The three speeches/headings immediately before

1. 1 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.

2. 2 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.

3. 3 earlier: Tim Farron

   Does my right hon. Friend agree that in rural and upland constituencies such as his and mine, the Government have seriously missed a trick when it comes to taking advantage of the natural renewable resources that exist there? I am thinking particularly of anaerobic digestion and hydro power. Given that there are 38 anaerobic digesters in this country compared with 25,000 in Germany, and that in my county of Cumbria, which has the fastest falling water in England, there are only four working hydro schemes, does he agree that the Government need to give much more attention to that aspect?