My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. The rural superfast broadband programme has been a great success. It has delivered access to superfast broadband
to almost 5 million homes. The money invested by Government will be paid back because of the nature of the contracts. The hon. Member for Wrexham mentioned that he had persuaded Virgin to come to his constituency. Virgin is now investing £3 billion in extending its network, and that is partly inspired by the success of the superfast broadband network.
The point I really want to make is that I am sick and tired of people talking down this country and pretending that we are in some kind of digital desert. The latest culprit—I am astonished that the Government allowed this to happen—is Lord Adonis, a Labour peer—[Interruption.] No longer a Labour peer. Alright, he is an ex-Labour peer, but we know where his sentiments lie. He used the platform of the National Infrastructure Commission to publish a report yesterday claiming that we have worse mobile broadband than Peru. He based that on one set of analysis by Open Signal. I am not denigrating that company, but it relies on people downloading an app and then uploading the speed they are getting. Some 4,500 in Peru use the Open Signal app, and most respectable telecoms analysts would not go near a country unless they had data from at least 25,000 users. One of the mobile companies in Peru does not even provide 4G, but that is not even mentioned in the Open Signal app.
It is much better to look at a company such as Akamai, which points out that we have the fastest download speed in 4G of any country in Europe. It is almost double the next best in the EU five. Its report, which was published this week, says:
“the United Kingdom once again had the fastest average mobile connection speed at 23.7 Mbps (up from 23.1 Mbps in the second quarter)”.
We have between 82% and 93% household coverage for 4G. A total of 76% of mobile subscribers in this country have 4G subscriptions. That is double the next best country, which is Germany, at around 35%. We have companies such as Amazon investing in cloud services. We lead the world in e-commerce. If we are this so-called “digital desert”, as Lord Adonis claimed today to promote his report, how come we lead on all these metrics? I urge my right hon. Friend the Minister to give Lord Adonis a dressing down and tell him to check his facts and use a better analysis instead of running around promoting his report, pretending that we somehow live in a digital desert.