BROADBAND EVENT ‘ANOTHER WASTE OF TIME’ SAYS MP

MP Ian Liddell-Grainger has dismissed as ‘an utter waste of time and money’ a suppliers’ event organised by Connecting Devon and Somerset, the local-authority-run consortium which is rolling out superfast broadband across the two counties.
CDS has announced that 50 delegates are attending Friday’s gathering in Taunton to help it ‘shape and finalise its requirements’ before tenders go out for the next phase of the scheme.

But Mr Liddell-Grainger, Conservative member for Bridgwater and West Somerset, says the event is nothing more than a smokescreen designed to hide CDS’s abject failure to meet its targets.

Earlier this year he called for it to be disbanded and for the Government to take over the project after it conceded it would fail to meet its promised target of 95 per cent coverage of the two counties by the end of 2017.
But today he said: “This is just a way of CDS trying to cover up the fact that it has failed to deliver what local people were promised.

“The fact is that it has been a shambles from start to finish and despite it talking airily of ‘engaging with the market’ at this event the whole thing is another symptom of the mess CDS has created – a mess I am now trying to sort out with Ed Vaizey the Energy Minister and the board of BT.
“The fact is that the greatest achievement of CDS to date has been to put back the roll-out of superfast broadband to hundreds of my constituents.

“It is, I am afraid, the result of boys trying to do a man’s job – and not the most competent of boys at that.