THE Cotswolds is still within the bottom 10 per cent of parliamentary seats for availability of super-fast broadband despite £1.7billion of taxpayers' money subsidising high-speed broadband, MP Geoffrey Clifton-Brown has said of his constituency.

He has joined a group of his peers who want action on BT's monopoly over the service which he says could 'leave Britain floundering as the rest of the world accelerates'.

Last week politicians acknowledged a report by the British Infrastructure Group of MPs which revealed that despite the subsidies, 5.7million people across Britain were unable to access the internet at the Ofcom required 10 megabits per second.

The report, labelled “BroadBad”, calls on regulator Ofcom to take radical action over the “natural monopoly” enjoyed by BT Openreach and said the modern British economy, which was reliant on broadband, was being held back by the company's lack of ambition and underinvestment.

BT called the report "misleading and ill-judged".

“I believe Britain should be leading the world in digital innovation. Yet instead Britain suffers from having a BT run monopoly clinging to outdated copper technology with no proper long-term plan for the future," said Mr Clifton-Brown.

"Britain needs to start converting to a fully fibre network so it is not left behind the other nations who are rushing to embrace digital advancement.

“However, Britain will only achieve this by taking action to open up the sector. Given all the delays and missed deadlines, I believe that only a formal separation of BT from Openreach (part of the group but run as a stand-alone company), combined with fresh competition and a concerted ambition to deliver, will now create the broadband service that our constituents and businesses so rightly demand.

"I am already seeing innovative new companies doing amazing things to provide tailored broadband solutions for rural communities and we need to open up the marketplace to allow these companies to flourish.”

But BT defended their hold saying they had invested £20billion in their networks over the past decade, bringing broadband to 99 per cent of the UK.

A spokesman said: “We are now taking next generation fibre broadband into rural areas with the help of the public sector whilst the likes of Sky and TalkTalk stand on the sidelines with their hands in their pockets. We would love to flick a switch to make fibre available but it involves complex and expensive engineering and that is why our engineers are working round-the-clock to make it available as quickly as possible.

“Ninety per cent of UK premises can already access a fibre optic broadband connection. That will soon climb to 95 per cent and above,” the spokesman said.

“The idea that there would be more broadband investment if BT’s Openreach infrastructure division became independent is wrong-headed. As a smaller, weaker, standalone company, it would struggle to invest as much as it does currently.”