Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the Conservative parliamentary candidate for North Northumberland, and founder of the Broadband4Northumberland campaign, has welcomed new figures showing how families and businesses in our larger towns in Northumberland – such as Amble, Alnwick, Berwick, Rothbury & Wooler - are at last starting to feel the benefit of the Conservatives' investment in superfast broadband. She continues to battle with BT and County Hall to speed up the work on getting to the small rural villages and hamlets who are not getting upgraded as quickly as is needed.
The figures show that, across Northumberland 36,713 now have superfast broadband and by 2017 a total of 20,255 homes and businesses in the Berwick constituency will have access to superfast connections.
Anne-Marie Trevelyan, who launched the Broadband4Northumberland campaign four years ago in order to drive fibre investment into our rural county, said;
“I am pleased that we are now seeing superfast broadband being rolled out in an increasing number of homes and businesses in Northumberland and we are seeing the benefit of the Government's investment up here.
Broadband is the fourth utility for all our homes and without decent superfast broadband, our children cannot do their homework, small businesses cannot grow, farmers cannot submit their online DEFRA forms and it has the potential to revolutionise community healthcare.
I am however, concerned that our Labour County Council are not pushing BT hard enough to tackle the hard-to-reach communities. The Secretary of State for Broadband met with me last summer and allocated a further £2 million to help with this problem, but it is slow progress to get this funding allocated to our small rural communities. I continue to work village by village with local people to get fibre & superfast broadband into every community. In recent weeks we have made some progress for Eshott and Alnham church, so we will get there. If a community wants to contact me about pushing harder at BT’s door, they should just give me a call anytime.”
Prime Minister David Cameron said: “Good, fast internet access is vital – both for businesses who need to be able to operate efficiently and for hardworking families. Anne-Marie Trevelyan has been a vocal campaigner on this issue and I am pleased that good progress is being made in Northumberland,and across the country, through our Superfast broadband rollout plan.”
For more information about getting Superfast broadband; visit www.broadband4northumberland.com, or contact [email protected]
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