RESIDENTS and businesses on Exmoor and in rural areas around Wellington were still being left behind in the race to supply the whole of the UK with superfast broadband, MP Ian Liddell-Grainger warned this week.

The Government is investing £5 billion in its Project Gigabit and has announced a commitment to delivering a lightning-fast service to every corner of the country.

So far, 30 live procurements and contracts have been put in place representing an investment of £1.4 billion in rolling out gigabit-capable broadband to hard-to-reach areas.

But, Mr Liddell-Grainger, who represents West Somerset and will be the Conservative candidate for the new Tiverton and Minehead constituency taking in much of the area around Wellington, said thousands of families in remoter areas could be waiting years to be connected.

He said it was because of ‘pitifully slow progress’ being made by Connecting Devon and Somerset (CDS), the local authority consortium overseeing operations.

Mr Liddell-Grainger said despite the needs of communities in Somerset and Devon having been recognised years ago, they could now be leapfrogged by other areas in the race to achieve better communications.

He said: “I read with interest of projects up and running in Dorset, Teesdale, North Northumberland, and Cumbria - and that only makes me angrier at the delays people in Devon and Somerset have experienced purely as a result of incompetence.

“Contractors have come and gone, countless promises have been made only to be broken, and if I printed out all the pitiful excuses that have been advanced for abject failure I should have enough to paper the entire walls of my office.

“Rarely can so much have been promised by so few to so many but with so little outcome.

“Ministers must now accept that Devon and Somerset are lagging woefully behind the rest of the country and that CDS can no longer be trusted to deliver.”