PETE Wishart pleaded with David Mundell yesterday in a bid to stop Scottish Tory MPs “embarrassing themselves on the issue of broadband”.
The Perthshire MP said the UK Government was not being accurate in its attacks on the Scottish Government over superfast internet.
Fibre broadband has been a priority for both governments in recent years, but it is wholly reserved to Whitehall.
READ MORE: Scottish Tory MPs 'cost country £265 million each'
The UK Government passed the responsibility for managing individual broadband initiatives to the Scottish Government, but wider funding and regulation of broadband services remains in the hands of the UK Government.
Clearly, Scotland’s geography means rolling out broadband here has been trickier than in most other parts of the UK.
BT even said Scotland had the “most significant geographic challenges in the UK, and arguably in Europe, when it comes to deploying fibre [broadband]”.
However, independent broadband website Think Broadband suggest 91.8 per cent of Scotland now has access to speeds of 24Mbps, which is classed as superfast in the UK – though it’s still short of European superfast standards.
Yesterday Mundell accused the Scottish Government of presiding over a shambles.
“The Scottish Government, who previously had responsibility for the roll-out, are three years behind on rolling out broadband in Scotland, and that is not good enough for people living in any of Scotland’s local authority areas,” the minister told MPs. He said his government would engage directly with local authorities as they would “give greater priority and expertise to this task than the Scottish Government”.
Dundee MP Chris Law pointed out that “in an area that is entirely reserved”, the UK Government had spent less on Scotland’s broadband rollout than they had on a similar scheme in Devon and Somerset.
Law said Mundell should be “ashamed that, on his watch, he has allowed Scotland to be so chronically underfunded”.
Wishart said there was a discrepancy between what Mundell was saying and the reality.
He told the Secretary of State: “Thanks to the added value of the Scottish Government’s investment, we have the fastest broadband roll-out in the whole of the UK.
“Without that investment, only 41 per cent of premises in my constituency would have access to fibre broadband; instead, 82 per cent have. In the Secretary of State’s constituency, the figure is 80 per cent instead of 39 per cent. Perhaps the Scottish Conservatives should avail themselves of Scottish broadband and google how not to embarrass themselves in this House?”
The Tory said the only person who had embarrassed himself was Fergus Ewing, for tweeting people to tell them “what a good job he was doing.”
“People up and down Scotland who do not receive adequate broadband services know who is to blame: the Scottish Government,” he said.
Ewing, the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Economy and Connectivity, had tweeted about how the Scottish Government had improved broadband access in each of Scotland’s 32 local authorities.
He’s previously accused the Tories of spreading misinformation.
Last month, the minister told this paper the UK Government needed to stop making false claims and “celebrate the success of the Digital Scotland programme”.
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