Official Report 427KB pdf
Agenda item 2 is an evidence-taking session for our inquiry on broadband infrastructure in Scotland. We will hear from witnesses who are or have been involved in local and community broadband projects across Scotland. I welcome to the meeting Vicki Nairn from pathfinder north; Stuart Robertson from Highlands and Islands Enterprise; Roddy Matheson and Rita Stephen from Aberdeen city and shire economic forum; Geoff Hobson from Angus Broadband Co-operative; Ged Bell from Dundee City Council; Sheena Watson from digital Fife; David Byers and Duncan Nisbet from the south of Scotland alliance; and Dr Andrew Muir from community broadband Scotland. As you will see, I have tried to seat the witnesses according to their location from the north to the south of the country.
I represent the pathfinder north partnership, which is led by Highland Council and comprises five local authorities across the Highlands and Islands. Our successful shared services agreement has resulted in a seven-year £70 million contract, which is funded by £62 million from the Scottish Government and £8 million from partner contributions. The contract connects 756 local authority sites, including council offices and schools, across the Highlands and Islands.
So pathfinder north and Highlands and Islands Enterprise are doing something with BDUK.
That is correct. Highlands and Islands Enterprise has a long history of supporting telecommunications developments, going back to the late 1980s and early 1990s. We have been involved in a number of projects. We feel that public intervention is required because our region tends to be at the tail end of the roll-out of any commercial telecoms developments and, without some sort of intervention, we might get those services three to five years after the urban parts of the country get them, if we get them at all. Highlands and Islands Enterprise has always considered telecoms infrastructure to be an important part of the essential infrastructure of a successful and competitive region.
Are we talking about two separate projects? Are you and pathfinder north working together?
We are working closely together, but there are two separate projects. The pathfinder project involves the local authorities working together and aggregating the broadband for schools and council offices. Our project is aimed at what I call the economic development side of telecoms development and involves getting the telecoms industry to make available in the north of Scotland and rural areas the services that it is rolling out in urban Scotland. We are trying to ensure that general broadband services are available to small businesses and householders. We do not seek specific bandwidths in specific locations; we look for a more general upgrading of the telecoms network in the Highlands and Islands.
Who will give us an outline of what is happening in the north-east? Will it be Rita Stephen or Roddy Matheson?
We will do it between us, but I will start.
At the risk of repetition, I will say that our work has very much been driven by the demands of the local economy and citizens. Many people in north-east Scotland work in the energy industry and have access to high-speed broadband in their workplace. Often, that is contracted privately rather than through public access channels. At home, those people find a marked contrast with what they enjoy at their work. One need travel only about 7 miles out of the centre of Aberdeen before broadband speeds of less than half a megabit per second are the norm rather than the exception.
Angus Broadband Co-operative is a small volunteer organisation with very low funds. Back in the early 2000s, a community website was developed by a community group to pull together the communities in the glens of Angus and to promote the glens. It became clear that one problem was that people in the glens could not get reliable broadband, so the group formed a sub-group to consider broadband delivery. In 2007, it commissioned a report from the community broadband network. Based on that report, we had a lot of discussion and eventually formed the Angus Broadband Co-operative as a separate entity. We succeeded in finding local funding and produced a detailed plan with costings for providing a fibre network to the Angus glens, but we do not have funding to build it.
I am sorry, but I am not with you. You say that you have funding, but—
We received funding to commission the planning work to get an idea of the cost of building a network. We are now looking for some way of putting that into effect.
The project in Dundee is different from those that the committee has heard about so far. It is a purely private sector initiative involving a fibre connectivity provider that the council had used on a small scale pre-2007. One of the companies in a group approached us with a willingness to fibre up the entire city, with connections to every home and business premises. That was a private sector initiative, but the council was keen to engage with the company because we saw the economic benefits of very-high-speed broadband being available to every household.
I am here to talk about the work of digital Fife. Fife has issues of rurality, although they are not the same as the issues in other areas that people have spoken about this morning.
The south of Scotland is very much like the Highlands and Islands from the point of view of rurality and exclusion. We face all the same infrastructure challenges as people face in the Highlands and Islands.
I should clarify my position slightly. My day job is as a director of a telecoms consultancy company. As such, I have been involved in broadband projects for a large number of years and I am currently working with a number of the projects that you have heard about today. Although you have me sitting in a position that indicates that I am based down south—in fact, I live in Edinburgh—I should probably be sitting next to Vicki Nairn, because I am originally from Achiltibuie up on the north-west coast, so being interested in broadband is essential for me.
Are you the only person who knows what is going on in all these other projects, Dr Muir, or do you folks all speak to one another so that you are not reinventing the wheel in your own patch?
Co-operation and sharing of information are probably as good now as they have ever been. I have been involved in telecoms development for quite a number of years. There was a tendency in the past to try to get an advantage for your region over other regions, but I think that that has now gone. We are trying to share the lessons that we have learned as widely as possible. Having got money from BDUK, we have an obligation to participate in sessions to pass on information to other parts of the country. We are talking to one another more than we have ever done in the past.
Is that speeding up all your processes? I see that Rita Stephen wants to come in. For the purposes of the Official Report, I point out that her organisation is Aberdeen city and shire economic future, not Aberdeen city and shire economic forum.
I endorse what has just been said. Most of us who are here today were invited to a session with the Scottish Government in June to look at what broadband is and where it is going. We shared information, and quite a number of councils and economic development agencies have been in touch with us directly. We are talking to Angus, Cairngorms and Perth and Kinross. In particular, I explained to everyone at the session how we carried out the infrastructure audit. There was a proposal, which is mentioned in the written evidence, that some funding might go towards bringing the rest of Scotland up to speed with the work that we have already done. We cannot emphasise enough that what we would like to do in the north-east will benefit the whole of Scotland and internationalise Scotland’s ability to trade globally. The connection speeds that we have at the moment are really hampering us.
Looking at the vast array of people sitting in front of me, I am wondering why we have all these separate projects, which presumably all have their own staff, managers and consultants and which are all competing for funding, instead of having one Scotland-wide national roll-out of broadband. Is there an obvious answer to that?
I will attempt to answer that—perhaps others will support me. In the work that we did we identified that it is quite difficult to have a pan-north-east Scotland project that suits everybody, never mind a pan-Scotland project, because there are rural areas and city areas, for which at least three or four different projects are needed. However, there is no reason why you could not link up Angus, Perth, the north-east of Scotland and Cairngorms, for example.
I am not quite seeing how the present arrangement can be cost effective. You are only a small representative group and presumably what you do is repeated across the country. How can it be cost effective to have all these organisations, with all their costs, chasing the same money?
We have to identify what is missing and what is needed to fill the gaps. Once that has been done, we will have to decide whether the service can be doubled up or included in other areas. I think that most of us are at that stage.
Can that not be done at the national level? We have heard evidence that that is what is happening in Wales.
Your question is quite reasonable. A certain amount of aggregation has already happened. In pathfinder north, five Highlands and Islands local authorities have aggregated their requirements for a number of reasons, the first of which was to get commercial interest in our individual regions. That was difficult because our population density is not attractive to commercial providers. In pathfinder south, two local authorities come together.
Neil Findlay is absolutely right that the size of the Scottish market suggests that it is obvious that we should just be able to do it all together. However, there is a tension between that suggestion, competition law and state aid rules. The telecoms industry is investing in our city regions of its own volition. We have to be careful to make sure that we do not displace that natural market activity by running publicly funded interventions. Where the central belt sits in the geography of Scotland has a natural effect of fragmenting some of our geographical projects.
It is right to say that there are tensions around the tiering and timing of funding. We have the recommendations from the McClelland review but we also have BDUK, and funding is also available from the European Union. That all needs to be meshed together in a useful way.
That was a good question from Neil Findlay. It depends what we are trying to do. If we are trying to create the infrastructure on which everything else will sit, it makes sense to try to do that on as large a scale as possible, rather than splitting the process up into separate projects. It gets more complicated, however, if we are trying to aggregate the needs of local authorities and the national health service, for example—the actual services—on top of the infrastructure. Trying to aggregate all that on a large scale can get difficult, but if we are trying to get the underlying infrastructure in place, yes, we should do it on a large scale.
I do not know any details of how Wales is doing this. How is it getting round the state aid rules?
I do not have an answer to how Wales is taking this work forward. Perhaps David Byers would like to answer that question.
I think that Wales enjoys a slightly different status from the majority of Scotland in regard to the type of structural funding interventions that it is allowed to take forward. It still, largely, has objective 1 status, which means that direct public sector investment in infrastructure is permissible. That is not the case in Scotland.
Is it fair to say that quite a few of the people sitting round the table today are engaged in projects that are designed to beat the market, so to speak, because if we just let the market deal with the provision of broadband, it would get to people eventually, but perhaps only in time for our grandchildren to benefit from it? Is it your objective to speed up that process and to target effort in the key areas that you are concerned about?
That is correct. There is a precedent for the issue being tackled at Scottish level from the first generation of broadband. At the time, the industry went so far in putting out ADSL. Then, at the later stages of the roll-out, when it became clear that rural Scotland was not going to get the services through industry investment, the Scottish Government developed a Scotland-wide project to cover that.
Is there an additional problem with the roll-out of such technology, in that, when investment becomes available, it obviously goes to the low-hanging fruit? Are the easiest options taken, in order to achieve the most while spending the least money? Is it also the case that, because the technology moves on, the low-hanging fruit is in the same place as it was before, and not in your area, when the next round of funding comes along?
Yes, that is correct. The telecommunications industry will always go where it sees the largest markets, which are in the urban areas.
So you are looking after yourself because no one else will.
Yes.
Pathfinder north is in a slightly different position, in that we are very much looking at public sector service delivery. There is an important distinction to be drawn; there probably should not be, but there is. For us, this is about how we deliver effective public services, and we cannot do that without broadband. Our businesses have become highly dependent on it. Modernising public sector service delivery is all about using information and communications technology in the sector to generate efficiencies and deliver benefits, and a big part of that involves broadband connectivity. I can think of a number of examples off the top of my head. We want to speed up CRM systems, and to speed up interaction with the customer—
Can you tell us what CRM systems are?
Customer relationship management systems—the front-facing customer systems.
I would like to talk about partners. Vicki Nairn talks about public service—mainly council and not even health—delivery, and then there is talk about the private sector. ACSEF is talking mainly about businesses. Things are still very fragmented in your areas, as you are not talking about health boards, councils and private businesses together. How do you identify partners? Rita Stephen said that many businesses in the north-east had put in their own connectivity. How can we get more joined-up thinking across the board? Have any of you already been involved in such an approach? Has it not worked? What are the barriers?
Again, our project is different from those of colleagues, as the Dundee City Council area is entirely urban.
When we were pulling together our digital inclusion strategy, we were pushing against an open door in the council to get education and economic development people together and, more widely, health and other players. That was fairly straightforward. It is clear that people quite readily see the benefits of working together. That is probably a shared experience—I see Vicki Nairn nodding—but it is a matter of providing the platforms for that to happen.
If, for example, private firms already have structures in place and somebody else comes in, would that slow down the service that they already get? I am not techie enough to know about that.
I clarify that what we are potentially talking about is not just for the business community. There are three separate projects, which, I would argue, could probably be replicated throughout Scotland. One is an open-access fibre network that would join up all the business parts and get superfast broadband speed for doing global business 24/7 in different time zones.
The convener asked about partnerships. For me, a number of factors are involved in looking forward and determining what has or has not worked. A lot depends on how far advanced organisations are at the point at which the demand is identified; a lot also depends on the procurement arrangements that they have in place. At the moment, part of the issue in Scotland is the fact that there are a number of different procurements in place with different start and end dates. Some of those procurements may be national contracts, some may be local, and some may be aggregated. There are lots of different starting points.
There are a couple of fairly fundamental issues. The technology is now fundamental to every business process in every sphere of economic activity. The information technology industry has always been supply driven, and we are on the cusp of its driving the next paradigm shift—or platform shift, as it is called—to a cloud computing environment. We have seen the advertisements on television on taking services to the cloud, which just means everything being run within the network system. Critically, that requires absolutely everybody, wherever they are working, to have the highest-quality connectivity.
Although it might seem that some of the projects are operating independently, there are direct and indirect links between many of them. For example, the pathfinder north project that is serving the local authorities on their sites has indirect benefits for the NHS and other users in the Highlands. Pathfinder created more infrastructure in the Highlands, which enabled the NHS to get faster and cheaper services for general practitioners and hospitals. The infrastructure that was created as a result of the pathfinder and HIE projects also has knock-on benefits for businesses and residents.
We will move on to the issue of technologies. Someone mentioned fibre and mobile connections and someone else—I think that it was David Byers—said that we need every house in every glen to be connected by fibre, which brought images of pound signs rolling before my eyes.
There is a distinction between rural and urban areas. The cost of fibre connections for sparsely populated rural areas would make that next to impossible. It starts to be possible in an urban environment but the companies are interested in taking fibre to homes and businesses only if they can find an absolutely low-cost way of doing things.
That is a fair assessment of where we are at the moment. I understood David Byers’s point to be more that our aspiration should be to move towards fibre everywhere. That may well happen over time, but to try to do that now would be expensive. However, the advantage of fibre is that, as far as we can see, it is the technology with the most potential to be a future-proofed solution that will allow continuing increases in bandwidth over time.
I want to cover a couple of points. The first relates to Dundee. It is great to hear that there is a project in place, although perhaps not progressing at the moment, to provide cable or fibre for the whole of Dundee. You mentioned some aspects of the business case that justifies that, but what is the potential return for investors? Specifically, does it include cable television provision?
It is a private sector project, but our understanding of the return is that providers would put in high-capacity services to bring what they term quad-play potential, which could include, for example, television services, phone services, data services, and home security and medical diagnostic services. Our understanding is that they need to make the investment, get the fibre in the ground and have an open-access network. Then, when there is a critical mass of connections, large-scale internet service providers, and even some television providers, will be encouraged to sell their services on top of that.
Therefore, you are at a fairly advanced stage not only in delivery but in identifying potential markets. You are perhaps showing the way for others—although it might not deliver a great deal for rural provision.
Yes, it is a method of provision for urban rather than rural areas.
That is where I was going for my next question, which relates to the Angus glens. You mentioned that your objective when you set out was to see fibre connection in the glens. Is that still your objective? Are we now looking at a situation in which near-market technologies, such as the potential provision of 4G, could overtake the need for cable or fibre provision in the glens, or is there a desire to do both?
When we were initially advised, we were told that wireless is problematic because of the geography of the glens. We would need to place our transmitters and so on at points that are largely inaccessible because they are on top of the hills and do not have a power supply. We took the view that, if we made one big investment in fibring the glens, we would have a network that would survive and still be functional 20, 30 or 50 years later. We could put new technology on either end and, provided that there was an infrastructure of fibre in the ground, the system would continue to work. It would therefore be future proofed.
So you are still playing the lottery and hoping.
We had some—though not very many—discussions with Angus Council, which is involved with the East of Scotland European Consortium. We are waiting to see what comes out of that, but we certainly do not have £9 million to put into infrastructure.
Would you be interested in 4G if it could be demonstrated that it would achieve your objectives?
Mobile coverage in the glens is rather low.
Indeed. I am fully aware of the state of mobile coverage in the glens.
Initially we thought that if we put in fibre we would be able to install mobile repeaters, which would increase the mobile coverage. In other words, we looked at the issue the other way round.
So it is a kind of chicken-or-egg situation.
I think that it is universally agreed that fibre optic cable is the way to future proof any new development. For a start, it is very difficult to overload. However, the situation in rural areas is difficult not just because of the sparse population but because of the access charges that BT wishes to make to anyone accessing its poles and ducts, which have by and large discouraged new entrants to the market.
How do we get over BT’s monopoly, the dependence on its network and so on?
We probably just have to go round it. We have been advised that it might take the Office of Communications five years to renegotiate access charges. Meanwhile the world moves on.
This might not be popular but, in BT’s defence, I should point out that it is the only infrastructure provider in the country that has a policy of operating an open-access network. All the other operators pick and choose the customers whom they allow to use their infrastructure.
Would the most obvious way of achieving that be to oblige other providers to do the same?
Who are we talking about? Is it companies such as Sky and Virgin Media?
Yes.
To follow on from what David Byers said about stimulating the market, we need to flush out the other operators. There is a feeling that they cannot compete with BT, so there is no point. We must present to them what we have and what we are looking for. A lot of people want to know how we did our infrastructure audit. We identified that an optic cable that is not owned by BT runs the length of the A90 and A98. As far as we are concerned, that is underutilised infrastructure that could be put to better use. I wonder where else in Scotland there is underutilised infrastructure.
Do you know who owns the cable?
Yes, we do. As our submission states, we are talking to the owner.
The owner has agreed to make the cable available.
Obviously, BT knew that the cable was there, but it did not tell anybody. We had to find out for ourselves.
So a valuable part of your work has been identifying existing infrastructure. Are the other witnesses aware of the underutilisation of existing infrastructure?
For us, the situation is the other way round. If we are to use next-generation technology, we need to get fibre further out into the Highlands and Islands. One problem is the heavy reliance on microwave links, particularly to the islands and up the west coast. We have a backbone infrastructure challenge before we even get to the issues of the access network from the exchange to the customer. There is not much underused fibre lying around in the Highlands and Islands.
We move on to the funding issues. Some of you have already mentioned how much funding your project will require. How do you go about obtaining funding, from whom do you get it and how do you assess whether a project has delivered value for money? I was interested in the fact that Stuart Robertson almost seemed to be saying that it was necessary to take what you can get rather than set the parameters in a bid.
I was only making the point that we are obliged to be technology neutral when it comes to procurement and that we do not try to steer or influence the market. We are looking for the private sector to come to us with solutions. Companies should be able to offer the solutions that they feel are effective, although we take technological factors into consideration when we choose the winning bidder.
You got £100 million from BDUK—
If only—it was £10 million.
I am sorry. What are you using that money for?
At the moment, we have £10 million in the pot from BDUK, we have earmarked £5 million of our own funding and we have access to European regional development funding of £5 million. Our project started as a pilot, but we have expanded its scope with a view to looking at a full roll-out.
I will deal first with the last part of your question, which was about best value and value for money.
I am interested in what Stuart Robertson said about having to be technology neutral. Funding is very tight for everything across the board. Given that you must be technology neutral and that money is scarce, is there a danger—to use a past analogy—that some people will be buying a Betamax instead of a VHS?
Being technology neutral is a way of ensuring that we do not go down a technological dead end. Effectively, we are relying on the industry to come forward with its solutions, rather than me and my consultant colleagues deciding that the best thing for the Highlands and Islands would be technology X and going out and buying it. We might get it badly wrong.
Is there a danger that the industry will promote solution X as opposed to solution Y because there are one or two more pounds in solution X?
That is why we must be aware of what is happening and what has been proposed in the rest of the country. To ensure that we get value for money in public expenditure, we are in a sense using what a provider might be offering Cornwall, for example, as a benchmark of what we consider it reasonable for that provider to offer us. I would hope that if we looked at the wider market, we would avoid being fobbed off with some expensive and potentially soon-to-be-obsolete technology.
Does anyone else want to say where they are getting the money from?
I echo some of the comments from colleagues in the Highlands and Islands about their situation. We understand approximately how much it will cost to deliver effectively the infrastructure to meet the targets of the Scottish Government, the UK Government and the European Union for 2020.
Highlands and Islands said that it needed about £300 million. What sort of figure are you looking at in the south of Scotland?
We are looking at a figure in the region of £120 million.
How many years would the investment be for?
We are looking at investment to deliver the 2020 target.
It is the same for us.
The reality is that the Scottish Government has access to a £144 million fund, which will clearly not do the job in the timescale that has been allocated for it. How do we use the funding to create the conditions for achieving the targets in 2020? Which projects would you prioritise for funding? What approach would you take to the distribution of that £144 million?
I will try to answer that. You have to look at where you are going to get the maximum benefit for your funding. We have all highlighted how we are looking to reduce costs.
But is not some of that money ring fenced for rural connectivity? Does that limit your ability to do those things?
We have some very good examples of areas that were traditionally conceived as rural but which are now effective and efficient business parks. I am not talking about destroying green belt. That covers two bases—mixed development, and rural and business. The energetica project along a 30-mile corridor from Aberdeen to Peterhead is a good example of that. We would like it to be Scotland’s first gigabyte business park, and it could be replicated elsewhere. We would then be punching way above our weight and would be a global market force.
That is interesting.
There are intermediate targets. There is a target to get everybody up to a minimum of 2Mbps by 2015. I know that that is very mundane in today’s world.
There is an element of market progression. When we were doing the first-generation broadband roll-out, it started slowly and the early projects were expensive, but as the market gained momentum, the operators were willing to do more and more by themselves. We spent some £25 million, but in the end we only had to plug the gaps in the really hard-to-reach areas, using public sector investment.
It will be incumbent on the projects that reach implementation early to push the uptake of the new services as strongly as possible, because high uptake is the language that the private sector understands. The higher the take-up that we get early on, the better, as it will help us to get best value from the public sector.
Rita Stephen said that ACSEF has done quite a few surveys of users. Have the rest of you done that as well? How do you plan to engage non-broadband users? One of the major planks is the low uptake in the city of Glasgow, where access is not a problem. We also have a low uptake among the over-55 sector in Scotland, in comparison with other parts of the UK. Have you come up with engagement strategies? Do you have plans to engage non-broadband users?
Timing is important in that regard. There is nothing worse than trying to convince someone to take a service that you cannot provide them with at the moment. The last time round, in relation to first-generation broadband, we did a lot of awareness-raising work. We have an online project in Sutherland at the moment, and we are doing a number of other things. That effort needs to be stepped up as soon as the service is available on the ground. The push on the demand side is important.
What about Geoff Hobson’s 2,440 households?
We sent out a postal survey to each of those properties, offering an option of either a paper or an electronic response. We got a response rate of nearly 11 per cent, which is quite good for that sort of survey. Only 2 per cent of the properties identified themselves as business-only properties. However, when you take into account businesses that are run from someone’s home, the figure for businesses goes up to 36 per cent. It is a mainly rural area, and at 36 per cent of the properties in the area some sort of business is being conducted in relation to which internet access would be beneficial. There was a range, from farming to consultancy businesses—all sorts of things. A further large number of people said that they would use a high-speed service in order to avoid commuting to work on some days, which would cut down the cost to them and reduce road traffic.
We conducted research in partnership with the Federation of Small Businesses and the Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce, so we got a pretty extensive response from the membership of those bodies. On top of that, our market research demonstrated that there is a deep pool of untapped demand for faster broadband connections, so we recognise that driving up that demand—which will attract the operators, as they will get more customers—requires some additional assistance.
In the south of Scotland, about 40 per cent of our population do not appear to be broadband users or computer users at the moment. We are proposing to run a smaller-scale pilot project in Annan—we are grateful to the Scottish Government for substantially funding that project—that will partly focus on directly targeting those non-users. We think that engaging them is largely about having a proposition that is of value to them.
I am not sure that we need to replicate the different surveys of user need and desire for these services. Yes, there are specific issues to do with take-up in Glasgow, but in other areas, we will simply find the same answers. The requirements are the same in the north, the south, the east and the west. I am not sure that we need to do a lot in that regard.
That perhaps brings us to our final theme, which is on the strategic issues. How can we ensure that all these projects can be linked up over the whole of Scotland? This may be where our recommendations to the Government come in. What should the Government’s role be in developing a Scotland-wide strategy? What part do you want to play in that strategy? I know that we all want more money, but some of you have helpfully touched on the need to make the best use of the money available. What do you think should be in the Government’s broadband strategy?
The Scottish Government could assist and work with us in a number of ways—we have heard about some examples of that today. There is a vital role for the Scottish Government in lobbying and persuading the telecoms providers that their investment is needed in all areas, and not just in the big, juicy areas of high population density. There is a great deal of activity among the telecoms providers at the moment, because of the information-gathering period, which will provide a useful opportunity to maximise any advantages. It is also clear that, although there are many demands on funds, there are not a lot of resources.
Sheena, did you want to come in?
I wanted to say something in answer to a previous question, so it is okay.
Do tell us about engagement.
Engagement has been central to what Fife has done. I want to mention the race online 2012 work in which Fife has taken part. To follow on from what Andrew Muir said, if people have access to or get the chance to try out the technology, there is an incredible appetite for it. We have been doing a fair amount of work with older residents in sheltered housing as well as with parents in low-income areas of Fife who are trying to help their children at primary school. There is a great appetite to get involved. We have been taking out quite simple technology such as netbooks and broadband dongles, and giving people a chance to try the technology has made a big difference. Our evidence shows that there is a great demand for the technology and people will use it.
Many people have made a conscious decision to just use their mobiles, rather than have a land line in their home. They do not realise that they are probably disadvantaging their children, who cannot access information online as part of their homework. Also, as you say, people might need to access jobs and all sorts of other things online. It is a real problem.
I will pick up on what Vicki Nairn said. I do not think that anybody in this room, particularly those who are MSPs or representatives of public sector organisations, underestimates the complexity of seeking to aggregate public sector demand. We all have different goals, budgets, legacy infrastructure, contracts, security needs and politics—are we allowed to mention that word? That makes this a challenge. Public sector bodies generally procure advance-managed services, which do not always lend themselves to being unbundled at wholesale level. We know that that is a challenge.
I echo the comments made by Vicki Nairn and Rita Stephen about the public sector’s role. This technology fundamentally drives our collective economic development strategy and fundamentally supports our low-carbon economy strategy, but we need to work together and recognise where the IT industry is taking the world. We are moving to a cloud-computing environment and, as Vicki Nairn has made clear, we very quickly need to work out the road map to take us in that direction. We must identify progressively where the major data centres should be in Scotland and how we can achieve connectivity between those centres and wherever everyone is, using the best technology that we can provide and as quickly as possible. We must also allow the public sector contracts that will be the core driver of commercial activity to link in to that process as soon as possible. That is the optimum way of driving the whole process forward with a national vision but not necessarily with some kind of big-bang national action plan.
Any strategy should contain three elements: first, a recognition that neither Scotland’s geography nor its market is homogeneous; secondly, the future-proofing of all new development through regulation stipulating that developers install fibre optic cable from the street cabinet to the end user’s premises; and thirdly, promotion by the Government of infrastructure sharing to enable services to reach areas of market or service failure.
I simply ask the Government to recognise the fundamental importance of good connectivity, particularly given that that underpins almost all of its economic strategy. In the modern world, it is so important to be connected.
Does anyone wish to comment on issues that they feel have not been covered? If you remember anything on your journey home, you can always submit it in writing.
It is just worth reiterating that, as members will have heard this morning, a lot of good work is going on in Scotland to get connectivity into the country and to the areas that the market is not going to reach right now. I think that I can speak for us all in saying that we are working pretty closely with Government officials on this issue and are contributing to national plans in relation not only to infrastructure but to services and the public sector network market.
I do not think that we should see this only in the context of enabling service delivery; after all, there are other benefits as well as those for end users. For example, the NHS in Grampian told us that, by enabling more use of telemedicine, improved broadband connections would have benefits with regard to footfall in their premises and it would certainly welcome the reduced wear and tear on their buildings and reduced pressure in their car parks.
We touched on this earlier. A number of us around the table who are in the middle of the procurement process or just about to start it are facing timing issues. There is probably no easy solution to what is a big and complex problem but I make a plea that, when solutions are considered, we get as flexible a solution as possible to allow those at different stages of the process to link in at a later date. This complex issue, which is certainly on my horizon, on Stuart Robertson’s horizon and, I guess, on the horizon of those in the south of the country, will not be solved within the next few months and it would be helpful if there were some mechanism that allowed us to link in later.
Three times in the past four years, a US think-tank has recognised Dundee as one of the world’s top seven intelligent communities. That does not mean that we all have Tefal-heads but it is all about how we have changed and moved in the direction of a knowledge economy. As someone who was heavily involved in that process, I noticed that the others in the top seven and the ultimate winners of the intelligent communities award had invested in broadband infrastructure. It is a key element for anyone who wants to change and drive their economy forward.
That is a good place to end. I thank all the witnesses for their evidence, which will be helpful to our inquiry. As I said, if you remember anything that you wanted to say but did not, you should submit it to us in writing as soon as you can.
Previous
Interests