9. Will the Minister provide an update on the Superfast Cymru scheme? OAQ(5)0095(EI)

We continue to make solid progress on Superfast Cymru. We have provided access to superfast broadband to over 620,000 premises that would not have been able to receive fibre fast broadband without our Intervention.

I thank you for that answer. This has been a significant investment by the Welsh Government, with European money, for the people of Wales. There is another £20 million earmarked for the next phase. Clearly, delivering Superfast Cymru does remain a top priority of this Government, and it has helped businesses grow, expand and develop within my region. But could you tell me, Minister, how many businesses in Mid and West Wales have benefited from the Superfast Cymru scheme?

We don’t have the information on individual businesses in that way, because the way that we let the contract is that it is on an all-Wales basis to premises passed. So, each individual premise that gets more than 30 Mbps is accepted onto the Superfast Cymru programme. We don’t have any way of differentiating whether they’re residential or business, I’m afraid. But we do have a £12 million superfast business exploitation programme in place to ensure businesses across Wales, including many in very rural locations and rural locations, maximise the benefits of superfast broadband and, indeed, take up superfast broadband when it arrives, because, often, unless people have seen it working, they haven’t got any understanding of what it can actually bring you. I’ll give you one example: a hotel I visited in Fishguard was delighted to have got Superfast Cymru and they invited me there to see how well it was working. They’d got themselves onto one of the voucher schemes that allow people to get a relatively good price for a weekend break, for example, and they were delighted because the hotel was completely full and totally delighted with the amount that they’d got in place so far. However, once they got it there, they soon realised that they could also then have weddings where WedPics could be used and so on, and that people were passing that information on on online, and very soon, the amount of superfast that they wanted was much bigger than the one that they’d originally envisaged. So, what we’ve been doing is encouraging both locally and regionally, and, actually, internationally. So, this particular hotel in Fishguard was attracting international visitors for the first time. So, it’s a fantastic programme that really helps business exploitation and, indeed, we also let a contract with Airband in 2015 to target nearly 2,000 premises, specifically in business parks and industrial estates across Wales that had been left out of the original programme, if you remember. When we did the new open market review, we were able to include those businesses. So, it’s been tremendously successful, and everybody who’s got it has seen a real increase in business productivity.

And finally, question 10—Darren Millar.