The other month I was on a train in London, on a business call with a client in Kampala, Uganda. The call broke up. It was my signal that dropped, not theirs. It was an embarrassing experience, but not a new one. Like many Londoners, I’ve become used to being unable to use my phone properly whenever I’m in a large crowd, a train station at rush hour or a very busy pub.
‘The path of least resistance for local politicians is to oppose new masts because they’ve learnt that approving infrastructure creates loud enemies.’
That is because London as a whole has the worst signal of any major British city, according to Ookla (which tests signal speeds) – over 60 per cent slower than Glasgow. Beyond the M25, it doesn’t get much better. The UK ranks 59th in the world for mobile download speeds, behind Kazakhstan, Peru and Vietnam. South Korea’s network is three times faster than ours. According to one recent report by the Centre of British Progress, these poor signals could be costing Britain £785 million a year.
This might sound alarmist, especially if you think of mobile connectivity just as a means to access the internet – but I’ve spoken to small business owners who have to refuse sales because their card payment machines can’t connect to a network. Poor signal impacts larger businesses too. Waymo, the self-driving car company, is planning to launch in London later this year. But this could be complicated by the city’s poor signal. There is also a cost to the rural economy: without a reliable signal, the self-steering tractors and real-time soil sensors that are a part of modern farming simply do not work.
Part of the problem lies in how we measure signal. Ofcom’s coverage checker suggests most of the country has 4G. In practice, 9 per cent of the UK’s landmass has no connection at all, and in many technically ‘covered’ areas, real-world speeds are unusable due to congested networks and ageing infrastructure. Ofcom’s map gives local authorities precisely the excuse they need: if the data says there is already a signal, why approve another mast? The result is a system that underestimates the scale of the problem, then uses that underestimate to perpetuate it.
Why is this happening? It’s mostly a planning problem. While the overall approval rate for planning applications in England is 86 per cent, for telecom masts, it’s only 51 per cent. Even successful applications can take over a year. And these are just the ones operators bother submitting, not the ones abandoned before they start, knowing the risk of rejection. Local councils are able to reject them partly because of how we measure coverage. Your local area can count as ‘covered’ even if mobile data is very slow, simply because it is technically possible to connect to the phone network there.
The path of least resistance for local politicians is to oppose new masts because they’ve learnt that approving infrastructure creates loud enemies. Britain needs a planning system that treats digital infrastructure with the urgency it deserves.
That’s why I’ve decided to launch a new campaign group, Buffering Britain, to push for exactly these changes. We want to make it easier to build masts, and to give people more reasons to support getting them built.
Keir Starmer’s government has struggled to deliver its central mission of growth. Here is something tangible for the next prime minister: £785 million a year (at the very least) is waiting for us if we approve more masts. No new spending or legislation is necessary. No political enemies will be made, except among the small minority of councillors who have decided that a phone mast is somehow controversial. Poor connectivity is a choice. It’s time to make a different one.
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