North Wales Assembly Member Mark Isherwood has this week questioned the Leader of the House over Superfast Broadband works in North Wales.
Mr Isherwood raised the matter in the Assembly Chamber yesterday.
He said:
“Responses I received from Openreach on behalf of constituents from Arfon and Anglesey, across to Flintshire and Wrexham, after the Superfast Cymru project ended on 31 December last year, all had the line 'deployment work has stopped completely on any projects that have not been finished'.
“On 23 October, in your Statement to the Assembly, you confirmed that Lot 1 North Wales for the successor programme was now complete, that work on the underlying network to support the project would begin shortly, and that evaluation for east Wales was ongoing.
“It would be helpful if you could clarify where the North Wales and East Wales borders begin and end. But constituents have subsequently asked whether jobs that remained unfinished following the end of BT's contract last December will receive priority in North Wales, as we now go forward under Lot 1.”
In her response, the Leader of the House told Mr Isherwood: “We're in the process of negotiating exactly which premises, because we very much want to learn from some of the experiences of the communications in the first superfast scheme, around giving people certainty about where they are in the programme, and what they can expect, and also giving them certainty that they're not in the programme, so that we can address issues in that way. We are actually still in conversation with Openreach about what are called stranded resources—the investment that they put into the ground that wasn't complete.”