I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this important debate. I shall make two or three recommendations, which will I hope be useful to my right hon. Friend the Minister. I do not particularly want to dwell on the past, but after the previous speech it is probably worth putting in context some of the points that have been made. It is worth pointing out, for example, that, in terms of the Labour party’s promise to deliver 2 megabits by 2012, we do not know whether that would have been fulfilled, as it was based on a highly questionable telephone tax, which would have seen a revolt from consumers. In any event, we now have coverage of 99.22% at 2 megabits.
The hon. Member for Wrexham (Ian C. Lucas) failed to explain what happened in 2010, which was that the new Government looked at the promise of 2 megabits and understood that it would not be nearly enough. In fact, I suspect that many of our constituencies, which were already getting 2 megabits, complained to us about poor broadband. What they want is a superfast connection of around 24 megabits that allows them to use many of the applications that we now regard as very commonplace.