultimately provided the public with the best possible network, or is there a world where your programme was never reliant on that and would actually be in a better place now?
Dean Creamer: My sense is that there is a massive opportunity in the emergency services network. These masts are being built anyway, and we have the opportunity genuinely to share infrastructure that is being built with public investment. We would have had to build those masts ourselves. From our perspective, we are doing everything that we should be doing, which goes back to Sir Geoffrey’s point about infrastructure sharing. This is a situation between us and the Home Office: we are sharing two programmes across the infrastructure, and bringing the commercial market on to that infrastructure in a way that should be really beneficial.
Q34 Matt Warman: Do feel that you are getting the data from the Home Office that allows you to maximise that? It is a sort of hypothetical, but if you had had that over the past three, four or five years, you would clearly be in a far better place now, wouldn’t you?
Dean Creamer: It is fair to say that the ESN delays created delays for the shared rural network programme. It took a long time to make the agreement between the Home Office and the mobile operators that is now in place. If it had been in place earlier, we could probably have gone a bit quicker, but we are now in a place where the relationship is in the right place to deliver the targets.
Q35 Matt Warman: In terms of assessing the value for public money, have you tried to put a number on how many sites, how many years, how many people those delays have cost?
Dean Creamer: No, we have not calculated it in that way. We are confident that the overall programme for the business case sets out a really good rate of return for investment. For the £500-million investment in this programme, we expect £1.3 billion in return.
Q36 Chair: Did you at any point consider stepping in when the emergency services network was behind the curve?
Dean Creamer: No. What I have observed since joining is that a clear set of letters were swapped between the permanent secretaries—between the Departments—that made clear how the two programmes would run. They are separate programmes, but they join up for the purposes of the SRN—the shared rural network. Decisions on the emergency services network are a matter for the Home Office, and the memorandum of understanding makes it clear that it will prioritise that programme because of the challenges it faced. From our perspective, the relationship that we have now is very positive and we are getting what we need.
Q37 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: In relation to the extended area service element of the programme, how many of the 262 sites do you need to deliver to get to your 2025 target?
Emran Mian: I think that it is the number that Dean just quoted, which is somewhere in the region of 170. Is that right?
Dean Creamer: For the extended area service, about 170 sites gets you the best part of one percentage point. For the total notspots, Digital Mobile Spectrum Ltd is looking at about 260 sites. Originally, that was over 300. One of the big wins of the programme is that, while there have been some delays, that has enabled the programme to become much more efficient in the use and selection of masts. Fewer masts are needed to get the coverage required. That is down, as I say, to about 260. My understanding is that that may come down significantly, which is good news, because that is one way in which we can absorb the additional inflationary cost that we have met. My hope is that that number comes down.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: You effectively read my mind on the next question. Thank you very much indeed.
Q38 Ben Lake: Ms Munby, turning to you on the point about the business case and the perceived benefits, Mr Creamer mentioned estimated quantifiable benefits of £1.3 billion from fully realising the scheme and the benefit-cost ratio of 1.6. One thing that is not clear—this is referenced in the Report—is that there is not a clear breakdown of how much rural areas will specifically benefit from enhanced connectivity. As somebody who represents such a rural area, with a sparsely distributed population, it is of real interest to me to understand whether the Department has done any work to fully assess the specific benefit for more rural areas.
Sarah Munby: I do not have a specific answer to that; I could look and see whether we have one. I would note that the answer is going to be, broadly speaking, that the vast, overwhelming majority of the benefit is in rural areas, because those tend to be the areas where the market has not been fully incentivised to deliver. I cannot give you an exact number, but the number would be high.
Q39 Ben Lake: To continue on that theme, a key thing for us in rural areas is to be able—in this new post-covid world of hybrid working, working from home, remote working—to fully take advantage of enhanced connectivity and the opportunities, social and, importantly, economic, that it offers our areas.
Paragraph 3.18 of the NAO Report mentions that, at the moment, the Department “requires” the mobile network operators to meet Ofcom’s 2018 minimum performance threshold for good 4G coverage. That is a 90-second phone call and a download speed of 2 Mbps. That is great for the world of 2018, but post covid, that does not necessarily give businesses or individuals the ability to work from home and partake in group video calls or quick data downloads. At the moment, without better internet speeds, some of the benefits mentioned in the business case, such as home working, small businesses and productivity gains, may not be realised. Do you think it is acceptable that some of the benefits listed in the business case may not be realised in more rural, remote areas?
Sarah Munby: The business case was built around that 2 Mbps definition, so from a calculations point of view—I will talk about that for a second, then I will talk about what is happening in the real world—we did not assume that the speed would be any higher than that. If we delivered that speed everywhere, we would be meeting what the business case predicted.
What is happening in reality is that, mainly, we are delivering significantly higher than that 2 Mbps. I think the average speed is 7 Mbps. I am searching for the number—I know I have it in my notes—but the significant majority are over 6 Mbps. We can give you the number for that. What is actually happening is that we are getting better speed than the business case relied on.
Of course, at some point in the future, you might want to say, “We no longer consider 2 to be good enough.” We have asked Ofcom to keep that definition of what is good coverage under continuous review. That will always be the case, by the way; it is not a moment-in-time thing. You would expect that to move over time, so if at some point the number moved, you would have to look at the question of where the gaps are that are left, who has only 2 Mbps, and whether there is a case for doing anything further to bring them up to whatever new definition of good coverage was in place at that point. Any such programme would be a new programme. This programme is designed to hit the current measure.
I would say that you always have a trade-off in a programme like this. On the one hand, you want to give people the best offer you can. On the other hand, you do not want to invest so far ahead of need that you are wasting public money. Building so that the minimum requirement is what Ofcom defined as good coverage, but the vast majority of people who benefit from the programme are getting something significantly above that, is where we have drawn the balance. I suspect that is about right.
Q40 Ben Lake: Briefly, to finish on this point, I take what you have just said about the balance that needs to be struck. My concern, representing an area that tends to be forever on the edge of connectivity, is that there will be certain communities that will forever lose out and be 10 or 15 years behind the rest of the country. From what you have just said, do you have an idea as a Department—it does not need to be disclosed today—of the areas geographically that, at the moment and after the completion of the scheme, will receive speeds that are below 6 Mbps or 7 Mbps?
Sarah Munby: Broadly speaking, the answer to that is yes. I mentioned the “Connected Nations” report, which already gives you a picture, postcode by postcode, of where speeds are today. Of course, we also know where new infrastructure is going to go in and where, therefore, that is likely to influence speeds. I do not think you can know it all in advance, because it depends a bit on the exact detail of the infrastructure that goes on the mast and how it plays out, but broadly, yes.
Dean Creamer: One of the things that gives me some reassurance is the fact that the infrastructure we are putting in place is upgradable, so in that sense it is future-proof. If it turns out that there is significant demand, there is the ability to upgrade that in due course.
The other thing I would observe is that if you over-provision and change scope, one of the quickest ways to lose control of time and money on a programme is to change scope midway through. From our perspective, getting what was promised delivered is the priority, but knowing that we have the ability to upgrade as and when is required is really important, and that is what we have.
Sarah Munby: The number we were just looking for is 70% of the TNS coverage will be above 6 Mbps.
Chair: Thank you for finding that figure; it saves you have to write later.
Q41 Anne Marie Morris: Ms Munby, 5% of the UK will still not have 4G after December 2025. What is going to happen to those people? What do you expect them to have? Who is going to decide who the unlucky people who will not get it are? I am particularly concerned, because for some people 3G is being turned off, and they will be left with 2G. By way of example, in my constituency, just to the west of Ipplepen and west of Dawlish, you can get 4G outside the property, but inside it is 3G. But they will not get 3G, so it will be 2G, which will mean they can only make phone calls. Of course, modern working means that people do a lot more than making phone calls with their phones, and they do not have landlines any more. Who are the 5% and, given what I have explained, what do you see as the likely impact on those households?
Sarah Munby: On the 5%, this comes back to the discussion we had earlier in which you were going down a line of asking whether the 5% should actually be even bigger? The 5% that is left at the end is what you might call extremely rural areas. This is places where broadly nobody lives, and equally where there are low levels of hikers and people travelling through. These are the most unpopulated areas of the country. They are extremely rural—much more so than even the next 5%, which is the one for which we were discussing whether there is a sufficient benefit to justify—
Chair: Are you suggesting, for argument’s sake, that the Cotswolds and Devon are not in the—
Sarah Munby: The Cotswolds are not going to be in the last 5%. This is extremely remote areas of the highlands-type areas, right? Anywhere where there are significant population centres will be exactly the areas we are seeking to cover under those masts we were discussing earlier, where we are looking at the local business case and whether there are benefits for people who live there, farmers, hikers, and so on.
On the question of whether you should extend into that very last 5%, do not get me wrong: if you are one of the small number of people who live in that last 5%, that is a hard question. But the business case by that point is becoming about building a really significant amount of infrastructure in a really remote area for a really, really small number of beneficiaries. That is why the original decision was taken to go for 95% coverage. There is always a line, and we have discussed whether it should have been less—equally, you could draw it for more—but the business case starts to fall fundamentally off a cliff.
Emran Mian: I wonder whether it might be worth clarifying—perhaps this is understood by everybody in this conversation—that the 95% is 95% of geographic coverage. The 95% geographic coverage means that 99% of premises are reached, so we are talking about a very small number of people.
Q42 Anne Marie Morris: When you say that the premises are reached, do you mean inside the premises or outside the premises? It almost seems to me that you have three things: the land mass that gets covered, the physical property that is covered, and then inside the property. I am not clear that you are actually measuring all three, because frankly it is no good, even if you get it outside your property in the garden, if you cannot get it inside, because that is where you live and work most of the time.
Sarah Munby: This comes back to your question about 3G. I want to be clear that the areas you are talking about are not areas that are left in the 5%. The challenge is areas where you do not have strong enough indoor coverage from the existing or new 4G infrastructure. From a technical point of view, that is usually not likely to be a missing mast—it is not that you need a new mast—but perhaps that the nature of the equipment on the mast, or the way it is angled, or the way it is set up, or the intensity of that equipment, is not quite right to provide full indoor coverage in the area, or at least a good level of indoor coverage in the area.
On the question about 3G, I think the specific concern was that there might be someone who has 3G coverage today and at the time of 3G switch off will not have 4G coverage. Ofcom has set—and indeed agreed—very clear expectations with the network providers that, as they go through that 3G switch-off process, their 4G coverage needs effectively to come in and provide “a reasonably similar” service. I think that the technical wording is along those lines—somebody else might be able to give it to me. They need to be able to provide that before they do the 3G switch-off. In other words, it should not be the case that there are substantial numbers of people who had good 3G coverage but do not now have 4G coverage. However, we know that the data does not always tell the whole picture, and that is why getting into where there are individual gaps—very small scale, perhaps, in physical terms, but important for those affected by them—that need to be addressed by tweaking the infrastructure provision, rather than being addressed by a big mast-build programme, is important.
Q43 Chair: When you say tweaking, do you mean angling a mast differently?
Sarah Munby: Those sorts of things, yes, or changing the power of the equipment. Ultimately, by the way, these are things that we would expect the market to do, which is why I think that having better information about these gaps will be a key enabler, because you want to be able to say to the network operators, “You are not giving the service you say you are giving. Your map shows this, but the reality shows something different. We expect you to fix that.” There is a big commercial incentive on them to fix that too, because people will stop choosing the network if they can see that it does not provide coverage.
Q44 Anne Marie Morris: Who has the overall responsibility to make sure that that checking takes place? It is one thing making promises, and another thing being able to hold somebody to account for not having fulfilled the promise, but somebody has got to know that the promise has not been met. You can’t just rely on constituents ringing their MPs and saying “Help!”
Sarah Munby: Ofcom has responsibility for providing that kind of data and assessment, and that is why we have asked it to do that work, coming up to this year’s “Connected Nations” report, on being able to provide better, granular answers on where coverage might be missing in exactly the kind of cases that you are talking about.
Q45 Anne Marie Morris: Okay, and are you sufficiently clear in your own mind that you do know how many premises will be covered by 2025? I think that, in one of your earlier answers, you talked about 2027, rather than 2025.
Dean Creamer: There is a premises target, which the mobile operators need to hit, that is assessed in 2027. What we do not know is the exact number of premises that will not be covered when we hit 95%. My understanding is that that is a few thousand—it is a small number, not a large number—and it is separate from the target that the mobile operators will be assessed on in 2027.
Q46 Anne Marie Morris: Okay. You say that we are not going to get people without, because 4G has to be in place before you chop off 3G. The Telegraph article earlier didn’t actually say that; it said you needed one to pay for the other, so it does not sound like you have that link, and therefore that safety net, that you suggested there would be.
Sarah Munby: The Telegraph article that you are referring to suggested gaps where people had had 3G and there wasn’t 4G when the 3G switch-off occurred. Obviously, we saw that at the same time as you, and we will be working closely with Ofcom to look at that. We did not immediately recognise all of that data, so we need to take a proper look at it and see whether there are specific gaps where we need to intervene—or, rather, where Ofcom needs to intervene.
Q47 Anne Marie Morris: Okay. For the final line of questioning from me, given that consumer expectations continue to change, what does the definition of good 4G and 5G coverage mean now? How are you going to make sure that that definition remains meaningful as time goes on?
Sarah Munby: That is an Ofcom job—to define what good coverage means. As I mentioned, we have asked them, in the wireless infrastructure strategy, to look at those numbers and ensure that they are fully up to date. As I said, by the way, I think that that is a never-ending task as well, because consumer expectations will continue to evolve.
Q48 Anne Marie Morris: Have you given them criteria or guidelines? Otherwise, you are simply allowing them to create their own criteria—it’s like marking your own homework.
Sarah Munby: Well, it is their job, as the regulator, to understand what an appropriate—they are the best people to assess that question.
Q49 Chair: I just want to go back to some of the points that Mr Lake was raising about premises. The National Audit Office Report, in paragraph 2.3 on page 18, says: “By December 2025, DSIT aims to broaden consumer choice…by increasing the percentage of the UK landmass with…coverage…and extending coverage to 280,000 additional premises” and to more roads. Earlier, Mr Creamer, you were talking about not having information until 2027. Maybe I have misunderstood, but there is a disjunct there. Can you explain?
Dean Creamer: What I was saying was that the Ofcom obligation is not assessed until 2027, but in our target we need to understand where we are against that, because that is our target. That is why I said we need information ahead of the 2027 assessment point.
Chair: So you will have some more information, but it will not be publishable because it will not have been verified. Is that what you are saying?
Dean Creamer: That is a conversation we need to have with the mobile operators to understand how we can get the information we need to assess against our target.
Q50 Chair: You have this target, but at the moment they do not have to provide you with information, so you could sail pass the end of 2025 and have no idea whether you are meeting the target.
Dean Creamer: We won’t do that, because we are having those conversations now.
Chair: So you are confident that they will provide you with the information you need?
Dean Creamer: I am confident that we will get the information we need, yes.
Q51 Chair: Picking up on what Ms Morris, Mr Lake and Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown have raised, you can have a number of premises; you could have a thick-walled Cotswolds cottage surrounded by a new-build estate, where they can get the coverage but the thick-walled cottage cannot. If someone was working from home there or if that were a local pub or something, that could be catastrophic. That is very granular, but is there any way that an individual can feed in that they are not getting a signal? There are websites that begin to collect this information about notspots in certain areas. How granular are you going to get? Ms Munby, you said that you could tweak the masts’ direction to do some of these things, but how will you know that the mobile network operators are going to respond to that?
Sarah Munby: There is not currently any “Tell us you don’t have coverage” service. We would encourage people to communicate directly with their provider, who is most likely to be able to fix the problem.
Chair: Some providers promise things and then when you do not get the coverage, you haven’t got a choice.
Sarah Munby: Absolutely. I just thought it was worth mentioning that that is the right first place to go. As part of the work Ofcom is doing on how you find out where these gaps are, I think we should ask Ofcom for its reflections on the idea of some kind of central repository. We do not have one at the moment.
Q52 Chair: I think Sir Geoffrey has raised some other issues, but I want to touch on the money spent on 5G initiatives. What have you got from the money that has been spent on the Department? It has been £400 million since 2017. What has that led to? What information do you have from that and where is it going to go?
Emran Mian: That is the purpose of the investment we have been making in 5G. Rather than rolling out the infrastructure itself, we think that currently it should be a commercially-led process, which is making some progress, but clearly there is a lot further to go, as the map you shared with us showed. The investment we have made, from a public value point of view, has been to really understand and then begin to scale some of the applications that are only possible with 5G and not with previous generations of mobile technology. The particular features of 5G are higher performance, higher capacity and lower latency. That is not something that all consumers need all the time at the moment, but there are use cases where it would be very useful.
Q53 Chair: A lot of money has gone in, so what are the business and economic opportunities for the UK that 5G will open up? You are going to be the Department leading that. Have you got a plan that you will be sharing on what the opportunities are?
Emran Mian: Yes. We do have more to say on this. On each programme we have published what we have funded and what we think that has achieved, but I think you are right to observe that there is probably more for us to do to bring all of that together. To give some examples of the kinds of things that become possible with 5G that are not necessarily possible with the previous generations of the technology, it is about being able to connect to lots and lots of devices and run them together in, for instance, an industrial setting. That allows you to do advanced manufacturing and precision manufacturing, and it allows you to do that better than you might be able to if those devices were simply connected using a wi-fi system. Equally, there are lots of benefits potentially for personal health devices and connecting those using 5G. I think there are some really powerful applications there.
Q54 Chair: Coming back to the industrial element, you have to work with Government Departments, local councils and devolved Administrations, and Ofcom obviously has a role. Is work going on to look at certain key areas of the country where having good 5G will boost the local economy and the industrial setting experience that you outlined?
Emran Mian: That is exactly what we have been trying to do. We have been focusing on some particular places in the country.
Chair: Can you tell us which places?
Emran Mian: We have 10 test beds that we are running at the moment—Belfast is one and Manchester is another. In each one, what we have tried to do is focus on a slightly different set of use cases, one attuned to things that there is capability to do and that we think support further industrial uses and growth possibilities in each of those places. In Belfast, for example, a lot of the 5G investment has been around the port and supporting the development of the port. In Greater Manchester, a lot of it has been around supporting advanced manufacturing.
There are other places where 5G also allows you to give people who are coming to a sporting, cultural or music event an enhanced immersive experience, so it massively increases the potential of that site and that venue compared with others elsewhere in the world. We have been trying to tune our investments to take advantage of where those areas and parts of the country already have competitive strands.
Q55 Chair: So that is the taxpayers’ investment. What are you doing to help to encourage commercial investment in 5G? Are all these pilots examples where you can say to industry, “If you put a bit in here, you could get some of these benefits”?
Emran Mian: That is exactly what we are trying to illustrate. As I was saying a few minutes ago, from the mobile network operator’s perspective in rolling out 5G at scale, I think the use cases will come, but it is not yet obvious that a consumer necessarily needs 5G to do most of the things that a consumer does. That is why we need to focus a bit more on illustrating what the industrial or business use cases may be, and that should help to drive investment.
Q56 Chair: We can see the logic of having some attempt to demonstrate 5G, if you like; what is puzzling is why so much taxpayers’ money has to go in. You say that it may not be immediately obvious to the commercial mobile network operators what the benefit will be to the consumer, but they could surely have worked out that a new venue with 5G that could provide enhanced opportunities for people going there is something that that venue may want to spend extra money on. Enhancement in industry may be something that that industry wants to spend money on. Why is it that so much taxpayers’ money has gone in, and when will you see the dividend of the commercial investment?
Emran Mian: I think this is a pattern that not just us but other countries are seeing. These use cases for 5G have been slow to emerge across a number of countries, and when we have this conversation with others that experience the same issue, they are also funding use-case work. For example, I was in India, where the roll-out of 5G has actually been very quick, but the ability of mobile network operators to monetise that to get investment from consumers and businesses has been much more limited. They are now investing a lot more in terms of public money to illustrate what those use cases are.
In terms of the effect on the UK, as the map shows, we are beginning to make some progress on the roll-out of 5G. A lot of the 5G being rolled out at the moment is using 4G infrastructure, which does not necessarily get you all the benefits of the next generation of technology. What we really want to see is the roll-out of stand-alone 5G where the whole infrastructure is set up for 5G. Again, that is now beginning to happen; we are seeing one network doing that at significant scale. Our expectation is that the others—indeed, they are talking about it—will roll that out as well.
Q57 Chair: You mentioned health benefits somewhere in the mix of your examples. Can you give a little more detail on that before I move to Sir Geoffrey?
Emran Mian: For example, in the context of a hospital it would allow you to have lots of devices and processes that could be run off a private 5G network that exists only in the hospital for users within it. That allows you to do things that you cannot do as effectively simply using a wireless network. Equally, outside of a hospital setting—
Chair: I am thinking of the practical impact on a patient or user of any health service. It could potentially speed up the experience for a patient.
Emran Mian: That is right. The transfer of data between different parts of the hospital and the tracking of what patients—
Chair: So you could go and be an out-patient in one bit then move somewhere, and your x-ray has already followed you there.
Emran Mian: Exactly.
Chair: Okay. These are potentially huge productivity opportunities.
Emran Mian: Yes.
Q58 Chair: How much more taxpayers’ money will you put into this before you expect the commercial operators to pick up on the pilots and start spending?
Emran Mian: As you observed, we have already made significant commitments to public investment here. The key thing for us now is to ensure that those are managed effectively and that we get the full benefits from them. We do not currently have any plans to make further investments in that.
Chair: You expect that you are now hitting the tipping point where the commercial operators will invest.
Emran Mian: That is right.
Chair: We touched on that because it is important, but it is slightly outside the mobile network connectivity issue and looking to the future.
Q59 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: I am happy for you to defer to either side of you on these questions on 5G, Ms Munby. First, jut to add to Ms Marie Morris’s question about the people left behind—the 5%—surely the answer to them would probably be satellite technology.
Sarah Munby: It’s funny you should say that. I have been sitting here thinking and regretting the way I spoke.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: Great minds.
Sarah Munby: What I wanted to say was that you have too few people for the right answer to be to build one big expensive thing and then share it between a small number of people. What you need is a solution that works at the level of a community, a farm, or a person. That is why the satellite alpha trials that I talked about earlier are concentrated in areas where the population is sufficiently sparse for big infrastructure builds not to be a value-for-money approach. You are therefore prepared to spend more on an individual person’s or household’s access. That is cheaper than building a big mast and sharing it between lots of people. I expect that over time what we will see is that 95% coverage from traditional infrastructure and then a fill-in of the relevant parts of the 5%, some of which truly do not have any population, but some of which do, and satellite will probably be the most cost-effective solution for those communities.
Q60 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: Particularly bearing in mind Mr Mian’s comments that it is 95% of the area of the UK, but 99% of premises, relatively few premises will need to have something. To put the rural and urban issue on 5G in context, paragraph 4.11 on page 43 of the Report states: “Vodafone research shows that 46% of parliamentary constituencies that are both rural and among the 40% most deprived areas in the country are classified as 5G…not spots, compared with 2.7% in predominantly urban constituencies with a similar degree of deprivation.” So this is a very important issue for rural areas.
Sarah Munby: Yes and, as I said before, that is not an entirely unexpected picture at this stage of the commercial roll-out.
Q61 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: I agree with that. In paragraph 4.5 on page 39, it says that “92.7% of premises had 5G coverage from at least one network operator. 55.0% of the UK landmass receives a 5G signal from at least one MNO, and most 5G coverage is in urban areas”. Importantly, that paragraph ends with the sentence: “However, DSIT considers that the current 5G service, which is almost all non-standalone, is unlikely to meet the UK’s future connectivity needs.”
Mr Mian, going back to the Chair’s question and the previous paragraph, which says, “Further funding to help, for example, local areas and MNOs coordinate the roll out of 5G infrastructure, and test new ways of using satellite”, do you have any projections or bids into the Treasury as to how much taxpayers’ money is likely to be needed to do that?
Emran Mian: As I was saying in response to the Chair’s question, I think our investment has focused on how we best illustrate and then allow to grow to scale the uses of 5G such that the commercial case for that investment then flows from that. That very much remains our focus. We have no current plans to put public investment into the roll-out of 5G itself. We are very focused on ensuring that we get 4G coverage to the right place and to deploy our public investment in the current round on that. We will see where the commercial roll-out of 5G gets us. I think it is far too early to say how far that will take us. But as that is happening and as the networks confirm their plans for 5G investment, that might be the point at which, from a public policy point of view, we have to look at that and see whether there needs to be any public investment that sits alongside that.
Q62 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: Very quickly, taking you to the following paragraph: “DSIT expects widespread adoption of 5G to improve public services and estimates cumulative productivity benefits of between £41 billion and £159 billion between 2021 and 2035.” That is a huge claim. I don’t know how you have calculated those figures.
Emran Mian: Those figures are calculated using the kinds of productivity benefits that we were beginning to touch on before. There are also productivity benefits in relation to, for example, how connecting vehicles or roadside and trackside infrastructure may allow you to run transport at much higher levels of efficiency.
Chair: It seems that we need another session on 5G, but we might need to park this for now. The Division bell will be going very soon, so I am going to ask Mr Matt Warman MP to take us to the bell.
Q63 Matt Warman: You mentioned stand-alone 5G—the full-fat version—which the Government have talked about increasingly. There is obviously the 2030 target for stand-alone 5G. Could you talk us through what the Government think that target look likes in practice, in terms of landmass coverage and so on, and how close are you to meeting it?
Emran Mian: The first thing I have to say—I hate to quibble with the words—is that we have always been careful about talking about it as an ambition rather than as a target. That is for the specific reason that we are not yet at the stage, and we may never be, where we are putting public investment in such that we would be controlling that target, nor are there licence obligations on the mobile network operators to achieve certain levels. It is an ambition, and it is based on what we think the commercial case for this roll-out may be.
I think it is very early to say where we might get to by 2030, but that remains our ambition. We are taking steps to forward that ambition and, as we were just talking about, we are continuing to invest in ensuring that the use cases are there, and that the commercial case for this is as strong as it possibly can be. Not only are we beginning to see that have real dividends and to see results back from those 5G trials, but we are seeing the networks themselves expand their plans for rolling out stand-alone 5G. We have seen O2 make announcements about going to a greater number of cities, and Vodafone has launched its stand-alone 5G in several cities as well. Again, it is very early days to judge precisely where we will be in terms of a map by 2030, but we are now beginning to see some of the signs that this is about to accelerate. As you will appreciate, there have been a number of things over the previous years that have perhaps made that progress less substantial than we would have expected.
Q64 Matt Warman: What we saw in the previous roll-outs was the Government trying to work collaboratively with the networks to say, “What do you want that will make this go faster, further and quicker?” Are the commercial operators asking for different things for 5G roll-outs? We have had conversations previously about slightly different planning because of different sizes of mast, different bits of street furniture and all that. Are the networks asking for different things for 5G roll-out that might allow the Government to achieve their ambition?
Emran Mian: I am not aware of them asking for different things involving planning freedoms around infrastructure. It may be that I am not aware, but I do not know of anything they are asking for on that front. I think it is well documented that they are facing a whole set of cost pressures at the moment, and as you would expect, they are coming in and talking to us about some of those. They have expressed that view in relation to, for example, Ofcom’s review of annual licence fees. A change in those would help them to do more investment in stand-alone 5G. [Interruption.]
Chair: The bell finishes us. I thank our witnesses very much indeed for their time. We will be producing a report on this at some point in May. Thank you very much indeed.