Rural Broadband and Mobile Coverage

I accept that, although there has been an improvement, as I know from having had the privilege of seeing one of the new Ka-band satellites launched before Christmas. There is room for improvement in the efficiency and effectiveness of satellites, but the space industry has plenty of experience and evidence of those developments. By the end of this Parliament, about 300,000 links will be possible for broadband via satellite. That is quite a few, and I am sure that it covers quite a few of the homes and businesses that my hon. Friends represent. Broadband Delivery UK estimates that about 2 million businesses and homes do not have good enough broadband. I am one of them and so are many people living in the west of my constituency and elsewhere. My final point about the space industry is that it is successful—a £7.5 billion industry annually, employing more than 80,000 people. The companies that provide the broadband service do so not only here, but sell their services abroad. They sell these services, some of them to 50 or 60 countries abroad, bringing income into this country. In the process of providing a broadband service that we all know is needed for this country, we will also be able to export, which is fantastic in itself. As my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border said, this is a no-brainer. There will be a combination of solutions to provide broadband for everybody. It will include wireless and mobile, and fibre optic, but I suggest that for the difficult-to-reach places, space provides the solution. We are fantastic at space. We are already providing solutions for broadband in that way, so let us provide some more. Ultimately, infrastructure matters. Reference has been made to the visionaries of the Victorian age who brought us trains. However, one mistake was made during that period. If my British social and economic history serves me well, we decided to go with Stephenson's gauge for rail, instead of Brunel's. Unfortunately, my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) has now left the Chamber, but an analogy can be drawn here: Brunel had a wider gauge, so we could have gone faster with our trains. We are now struggling to provide even faster trains; if we had gone with Brunel, we would have had them. I suggest that we adopt exactly the same approach to broadband. Let us not have a narrow vision, but a broad one. Let us have a system that provides the very best broadband for all our constituents.