THE Government has been urged by Wellington MP Gideon Amos to step in following the latest debacle with superfast broadband agency Connecting Devon and Somerset (CDS).

The failing agency, jointly run by Somerset and Devon County Councils, has allowed tens of thousands of rural homes and businesses across the Wellington area to be dropped from plans to install hi-speed broadband.

Now, Mr Amos has called for the Government to take over responsibility for delivering the project.

Mr Amos said: “It has become painfully obvious that the whole approach to rolling out gigabit broadband simply has not worked in whole swathes of Somerset and Devon.

“Parcelling off a national network, one becoming as vital a utility to everyday life and to our businesses as energy and water, to thousands of tiny companies simply has not worked.

“The insistence on a Government-issued form of contract without effective penalties when things start going wrong just means that the local delivery body Connecting Devon and Somerset is dragged into lengthy negotiations every time the next new provider fails to deliver.

“We need to move away from relying on the proliferation of unstable smaller providers where they have shown they cannot fulfil the brief.

“For a whole list of parishes in my Taunton and Wellington constituency this means they are not getting the connections they were promised years ago

“The new Government needs to take hold of the process.

“Surely, like any other national network, we need a provider of last resort, backed by Government and on stable financial foundations, which will guarantee to finish the job.

“It is time to end the stop-start we have had since 2016.

“Waiting for the gigabit broadband the local communities I represent need, feels a bit like listening to the stuttering of dial-up connections from the dawn of the internet.”

Mr Amos had previously raised his ‘serious concerns’ in Parliament about a catalogue of failures by CDS and had been promised a Ministerial meeting on the issue.

The properties were dropped when CDS agreed to let contractor Airband UK ‘scale back’ its commitment after the company admitted it could not deliver its promised 55,000-plus connections.

Instead, CDS has told Airband it now only has to connect fewer than half that number.

CDS said it was committed along with Airband to trying to find ‘alternative delivery solutions’ for those communities which had been due to receive fibre broadband under the contract.

It was discussing alternative options with the Government’s national agency responsible for the delivery of gigabit broadband, Building Digital UK.

In 2022, CDS also axed the second of its three contractors when Truespeed failed to deliver key contractual commitments.

The roughly 28,000 rural homes and businesses which will now miss out include some in the parishes of: