Telecommunications Infrastructure (Leasehold Property) Bill

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 2nd June 2020 Lords Chamber

As noble Lords will be aware, our approach has been scrutinised by the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, which did not identify anything in the Bill to which it wished to draw the attention of your Lordships’ House. I was pleased to see that my noble friend Lord Haselhurst, one of the members of that committee, was with us earlier in this Committee’s proceedings, and of course my noble friend Lord Blencathra, its chairman, is with us today. I am grateful to them and the rest of the committee for their scrutiny of the Bill. Given all that, we remain satisfied that the negative resolution procedure continues to be sufficient for the regulation-making power in question. I hope the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Fox, will agree and feel able to withdraw the amendment.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

I want to return to comments made by the Minister in his concluding remarks, which were very comprehensive and tried to answer many of the questions posed by noble Lords. I worry, however, that anyone neutral listening to this debate would take the view that there is already a gap between where Ministers wish to go with the Bill and where those who have been participating in the Second Reading and Committee of the Bill are, which will need to be resolved as we get further down the track. It is worth pointing out that this comes from all sides of the House; it is not a partisan position.

I put it to the Ministers that the gap they are trying to bridge will not be achieved by the Bill. Unless and until they are prepared to put forward very firm commitments about how they will take forward the issues that have been raised, there will be trouble with the Bill as it reaches its later stages. To take one example, the Minister said that the department was regularly in discussion with operators about what they would like to see happen. That is very interesting. I am sure that most Members of the Committee taking part in this debate have had similar correspondence. Everything I have seen in relation to the Bill has been a complaint by the operators that their particular issues about how to involve themselves in this debate have not been listened to by Ministers and that the Bill is a pale imitation of what they thought they were being promised during the discussions that they had. So there is a difficulty.

I want to pick up on two other points. Ofcom may be doing a very good job as the current regulator in this area and reporting well to the wider public as well as to the Government, but that does not answer the main point, which is that we were promised in the recent election a completely different set of arrangements for our internet for the future than we are currently offered. My noble friend Lord Adonis said that we cannot claim to be world beating if we aspire only to 10 megabits per second, and others have said that the Covid-19 experience shows us that we have to rethink entirely what we do for our communities in internet provision. It is more than a utility; it is almost as vital as the air that we breathe to survive in today’s society. If we do not get it right now, we are missing a tremendous opportunity to get ourselves at least back on to the ladder of progressive activity in relation to this. As others have said, we are a long way down the list and we will need a lot of effort if we are to get further on.

The question of whether or not we trust what the Government are doing will not be resolved by answering questions in Parliament or by Statements being made from time to time, when the Government choose to do so. We want to be confident that the Government are taking the opportunity that lies before us now to push forward this arrangement in a way which will satisfy all aspects of society. It will not be done simply by occasional reports, because we just do not know; we need definite information. That is the point I want to leave with Ministers: unless we can get some movement between now and Report, we will want to come back with a much tougher amendment that will push this Government where we think they ought to go.