'Come and see our patchy phone coverage' - Shropshire MP lays down gauntlet to minister

Mark Pritchard, MP for the Wrekin, asked culture minister Sir Chris Bryant to visit the county to see for himself the problems with 'notspots' in the mobile phone network.

"Perhaps one of the reasons is that this country has only four mobile network operators," Mr Pritchard told the Commons.

"Is it not time that we had more competition?"

He also asked whether the shared rural network agreement, between the four major providers, was likely to hit its target of 95 per cent coverage by the end of this year.

Sir Chris said he expected the target would be met, but agreed that coverage often fell short of what was promised.

"Frankly, the connectivity that people think they are getting from Ofcom is simply not what they are actually getting," he said.

"Their phone looks as though it has lots of bars and is saying 4G, but they cannot even download an app to park their car.

"We have to transform that across the whole of the UK. In the end, most of that is down to the industry, and I want to make sure that we remove some of the barriers to further investment in the industry to improve mobile connectivity for every single member of the house."