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Mr John Whittingdale (Maldon) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I am grateful for the opportunity to debate an issue that has so far received little attention, but one that will affect large numbers of people in this country quite soon. It is appropriate that we should be debating it today. This is the day on which 4G services have become widely available in a number of cities as a result of Everything Everywhere making use of the 1,800 MHz spectrum.
Understandably, the competitors to Everything Everywhere have been concerned that it should be given a lead and so have been pressing to be able to go ahead with the provision of their own 4G services, and to do that they require access to the 800 MHz band. The Culture, Media and Sport Committee, which I am proud to chair, also shared the view that we needed to get on with the allocation of spectrum for 4G, because 4G carries real benefit to the economy, and we did not wish to get left behind.
I am pleased that Ofcom is now pressing ahead with the auction. However, the use of 800 MHz for mobile telephony will have consequences. It will result in interference with the provision of services currently using that band, particularly digital terrestrial television.
We have, of course, just been through a major exercise: the analogue switch-off and digital switchover. When I first became Chairman of the Committee, the first inquiry we had was into analogue switch-off. We felt that this was a huge undertaking, with risks that we highlighted. Happily, the exercise has now been completed and it has gone remarkably smoothly. I pay tribute to Digital UK for its success in overseeing the switchover process with very little problem or complaint. I like to think that the report of my Committee, in which we flagged up some of the problems in advance, allowed us to take account of those and put in place measures so that they did not cause the complaints or disruption that we were concerned about.
Similarly, I want to flag up one or two concerns that I have about the effect of mobile services being made available on 800 MHz, and what we might do to try to avoid difficulties. It is estimated that the reception of digital terrestrial television in 2.3 million homes may be affected once mobile 4G services become available. Of those, 900,000 are primary DTT households that will require filters for them to continue to receive television without interference. I welcome moves by the Government to make filters available to those households. I also welcome the additional help of a £50 voucher, should they have a loft or masthead amplifier, so that the filter can be professionally installed.
I recently met with Ofcom and saw one of the filters that it is intended should be fitted. I accept that as long as someone does not have an amplifier, it is pretty simple to unplug the aerial cable, insert the filter and plug it back in again. However, there will be households for which it is not so simple and the Government are right to make additional help available.
One of my concerns, however, is that the Government are making the filters available only for primary DTT households, and yet there will be a large number of additional households that have second sets, and they will not receive filters. I accept that the Government have to draw a line somewhere, but given that the mobile companies will be bidding a substantial amount of money for the spectrum, I think there is a case for households that still use DTT, but not as their primary means of receiving television, to receive some help.
I also understand that additional measures can be taken to try to mitigate the effect of the interference at the base station. That could help all households that are likely to suffer from interference, but it is not clear to me yet what plans the Government have put in place to ensure that the mobile companies carry out the base station mitigation at the stations that will result in interference. I think it is relatively cheap to install a filter at the base station—I was given a figure of £400—and I hope that the mobile companies do that. Will that be made a condition of the auction, so that the mobile companies carry out the base station mitigation to try to minimise the interference that could result?
I am also slightly concerned that while we are relying on projections of the number of households that may be affected, to some extent we cannot know whether such forecasts are right. The Minister conceded that point when he gave evidence to the Select Committee. One way in which we could perhaps get round that is to have a trial in advance, similar to that which took place at Whitehaven prior to the beginning of digital switchover. There may well be a case for a trial in order to get precise figures for exactly which households will suffer interference and to what extent that interference is a serious problem. I hope that MitCo will consider that. I understand it is still a possibility once the advice is received.
Another issue is whether the filters will work properly, and it would help if they too could be tested in a trial. The prototype filters are now available—as I have said, I have seen one—but mass production has not yet started on the scale that will be required.
The situation has been made more difficult by the bringing forward of the timetable for 4G’s introduction. I do not criticise that; it is important that we get 4G roll-out as soon as possible, but there is no question but that the accelerated timetable will make the process more difficult. Digital UK did a good job in overseeing the transition for analogue switch-off, but it did so over a number of years. It mounted a significant publicity campaign in advance, region by region, so that when it came to switch-off almost everyone knew what was happening, and was hopefully prepared.
Instead of a period of years, however, this process will be done in a period of weeks. The auction of the 800 MHz band is due to start in February and it is intended that the installation will take place shortly after, perhaps in March or April, so we could start rolling out 4G in June. Yet, I am prepared to bet that we would be hard-pressed to find anyone on the street who was aware that there was a risk of their television reception suffering interference again, and that they might have to take further measures to those they have already taken to deal with the analogue switch-off.
Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)
My hon. Friend makes a powerful case. Is he aware that in a presentation to the all-party parliamentary media group, Arqiva estimated that for some 40,000 homes there was no solution at all, because they were too near to the base stations? In those cases, there will be more than interference; the households will simply not be able to get television reception at all.
Mr Whittingdale
My hon. Friend raises an important point, which I have not addressed. He is entirely right. I have been informed that 38,500 households—very much the figure he gave—will still be affected after filter installation and that, of those, perhaps 18,000 will be primary DTT households. After the various measures have been taken, there will certainly be some households that still cannot get DTT, and the Government have put aside a budget to address that problem. The only solution will be for such households to change platform, to Freesat, cable or Sky, and where those options are not available either, they might even need to have a special relay station installed. It will be interesting to hear whether the Minister accepts that those are the current figures. The degree of interference will vary, but some households at the extreme end will no longer be able to get DTT under any circumstances.
As I was saying, the Government need to start alerting people to the problem very soon. I have been told that it is difficult to mount a publicity campaign until we know who has obtained the licences and therefore which base stations will be affected, but it would be a good idea to start informing people of the problem. We must have a fairly good idea of the base stations that are likely to be involved. We do not know which operator will obtain which licence, but if the Government are successful in their hope to achieve competition in 4G provision, it seems likely that at least the majority of the major operators will obtain licences, so there is certainly a case for beginning to prepare the ground now for telling people what will happen.
I want to raise two other concerns. The first is about our old friend the PMSE sector, with which the Minister will be very familiar. The programme making and special events sector includes those who need microphones for television productions and live music performances. This important sector is concerned that it, too, might be affected by interference. It has already had to vacate channel 69 and deal with problems resulting from the analogue switch-off and the making available of the spectrum there, and it is now concerned that the problems might continue. It has been suggested to me that industry experts have said that anything above channel 56 might no longer be suitable for PMSE use, which leaves the sector with just two options. The first is that it suffers interference in the five channels it currently has that might be affected, but that is not really an option. If there is a live performance by Bon Jovi—I think I cited them on a previous occasion—sudden interference in the communications is simply not acceptable. The alternative is that the PMSE sector has to vacate those five channels and find new ones further down. The sector has made a perfectly reasonable request for MitCo’s remit to be extended at least to consider the potential interference, and that the sector be represented on its supervisory board, and I hope that the Minister will consider that.
Finally, I turn to the longer term. The Minister will be aware that there is a debate about the likely ever-increasing demand for mobile services and about mobile telephony’s appetite for bandwidth, as a result of which it is being suggested that mobile telephony might in due course creep into the 700 MHz band, possibly from 2018. That would cause further problems for DTT, which might have to move out of 700 MHz and into the 600 MHz band. That date of 2018 is still a little way off, and it is after whatever decisions are taken at the next world radiocommunication conference, but I ask the Minister for one or two assurances now.
First, in the event that that were to happen, it would seem only right that there should be an allocation of spectrum in the 600 MHz band for DTT, and that if DTT were forced out of its current spectrum it should not have to participate in an auction process. It is worth beginning to consider, some way in advance, how many households might be affected and how many might need new set-top boxes.
My real concern, however, which I hope the Minister feels able to address, is that there has been a suggestion that in due course we might no longer need DTT. We have internet protocol television, or IPTV, coming down the wire, and there might come a time when the different ways of receiving television—broadband and satellite—mean that there is no longer a need for Freeview DTT. I can anticipate that day being reached, but as IPTV services are still in their infancy I think it would take a long time.
A certain amount of concern was raised within the industry by the recommendation of the Lords Committee on Communications. I do not want to criticise my colleagues in the other place, but the Committee’s report on broadband states:
“We recommend that the Government, Ofcom and the industry begin to consider the desirability of the transfer of terrestrial broadcast content from spectrum to the internet and the consequent switching off of broadcast transmission over spectrum”.
As 2018 is likely to be too soon to even contemplate that, I seek the Minister’s assurance that if DTT finds itself unable to use the 700 MHz spectrum and has to move as a result of further allocation of spectrum to mobile telephony, it would be the Government’s intention to continue to have DTT services, certainly for some considerable time to come.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport (Mr Edward Vaizey)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale) on securing this important debate. As he points out, apart from a brief evidence session before his Select Committee, Parliament has not debated 4G interference with digital terrestrial television, so this debate is a useful opportunity to set out the Government’s position and perhaps address some of the concerns that he highlighted in his excellent speech.
First, I make it clear—my hon. Friend is an expert in such matters, but those watching the debate may not be—that we are talking about interference from the 800 MHz spectrum. As hon. Members may know, after the spectrum auction, mobile phones will use a range of spectrums—800 MHz, 900 MHz, 1,800 MHz, 2.1 GHz and 2.6 GHz—but only the 800 MHz spectrum risks causing interference as it is adjacent to the 700 MHz spectrum used for digital terrestrial television. It is important to make that point, because as my hon. Friend points out, today sees the launch of the UK’s first 4G service by EE, as we must now learn to call it, but that is in the 1,800 MHz spectrum, so nobody need go home tonight in fear that they will miss “BBC News at Ten” or “Newsnight.”
Secondly, only digital terrestrial television viewers will be affected. Again, effectively that is people watching Freeview. People who get their television through Freesat, cable or a commercial satellite provider will not be affected by the 800 MHz spectrum.
My hon. Friend points out that Ofcom has estimated that some 2.3 million households will be close enough to mobile phone base stations using the 800 MHz spectrum to risk being affected by interference. That is an estimate, and the figure may be substantially lower. There are a number of reasons why that may be the case. First, Ofcom estimates that only 40% of those households will be viewing Freeview; the rest will be getting their television in other ways. That brings the figure to 900,000 homes.
My hon. Friend asks whether mobile operators will be compelled to put filters on their base stations. I am pleased to inform him that all the base stations being procured by potential winners of the 800 MHz licence will include a filter as a matter of course. Without wishing to confine myself to a specific figure, I have been informed that it is therefore likely that the new base stations, which are substantially more advanced than the ones used in other countries, may substantially reduce the number of households affected. When that becomes clearer, I will, of course, inform him.
My job as a Minister, working with Ofcom, was to work out the best way to reduce any interference for potentially affected households. First, the obvious decision was to put the mitigation measures into the hands of the mobile operators. They are the ones who will site the base stations and procure the relevant technology, so it seems sensible that, as the people potentially causing the interference, they are in charge of reducing that interference as much and as upstream as possible.
Secondly, I was given a range of financial support options that I could make available for mitigation. To put it bluntly, those options included zero and figures across the spectrum. I chose the higher end of the spectrum. I would rather be the Minister who set aside too much money for this programme than the Minister who set aside too little to get the job done.
How will the money be used? First, all the households that might be affected by the base stations will receive a free filter. So, on the current figure, 2.3 million households will receive a free filter. That means that, for the sake of argument, if a household receives the signal for the main television set in the living room through cable or satellite, it will receive a free filter for, say, a Freeview set in the bedroom. That will help many households that have second sets.
If we zone in, as it were, on the 900,000 households that use Freeview for their primary set, we estimate that some 150,000 of those households will be able to fit a filter without any problem. I have fitted a filter, and my hon. Friend has fitted a filter, which is literally a piece of aerial, to put it in layman’s terms. I simply unplugged the aerial, attached the filter and put the aerial back in. That took me 10 seconds, and I would not class myself as a DIY expert.
We are then left with 220,000 households that are technically vulnerable, which means people with disabilities or people aged over 75. I do not want to get into a secondary debate—I know many 75-year-olds who might not class themselves as vulnerable—but technically, they are vulnerable. That is about one in four of the 900,000 households, and help will be available to them should they so choose. We know from the digital switchover scheme that, of the people who were eligible for help, only 15% chose to make use of the available help scheme. Nevertheless, money will be set aside on the basis that every single one of those households will use the help scheme.
The next category is people with amplifiers, which are used to boost the power level of the TV signal. Before the switchover, amplifiers were quite prevalent because, obviously, people were using them to boost weak digital signals before we completed the switchover. Sometimes amplifiers are used to boost a strong signal where there are two or three televisions in a home. Ofcom estimates that some 380,000 of the affected Freeview homes have amplifiers, but many of those will no longer be in use and there will be no need to fit a filter. Where there is an amplifier, there is no reason why, in quite a significant number of cases, a normal able-bodied person will not be able to fit a filter. There has been a suggestion that, if the amplifier is in the loft, that could be a problem, but it should be possible to go into the loft to fit the aerial extension.
We acknowledge, however, that if the amplifier is on the roof, we certainly would not expect someone to get out the ladder and climb on the roof to fit the aerial. Ofcom estimates that there are some 125,000 households in that category and, as a result of the high-profile concerns that were raised on that specific issue, we have instructed that about £12 million of the £180 million be set aside to pay for the reasonable costs of professional installation. We have estimated those costs to be about £50 plus VAT. It is important to stress that by “professional installation” we mean going up a ladder safely and putting the aerial extension into an amplifier. That is not the same as adjusting an aerial for the digital terrestrial television switchover, which was a more complicated, technical task, but we expect people to use a registered digital installer. That is something that we inherited from the digital switchover scheme and will ensure that people are using professional installers.
Finally, there comes the issue of fitting filters to communal properties. We think there are about 20,000 such properties, which make up the rest of the 900,000 affected households. Those properties will require a more sophisticated filter, which we think will cost up to £300, but those filters will be provided to communal properties free of charge. Fitting such a filter is probably more demanding than fitting the filter that my hon. Friend and I have used, and we think a figure of about £220 is right. As a general rule, we would expect landlords to be responsible for ensuring the fitting of that filter to their property.
My hon. Friend says that he thinks people with second or third sets should get additional free filters. I am afraid that at this stage all I can do is agree to disagree with him. Additional filters will be easy to obtain and should cost £10 or less. It is difficult to give an open-ended commitment to provide free filters and to ask people to write in to say that they have two, three, four, five or six television sets, or to try to guess how many television sets they have. I think it is easier simply to give everyone a free filter and then say, “If you want a second filter, they are relatively cheap.”
I have also noted my hon. Friend’s suggestion for a pilot or trial period before rolling out 4G. There have been a number of technical trials already, and we have seen commercial roll-out in other countries, so we have a great deal of experience to draw on. We do not believe that a trial would add anything to our knowledge, and it would significantly delay much-anticipated 4G services. We will keep the matter under review, but it is important to explain again that 4G will roll out gradually; not all the country will be covered by services the minute 4G goes live in the 800 spectrum category.
I note my hon. Friend’s concerns about the lack of a public awareness campaign. Again, the mitigation programme is different from the digital switchover programme, because it does not affect every household in the country. Far fewer households will be affected. Also, every single household within range of a base station will get at least four weeks’ notice, and the roll-out process will take two to three years. We believe that embarking on a widespread publicity campaign at the moment might not have the impact that my hon. Friend suggests.
It is also important to stress that those who hold 800 MHz licences after the auction will have strict key performance indicators on the provision of public information as part of their licence conditions. Our final guarantee is that if any of the mobile network operators fails to meet the key performance indicators, the immediate sanction will be that they must switch off the offending base station and not add any others until they have remedied the issues for local TV viewers. That strikes me as an elegant and effective way of ensuring that mobile network operators take the issue seriously.
My hon. Friend is right to point out that because of our work in clearing the spectrum more quickly than we had anticipated, bringing the benefits of 4G to the UK more quickly than planned, we have a stretching timetable, but I am pleased that the mobile network operators moved quickly to set up the mitigation company, which has the elegant title of Digital Mobile Spectrum Limited and Andrew Pinder as its interim chair. The creation of the company has been at the heart of discussions with the MNOs about bringing forward the roll-out of services, and the MNOs are still required to have the mitigation company operational in time to launch services. I am confident that the MNOs are taking that requirement seriously. Furthermore, we will have oversight through an oversight board. I am delighted to tell my hon. Friend that the board had its first meeting this morning, and it was very productive.
Finally, let me address three points quickly; I am conscious that I might run out of time. My hon. Friend said that 38,500 people could be so seriously affected that no filter will help them. That figure may change over time as base stations become more sophisticated, but yes, we have made provisions for them to have a full platform change, or even a direct digital terrestrial television relay should one be required.
We note the concerns of the programme making and special events sector. I met with Lord Grade recently to hear its concerns. It is for Ofcom to deal with the PMSE sector and find suitable frequencies for it. It has a dedicated channel, channel 38, but we will keep the issue under review, and I promised Lord Grade that we would meet regularly.
Finally, my hon. Friend mentioned the long-term future of 700 MHz. We note concerns about the long-term future for spectrum as mobile phone demand increases, and we have an ambitious campaign to release public sector spectrum. There is, of course, an international dimension to the designation of the 700 MHz band, and we will undoubtedly continue to negotiate with our international partners about its future use, but I note absolutely my hon. Friend’s comments. It is important that we do not run before we can walk.
Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)
I do not think that there were any problems with transmission or reception during that debate, but I am afraid it is time to tune out and switch off.
Question put and agreed to.