Charles Kennedy

I completely endorse what my hon. Friend says. I have noted time and again in my constituency precisely the kind of anecdotal example to which he draws the House's attention. Indeed, if I have any sympathy at all, it is not for the Government, who are trying to deal with these problems, but for the Hansard Reporters during my short contribution. Given the many locations I have mentioned and the contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale, this is becoming a bit of a round Britain quiz, but that at least makes the point that broadband is vital precisely because of the nature of the communities that we represent.

In the mainland area of the Highlands, which encompasses quite of lot of my constituency, the city of Inverness, and the larger towns, such as Dingwall and Fort William, everybody should be able to access a universal standard. However, getting the edge on broadband speed is important when it comes to fast-tracking the next generation of broadband. Representatives from across the political spectrum and those of us in elected public positions have learned-from our own work as MPs, but certainly from schools, the vital public services such as the police, hospitals and the health service, and business generally-that providing broadband services is the big problem that has to be overcome more successfully if we are to have a properly and fairly connected UK operating with the economic success that broadband technology can bring.

Although there is not long left in this Parliament, there will at least be further parliamentary time to debate the social opportunities and social injustices of fuel poverty and fully flexible and modern broadband connections, which are insufficient at the moment. The time available to us, as representatives, can be well spent discussing those matters.

Finally, I welcome the obligatory reference at the outset of the Queen's Speech to Europe. That reference is encouraging because of the history and future of the fuel poverty and broadband issues that I have raised-and not only for the area that I represent, but for the country as a whole. An awful lot of the decision making is now done at European level, and rightly so. The infrastructure investment that becomes available is crucially dependent on our being able to attract funding from the EU, and to match funding out of our UK coffers for the funding that is available from the EU. That underpins the need for this country to have an ongoing, sane and constructive engagement at a European level.

Although I have great and deep criticisms of the Prime Minister and his predecessor for having missed tremendous, historic opportunities for this country where Europe is concerned, I none the less feel reassured that this Queen's Speech acknowledged Europe's role in a sane and rational way, even if I would like the Government to be more ambitious in their approach. Heaven knows what kind of approach would be signalled following a change of Government and a Conservative Queen's Speech in six or seven months. I hate to think of the damage that that would do to the long-term interests of all our constituents.

— from debate entitled “Debate on the Address — [1st Day]”

The three speeches/headings immediately before

  1. 1 earlier: Alan Reid

    My right hon. Friend is perfectly correct. I was on the Isle of Coll on Saturday and found that there is a limit to the number of available broadband slots, and that BT seems to have been operating the situation very haphazardly. For example, when a constituent who came to my surgery moved house, he lost his broadband connection, and the slot was allocated to the lucky person who happened to phone BT on the day he moved. That is haphazard. My right hon. Friend is right: we need a system of universal broadband to cover the whole country.

  2. 2 earlier: Charles Kennedy

    My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. Two words that I am happy to re-record for the Official Report are "hydro board". Not only do I come from the home of Scottish Hydro Electric, which is in the highlands of Scotland, but my father's employment for many decades as draughtsman with the old Hydro-Electric Board brought in the money that put food on the table in our house, so it is very much part of the family in that sense. Tom Johnston, the post-second world war Labour Secretary of State for Scotland-a great political figure of his time and one of the great definitive Scottish Secretaries in a century of that office-spoke about power to the glens when referring to the development of the hydro schemes of that time. In terms of social impact and economic well-being, those schemes probably did more than anything else in history to transform for the better the prospects of our part of the country.

    I want to look forward to something that has an equal role to play and represents something as revolutionary as did hydro power in its time in the highlands and islands generally. Broadband is another issue to which the Government have given welcome attention in the Queen's Speech. I want to enter another plea. I represent a part of the country where a significant number of people have no broadband, or have broadband connections only by means of satellite because of their distance from an exchange. It is hard to help those categories of people.

    However, broadband provides the big, historic, electronic opportunity to overcome at speed the disadvantage of those in the Lake District, part of which my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) represents, or in my part of the country or any other of the peripheral parts of the UK's islands. Those parts of the country are at a natural economic disadvantage, for all the obvious reasons, including geographical factors such as transport infrastructure links, distance from the larger markets and the higher prices it costs to import raw materials that can be used to make something that can be exported from an area. Ironically, our areas find it most difficult to get the access that would begin to create the sense of a more level playing field. We have suffered the disadvantage of the uneven playing field for so many years and decades past.

  3. 3 earlier: Alan Haselhurst

    Order. May I say to the hon. Gentleman that it is not very helpful for him to turn his back on the Chair? It means that his words are less easily recorded by the Official Reporters.

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