Mr. Shane Campbell:

The report that has been delivered took as a starting point our work on the Fibre at a Crossroads reports. The basis of our interest and reporting on this was very much that Government investment should be targeted at rural areas. As I understand it, the UK Government Building Digital UK, BDUK, approach and strategy related very much to the fact that significant population centres, that is, larger towns and cities, could make broadband investments affordable without the need for a Government subsidy. In the report the audit office has completed, it was understood that the level should have been set at 20% and there would have been a 20% take-up for the NIBIP and the SRP2, the two broadband initiatives or funding programmes that were referenced earlier and were studied as part of the report. The take-up of those was 66% and 33%, respectively, and the 33% figure is still increasing. We had previously asked whether there was a need for Government intervention in the first instance into those areas, and argued that surely the funds should have been targeted at rural areas. That was the purpose of the original Government investments in broadband programmes because the market has to be allowed to deliver. That is very much how broadband and telecommunications work. Where there is a market failure, the Government should step in, and that market failure is very evident in our rural areas.

As for the learning, the report is quite new, and we hope the Stormont Public Accounts Committee will consider that document and its findings and pursue the recommendations in the interests of ensuring that people in rural areas will have the same access to broadband services, bearing in mind how important those services now are, as to people in other areas. Everybody should have that key speed of at least 30 Mbps. Particularly with regard to where the investments are now going, it is very much fibre driven, which provides an opportunity for any speed and an ability to do many more things than copper connections could ever have provided.

A report is due later this year from the audit office into the Northern Ireland Project Stratum programme and its procurement. We will look with interest to that because, as we understand it, the framework that was the basis of the investment in NIBIP and SRP2 is not the basis of Fibrus’s for the delivery of Project Stratum. We hope, therefore, that that learning has been considered by the Department and the Government in Northern Ireland and that, as a result of that, more and more people will be connected, given that that is what we are seeking. In the first instance, we encourage all the Northern Ireland MPs at this meeting, in their interventions with their party colleagues who may be involved with the Public Accounts Committee in Stormont, to ensure it will be given scrutiny. It is probably one of the foremost and most important reports into broadband that has been delivered north or south of the Border in recent years.

Councillor Doherty might like to comment on A5-N2.