Digital Economy Bill

Baroness Byford Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 13th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Byford (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, who so clearly demonstrated the importance of pushing ahead with digital entrepreneurism, if I can put it that way. I will comment on three aspects of the Bill. As other noble Lords have said, the Bill is very broad. I shall comment on broadband, Part 3 on pornography, where I shall take up one or two comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, and the slightly different area of data protection, which one or two noble Lords have spoken about. I remind noble Lords of my family farming interests, although with regard to this Bill I do not think we have anything to declare.

As the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, has just said, broadband is absolutely key and its success or lack of it has great implications for many people’s lives. Noble Lords will be aware that I have for many years raised this issue with regard to rural areas. We talk about gigabytes but there are still some areas of the country where there is no coverage at all, which is absolutely appalling, and some areas where the connection is very slow, and therefore the service cannot be used in the way that people in London and other areas can use it. Providing many of these rural areas with broadband access would enable them to diversify and create new businesses, which at the moment they cannot do. So for many people, companies and organisations, the whole question of broadband is one of complaints, arguments, disappointment and charges to do with its coverage, speed, maintenance and cost. I have spoken often about that in this House.

Coverage by broadband services is far from universal, in that there are many tracts of the UK where it is simply not available. There are also many places where it exists but the speeds are too slow, making it an impractical tool for many who want to create businesses, or even fill in government forms.

I would be grateful if the Minister would explain the application of the universal service obligation. The Explanatory Notes cite the telephony obligation whereby any customer can request a service but they will have to pay the extra if it costs more than £3,400 to provide. What is the base cost for broadband? What parts of the country will cost more than that: for example, ground above X metres, or buildings more than Y kilometres from a given point? As the population expands, is there a danger that the location of their dwellings will be dictated by the practicality and the cost of broadband installation?

Connection to broadband is at the moment a serious cause of anxiety, cost and time waste for many people. Consider the work/life balance of the farmer who travels many miles to fill in government forms, which is now required, to claim his entitlement to the single farm payment or to report the many statistics demanded of him. Think of the families required to manage all school contact using a two megabits per second service. Rural children are already handicapped by the length of their journeys to and from school, especially where rural bus services have been reduced. Surely they should not lose out on sleep because it takes so long to download and return homework.

This does not happen just in rural areas. I will give an example with which I am directly involved as a past Master of the Worshipful Company of Farmers. We and the Fletchers have a hall in the City of London. In September 2015 we quickly realised that the simple broadband service and wi-fi we had installed in the hall was just not adequate. We duly ordered a fibre-optic cable-based system through Onecom, a respected supplier, which would give us an uncontested 20 to 100 megabits per second service. The order was placed by email on 25 November 2015, and contract documents were signed on behalf of the hall the following day. Onecom has been helpful, but its—and our—problem is that Openreach has the monopoly on installing the cabling. It has been totally inefficient and seems to stumble from one problem to another. No one person in Openreach can be identified with the ownership of the case, and we have endured a long saga of engineers calling, being unable to resolve the issue, and disappearing again. That was a year ago, and this is London. Finally, we have been told that the connection is installed and we have been sent a wi-fi router, which we are to plug in, and away we go. As I understand from the secretary, the snag is that they cannot locate the socket that Openreach says it has installed.

The noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, said that he would advocate the splitting up of BT and Openreach. While that may not be popular with others, I, too, share his view on that case. Too much gets shifted from BT to Openreach and back again, and a clear definition of who takes what responsibility would be a huge improvement.

There is another problem, of which I cannot recall hearing any other noble Lord speak. If you cannot pay your bills, you will be taken to court by the council, cut off by the electricity provider and possibly visited by the bailiffs. What do the Government intend should happen to someone who cannot sustain a credit rating and is refused broadband installation? How will the broadband provider be entitled to deal with the customer who cannot pay a bill? I cannot find the answer in the briefings we have had.

Before I move on to Part 3 I will reiterate what other noble Lords have said about the unacceptable level of mobile reception throughout the country. In some areas you can get it, in others you cannot. It is absolutely hopeless when we can get it very much more regularly and easily when we are abroad.

On Part 3 and the Government’s intentions to look at online pornography, clearly there are those who enjoy access to pornography, just as there are those who enjoy taking drugs or smoking. In all three cases the problem is not only the enjoyment but the urge to involve others, particularly those under the age of consent. I agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, clearly said. I will not repeat what she said, but this is a huge problem. I would love to see pornography banned altogether, but that is an impossibility. However, we certainly need to make sure that it is controlled in an acceptable manner.

Finally, I will say a few words on confidentiality and personal data. Paragraph 33 on page 11 of the Explanatory Notes states that,

“the Bill will enable access to civil registration data like births, deaths and marriages so that public authorities do not send letters to people who are deceased”.

Having lost my husband three years ago, I very much appreciate any move to stop that from happening. I feel that if this is the level of justification employed by the Government, we should look more closely at both the mania for sharing data and the implications it has for trespass upon privacy.

There is a difference between improving a public service and selection, often by a computer, of individuals deemed to be in need of that service. I am particularly concerned that access to sensitive data is to be extended from those who have always been at the forefront of welfare provision to those whose concern for their own welfare, otherwise known as profit, has been notable. For example, who is to decide that my home is hard to heat? Who is to decree that my income is below some limit that renders it acceptable? Even if they are right, why should that information be passed to service providers whose discretion and public spiritedness is often the butt of ridicule? Freedom of information requests to Ofgem resulted last week in the publication of preliminary figures concerning the amount of money taken from customers’ accounts and held by suppliers. The sum quoted on the radio was billions of pounds.

The Data Protection Act is often quoted and I have no reason to doubt that many organisations abide by its provisions. However, when private data are divulged, how are we to find the person or organisation responsible if HMRC data are to be made available to persons unknown? In this country, personal taxation has been private and this Bill does not set limits. Will the data consist of the names, national insurance numbers and addresses of those who earn less than the tax threshold, or will there be much more detail? Page 74 of the Explanatory Notes lists the Secretaries of State for justice, education, transport, international development and culture, as well as the Duchy of Lancaster, as recipients. Does the digital economy require all this information to be disclosed, and, if so, why? If the Minister cannot answer my questions tonight, I would be grateful if he would do so in due course.

So although I welcome the Bill, I, like other noble Lords, have some questions about its implications. The digital age is opening up new opportunities, most importantly to increase education and learning. There is a whole range of possibilities with new jobs. One or two speakers have said that the Bill lacks ambition, but we need to back it because we really must move forward—and quickly.