Minutes before the UK’s chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, gave her spring statement to the House of Commons last month, her immediate predecessor, Jeremy Hunt, rose to his feet to speak in the packed chamber.
Hunt didn’t want to talk about the dire national finances, tax policy or Reeves’s increasingly desperate attempts to spur economic growth. The thing that vexed the man who once ran the UK’s economy was the rather more parochial issue of his constituency’s mobile phone signal – or the lack of it.
“The [telecoms] minister [Chris Bryant] can see that the whole house has filled up out of concern at the atrocious mobile phone signal in Godalming and Cranleigh high streets,” said a grinning Hunt, referencing two villages in his Surrey constituency, about an hour south of London.
The whole house, as the facetious Hunt knew well, had actually filled up to hear the imminent latest instalment of fiscal bad news from Reeves. Yet his fellow parliamentarians were rapt as the former chancellor complained about his local mobile signal. It struck a chord. Other MPs complained too.
Britain and especially Greater London has, as the Economist magazine recently wrote, “the worst mobile service in the rich world”. It published a table based on information supplied to it by research firm Opensignal that ranked Britain 46th out of 56 developed and developing nations.
London’s almost universally-awful mobile phone signal is one of the most surprising and irritating daily realities of living in what is meant to be one of the world’s greatest and most developed cities. Yet in swathes of central London, it can be hard to get enough signal to send even a WhatsApp message. The West End is usually full of confused tourists wandering about lost – because they can’t get Google Maps to work on their phones. Paying for parking via an app frequently is impossible.
The signal in Dublin and almost every other big European city is routinely much better. For many Londoners, the issue has reached crisis point. Problems are also widespread outside the capital.
Hunt, who spent his time in government managing a budget of close to £1 trillion, made a promise to fix poor mobile signal locally the centrepiece of his Westminster re-election campaign last year, when he scraped home by a razor-thin margin. Nine months later, he still records regular videos about it.
According to Hunt, almost 70 per cent of people he has surveyed class the mobile signal in the centre of Cranleigh, just a half-hour away from Gatwick airport, as “very poor”. In one of his chipper campaign videos on social media, he says the mobile signal is nothing less than “absolute rubbish”.
London Centric, a delightful online news source run by former Guardian media editor Jim Waterson, has investigated the issue. Experts he spoke to said London’s mobile signal was so bad due to a shortage of network capacity. Network coverage refers to geographic roll-out of mobile masts. But capacity is a function of how many people use each mast. You can have coverage and bad capacity.
Waterson and many others have concluded that London has a chronic shortage of mobile phone masts because of the difficulty of getting them through the planning system. Residents, in many cases, simply won’t have them and pressure councillors into rejecting applications.
In a case that became notorious in southwest London, where I live, local residents in Mitcham objected to a much-needed phone mast because it would cast a shadow on a local green. Haringey council, meanwhile, apologised to local residents for granting permission for a mast at a cricket club. Waterson published data from industry lobby group Mobile UK that showed about 80 per cent of mast applications are approved on average in Britain. It is less than 40 per cent in London.
As well as the problems caused by the huge population of London, which eats up capacity in a system constrained by planning rejections, the problem of poor reception is compounded by insulation retrofitting of old buildings and standards for new ones – insulation can block mobile signal.
London and Britain desperately needs more mobile phone masts. Bryant, as he responded to MPs who complained last month alongside Hunt, acknowledged this. He conceded regulators’ “reporting of mobile coverage is rather over-optimistic and does not reflect people’s lived experience”.
“The connectivity that people think they are getting from Ofcom [the regulator] is simply not what they are actually getting. Their phone looks as though it has lots of bars and is saying 4G, but they cannot even download an app to park their car,” said Bryant, who promised to fix the issue.
Hunt, and many other MPs, will be waiting to hold him to account.
