Recommendation 14

A number of stakeholders from Scotland, in areas which were particularly remote, have raised concerns about the programme’s impact on the environment and questioned whether the benefits justified the investment of taxpayers’ money.24 We therefore asked if the Department had done enough in its business case to identify the cost-benefit analysis of putting masts in very rural areas. The Department told us that the business case was high level and could not be disaggregated for individual masts. This was because the programme was a deal between government and mobile network operators whereby the operators would fund the Partial Not Spot element and, in return for this, the Department would fund the Extended Area Service and Total Not Spot elements. It therefore needed to be viewed in the round.25