Lord Condon – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Culture Media and Sport

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Condon on 2014-05-07.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the progress of the roll-out of high speed broadband, and in particular of the impact on small and medium-sized enterprises in rural areas.

Lord Gardiner of Kimble

The Government’s programme is making good progress and has now made available superfast broadband to over 0.5 million premises in the UK. The pace of deployment has increased from 10,000 premises a week gaining availability of superfast broadband in early 2014 to 20,000 a week now and this will increase to 40,000 per week by the Summer of 2014.

With respect to impact on SME’s, the Broadband Impact Study – Impact Report, an expert report by analysts SQW (with Cambridge Econometrics), revealed the Government’s investment in superfast broadband will deliver a major boost to the UK economy; for every £1 the government is investing in broadband, the UK economy will benefit by £20 by 2024. It also demonstrated that the benefits will be shared across the UK, helping the rebalancing of our economy; approximately 89 per cent of the benefits will be in areas outside London and the South East of England with rural areas set to benefit most.

The report focussed on impacts of mass market broadband services – i.e. ‘affordable broadband’ for SMEs and households – and estimated that by 2024, net annual GVA impacts attributable to intervention include:

· £0.8 billion from safeguarding local enterprise employment,

· £5 billion from productivity growth for broadband-using firms,

· £0.3 billion from improved teleworker productivity, and

· £0.2 billion from increased labour force participation.

The majority of these benefits will be to SMEs, and over half to rural areas.