Western Morning News (Saturday)
Better broadband must be a priority
Cancel HS2 – and invest in improved online connectivity, says Graham Long
THE Public Accounts Committee has concluded that the HS2 project is “badly off course” and that the Department for Transport had “withheld [from the PAC] that the programme was in significant difficulty”. The £56 billion budget for the project set in 2015, is now estimated to be as high as £106 billion and all to shave 30 minutes off the journey time between London and Birmingham. Launched as George Osborne’s vanity project when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and MP for Knutsford, Cheshire, it still has government backing but for how long when the UK economy takes a headlong dive into recession?
No one forecast the coronavirus pandemic but following the SARS outbreak in China between 2002 and 2004 and the MERS Coronavirus Syndrome in Saudi Arabia in 2012, the UK did maintain pandemic stockpiles of things like Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) should a future pandemic emerge.
Between 2014 and 2020 however, the UK government’s austerity culture allowed this stockpile to fall by 40% as £325 million was wiped off the value of the NHS emergency stockpile.
This put the UK in a very weak position when Covid-19 reached these shores. The UK daily death rate from Covid-19 now exceeds the average UK military and civilian fatality rate during the six years of the Second World War, and the government’s insistence on easing lockdown could easily trigger a second exponential growth of the virus reproduction rate, R, with all the implications that has for many more deaths and a much bigger hit to the economy.
Against this backdrop, committing £106 billion of public money on a project to reduce journey times between London and Birmingham by 30 minutes looks insane, especially when costs and delays are running out of control.
Today, fast broadband has become essential for those who can work from home to enable business to continue to operate. Video conferencing platforms have become essential for commerce, schools, universities and individuals to keep in touch with colleagues, friends and families.
The “new normal” is likely to see a revived “cottage industry” with employers realising that employees actually work harder at home rather assuming people will twiddle their thumbs when no one is looking.
Jack Dorsey, the founder and CEO of Twitter, last week sent an email to all his employees saying they could all now work from home … for ever. Companies, employers and employees still have a lot to learn to maximise the efficiency of home working, but as we hear that Covid-19 could be with us for the long term, homeworking will be core to what “new normal” means.
This change also comes with significant benefits as air quality in cities has improved, traffic volumes have reduced dramatically and the reduction in air travel may mean Heathrow’s third runway doesn’t get built for years. With “tele-commuting” replacing physical commuting, now is the time to scrap HS2.
But some things haven’t changed. In Devon and Somerset, the availability of fast fibre broadband has not improved since 2012, when Connecting Devon & Somerset (CDS) was allocated £27 million for the rural broadband programme. In fact CDS, run by the two county councils, has wasted most of the last eight years with three failed procurements and cancelling the supplier contracts awarded to Gigaclear in 2017. They have now embarked on a fourth contracting round with the hope of putting contracts in place by the end of 2020 and completing fibre roll out by 2025.
That’s eight years of delay during which 83% of rural Devon and Somerset are no closer to getting faster broadband than they were when CDS announced their rural broadband programme in 2012. This is a double blow to taxpayers in rural Devon and Somerset on top of the isolation caused by coronavirus.
Somerset County Councillor and CDS Board Member, David Hall admitted on BBC News last week that “If you haven’t got it [fast broadband] it’s an absolute disaster”.
The people of rural Devon and Somerset know this only too well David, and after eight years on the Board of CDS you are no closer now to solving the rural broadband problem for 83% of the two counties than you were in 2012.
To make a mistake once is a learning experience. To make the same mistake a second time is an error, but to do it a third time is incompetence.
It is time to have this programme run from the centre by DCMS and BDUK, the DCMS department charged with getting fast broadband to everyone in the UK. Now is the time to cancel HS2 and increase government investment in full fibre broadband.
■ Graham Long is a campaigner for better broadband and a telecommucations expert
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