Janet:

Will the Leader of the House outline how the Superfast Cymru successor project will engage with properties that were not covered by the initial scheme?

Julie James AM, Leader of the House and Chief Whip:

My officials will work closely with the successful delivery partners of the successor scheme to develop a robust, comprehensive communications and engagement plan, details of which will be made available following completion of the procurement process.

Janet:

Thank you, and whilst I understand that details will be available and when, as you're no doubt aware, I have a considerable number of home owners and business proprietors who have not benefited at all from the current superfast roll-out. It did take some time to drill down to establish—I sent all of these to you, or many of them—and it took some time to realise that they were not included: 4.5 per cent remain unable to receive any form of fibre broadband whilst a further 3.5 per cent received just 2 4Mbps or less, often considerably less, with many receiving just 1 Mbps or 2 Mbps. In such circumstances, it is now becoming impossible to run a business, for children to do homework, or complete required farming forms online. How will we, as Assembly Members, be able to work with you, as the Government, and how will you and the new successor project communicate the property details of those missing out in our communities, who have approached us to do so, because I just think there's been too much wasted time? And with any successor project, I want to be able to get right in there and establish quite quickly whether they will benefit from the next project.

Leader of the House and Chief Whip:

Yes, absolutely, and, as I said when I was at the meeting in your constituency, we very much take that on board and so successor projects are being designed to go to specific properties. So, if you'll remember, the first one was a bit of a fishing pool: they could go to 690,000-plus properties across Wales—any property they wanted—because we had a massive problem when we started off that programme. Now we're down to the last 95,000 premises. So, what we've asked for in the next procurement is that it's targeted, so that those people who are successful in the successor programme, we will know exactly where they're going and why and how much that will cost. So, we will know both who's in and who’s out. For the people who are in, we'll be able to get a communications strategy, so, if there are delays and so on, we will know exactly what the issue was. And for the people who are out, we'll then start to work on bespoke plans for those. Because, I've been very clear: at the moment, with the gain share and the amount of money in, we haven't got quite enough money to get to absolutely everyone, although, with the intermediate investment programme that we're aware of now, we have had another £31 million to put into that, but it still won't be quite enough, so we will have to have those bespoke community solutions as well.