Ministers of every party enjoy telling us that Britain is a leading digital economy. The claim is usually made from a stage, indoors, on wifi. Try making it from the 14:37 to Exeter, somewhere around Taunton, and see how it holds up.
However even some MPs don't buy this: the MP and former soldier Tom Tugendhat has complained of getting a worse mobile signal in Dulwich than he did in Kabul a decade ago.
Kabul beats Dulwich
The specifics Blackhurst cites are almost comic. VodafoneThree has around 80 network sites across London off air, unable to find replacement buildings to host masts displaced by urban redevelopment. Virgin Media O2, he reports, has had thirteen attempts at putting up a single new mast in Paddington since 2018.
The official picture is improving, to be fair. Ofcom's Spring 2026 update reports that 5G coverage outside premises rose by at least five percentage points for every operator in the six months to January 2026, with full fibre now reaching 82% of UK homes. The fixed-line story is genuinely a success.
Mobile is another matter. A year on from the VodafoneThree merger, industry analysis still places the UK at the bottom of Europe for 5G performance, with indoor coverage particularly poor — and with the specifically British detail that planning restrictions long prevented operators from putting tall masts near railway lines, which explains rather a lot about the journey to Exeter.
The veto economy
The mast problem is the same problem as the housing problem, the reservoir problem, the pylon problem and the HS2 problem. Britain has built an unusually generous system of objection and an unusually thin system of decision. Almost anybody can delay almost anything, and almost nobody can approve it.
This is what you get when a country's politics is organised around asset protection. If your primary economic interest is the value of the thing you already own, then the rational move on any proposed change nearby is to object first and read the plans later. Multiply that by forty years and you get a G7 economy that can't erect a pole in Paddington.
The irony is that the objectors and the complainants are frequently the same people. Everybody wants five bars. Nobody wants the mast.
The basics before the vision
Meanwhile the political conversation has moved on to AI, data centres and national compute strategies — none of which are bad things, and all of which require considerably more physical infrastructure than a mast. If we can't site a 15-metre pole, the odds on siting a hyperscale data centre and its water supply are not encouraging.
