LIKE many constituents living a few miles outside Salisbury, I am all too aware of the frustrations of having intermittent or non-existent mobile phone coverage.

This may be an inconvenience for many but for business people it has a direct impact on their livelihoods.

For the residents of Bishopstone, who have been battling with intermittent landline and internet connectivity as well for the past three months, the situation has been far worse.

I was glad to raise their plight in the House last week, and I continue to liaise with local residents and BT to make sure we are moving in the right direction.

There will always be occasions where faults develop and it can take a long time to put things right. The issue here has not just been the pace of repair, but communication with local residents. It is unacceptable to expect them to drive to get a mobile signal to ring a call centre and to speak to someone thousands of miles away, who is reliant on a computer system being updated.

All residents have been seeking is a point of contact who can tell them honestly when work is going on and when they expect it to be complete.

Of course, the situation would be improved if Bishopstone had access to reliable mobile coverage. In addition to the £150m already committed to our mobile infrastructure pro-ject, I welcome last week’s announcement that the Government is looking at further action to make sure people are not tied into one single provider in their area who happens to have a monopoly on the infrastructure. This includes the possibility of new laws to compel mobile providers to share masts.

For many of my constituents, there is either no coverage or no choice: this is unacceptable and prevents access to the best deals on the market.

But we also need to do more to roll out the infrastructure we need to tackle complete not-spots. I was delighted to hear that the people of Broad Chalke will benefit from the Vodafone Rural Open Sure Signal programme, following in the footsteps of Winterslow.

This is very welcome and I hope many other communities will follow in their footsteps.