Digital Landlines: Rural Communities

I remind hon. Members that it is up to the Member who is speaking whether they take an intervention. If any Member wants to speak in the debate, they must have got the agreement in advance of the Member in charge and the Minister. They cannot just get up and speak. They must have done that in advance, according to the rules that apply in this debate.

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the impact of the switch to digital landlines on rural communities.

It is good to see you in the chair, Mr Betts. You are correct that a 30-minute debate is normally a two-person debate. This subject has attracted more attention than is normally the case. I come at this from this from the perspective of my beautiful rural constituency, with places such as the Candovers and the Tisteds, Binsted and Buriton, Froxfield and Privett, Hawkley and East Meon, but the debate is deliberately is not entitled “East Hampshire”; it is entitled “Rural Communities”, because the impacts and the issues are much broader. Colleagues from all parts, possibly all four nations of the United Kingdom, with us today may therefore wish to intervene, and I have trimmed my remarks to make sure that colleagues can intervene—within reason, obviously—should they wish to.

Analogue telephony will soon be no more. PSTN, the public switched telephone network, uses technology that is outdated, with copper wire infrastructure nearing the end of its life and spare parts becoming harder to source. Britain, like other places, will thus be digitising its phone network. What follows will in many ways be better—more resilient, more scalable and more flexible. The roll-out of VoIP, Voice over Internet Protocol—we sometimes hear different names such as Digital Voice—is an industry-led initiative, but some of the issues that we will be talking about today go beyond that. They are issues for our society and therefore for the regulator, and ultimately, they are issues for the Government.

The right hon. Member is right to highlight the issue. Although the technology is moving, for those of us in coastal and rural areas, the new digitalisation will cause problems where there is a dependence on landlines. If we have electricity cut-outs and storms, which we have had this last year, the system will not work. For those in rural and coastal areas, such as the right hon. Gentleman, myself and many others here, the problem is that it just does not work.