Mark Pritchard raises problems with Shropshire's mobile phone coverage in the Commons
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00:00I thank the Minister for his candidness and honesty in saying that he is one of the most
00:05effective, experienced and able Ministers in the Government. Having made those compliments,
00:10may I encourage him to visit Shropshire, where there are still too many not-spots? Perhaps
00:18one of the reasons is that this country has only four mobile network operators. Is it
00:24time we had more competition? Finally, is the shared rural network agreement likely
00:30to hit its targets by the end of this year?
00:34The shared rural network will reach its targets, but the right hon. Gentleman makes a very
00:37good point, which is that the connectivity that people think they are getting from Ofcom
00:44simply is not what they are actually getting. Their phone looks as if it has lots of bars
00:48and is saying 4G, but they cannot even park their car and download the app to be able
00:53to do that. We have got to transform that across the whole of the UK. In the end, most
00:57of that is down to industry, and I want to make sure that we remove some of the barriers
01:02to further investment that there are in industry to make sure that we improve mobile connectivity
01:07for every single Member of the House.