Armistice Day: Centenary

Earl Cathcart Excerpts

Monday 5th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Earl Cathcart (Con)]

My Lords, Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday are about remembering all those—both men and women—who fought and died during the wars. It is often a very private remembrance for us to remember those in our own families who fought in the wars, some of whom died. The noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, talked about research into our family histories. I have recently completed our family tree and I got the Cathcarts back, father and son, to the Normans. The first few were knights before they were created Barons in about 1400. In 1513, all the Cathcart brothers were annihilated—killed at the Battle of Flodden, along with their King, James IV of Scotland. Luckily, the eldest brother already had a baby son, otherwise I would not be standing here today. Thank goodness they had no family planning in those days.

My father was the seventh general in the direct line of Cathcarts, with three other generals in branches of the tree, making a total of 10 generals in all. There were also four ambassadors in the direct line, and one or two governors-general. After I completed the family tree, I thought to myself: “Beat that if you can”. Buoyed up by my success in completing that family tree, I am now in the process of doing my mother’s. It is a work in progress, but I have so far identified 11 generals, one ambassador and two admirals, one of whom was awarded the VC. So, in my mind, her family definitely did beat that. I was in the Army for a few years, but I never reached their dizzy heights. With hindsight, I must have been a bitter disappointment to both families; I broke the mould.

Seven of my grandparents’ generation fought in the First World War; three of my great-uncles were killed. This is not a dissimilar experience from that of millions of other families. During the Second World War, my father and uncle both joined up and happily survived. Strangely, I never heard either of them talk about their experiences during the war; I learned more about their war after they died. One can understand why many of that generation wanted to draw a line under their painful experiences and just move on.

That is not quite true. My father mentioned just two incidents. The first was when we were talking about a friend of mine. My father said:

“Of course, he was my godson. It was such a pity that his father, Nigel, never knew that he had a son”.


When I pressed him to explain, he said that his tank battalion was advancing on the enemy in Normandy and when he looked to his right, he saw Nigel’s tank being blown up and on fire. He then saw Nigel, his great friend, escaping through the turret with his clothes on fire. He died before he hit the ground. Millions of servicemen must have had similar experiences.

The second occasion was when I was a young officer. My father insisted on taking me to Belsen concentration camp. While there, he said that he and other officers and men were made to visit the camp the day after it was liberated, in order to witness first-hand the horrendous things that had taken place there. He said that the horrors of what they saw that day stuck with him as if it were yesterday.

War is a horrific business, and all of us living today have much for which to thank those who fought and died, men and women, so that we can live with the freedoms, peace and democracy that we so cherish—and perhaps, to some extent, take for granted. Long may we remember them.

Electronic Communications (Universal Service) (Broadband) Order 2018

Earl Cathcart Excerpts

Tuesday 5th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I add my support to the Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, and I share his concern that the proposed broadband universal service obligation is disappointing. I have not studied the helpful documentation accompanying the order in great detail but my overall reaction, as someone with a home in west Wales—I am following the script set out by the noble Lord at the beginning—with no current mobile telephone coverage and rather limited broadband options, is that the situation of myself and others in the same boat is unlikely to be much improved by the USO as proposed. I welcome the principle of the USO and the fact that it includes a minimum upload speed as well as a minimum download speed, but 1 megabit is not enough.

One of the great potential benefits of universal broadband, as we have heard, is that it makes it possible to run a small or even medium-sized business from anywhere in the country, however remote. However, such businesses depend at least as much, if not more, on their ability to upload data to their customers and partners as on being able to download material from the internet. Unlike private users, they are less likely to spend time and bandwidth downloading films, videos and social media postings. I recognise that full fibre, much as I would welcome it—either right to the premises or, indeed, to anywhere reasonably nearby—is unlikely to reach all of the rural areas where many of the 5% of premises not currently receiving superfast broadband are located. What will the order do to promote the development of new approaches and technologies that can reach those locations? It seems to me that far too much reliance has been placed on Broadband Delivery UK, Openreach in particular, to achieve the 95% coverage, using largely old-fashioned technologies with limited expansion capability.

We were rescued from a BT Broadband service that rarely, if ever, reached 0.2 Mbps by a local ISP, appropriately called ResQ, which offers a line-of-sight fixed-wireless service with speeds of around 10 Mbps for both download and upload. Surely it would be better to incentivise and promote competition in developing new approaches, whether based on fibre, fixed wireless, satellite or even the use of 4G mobile networks, with the capability of reaching premises everywhere in the UK with speeds more like 30 Mbps than the 10 Mbps in the order. Members of your Lordships’ EU Internal Market Sub-Committee who visited the Harwell space centre recently heard from a smallish satellite company with plans to offer global high-speed broadband coverage via satellite. There are opportunities to explore technologies other than fibre.

I note from the Government’s impact assessment that a USO specifying 30 Mbps download and 6 Mbps upload could reach 2.6 million premises in scope, as opposed to 1.05 million for the proposed approach. That is well over double the number of premises able to access superfast broadband for a relatively modest extra investment.

Finally, I ask the Minister to explain how the USO will actually be enforced. If I am not getting my 10 Mbps, what do I do? How soon must the service be provided and by whom? I also note with concern that if it costs more than £3,400 to provide it, the end user—that is, me—is going to have to pay the extra.

The UK is already a considerable way behind many other nations in its rollout of truly high-speed broadband. In my view, the introduction of the USO, which is indeed welcome in principle, should be grasped not as a way of trying to catch up a bit but as an opportunity to get ahead and to open the doors to all the potential internet-based applications of the future. We do not know yet what those will be but we can be pretty sure they will require more broadband capacity, rather than less.

[Earl Cathcart (Con)]

My Lords, I am sure that my noble friend Lord Ashton of Hyde will know what I am going to say before I say it so I will not disappoint him—or the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson. I live in Norfolk and as in many other areas of the country, as everybody has said so far, we receive appalling broadband speeds. It is so bad that when Defra sends me a long farming document, I cannot download it, so I have to ring up my agent in Norwich, get him to print it out and send it to me in the post. That is hardly 21st-century communications but at least the post is reliable.

We have been promised speeds of 2 Mbps and now the universal service obligation of 10 Mbps. As my noble friend found out for himself when he stayed with me last summer, our speeds are very slow. He measured our speed and found it was a mere 0.03 megabits per second—hardly the promised 2 Mbps, let alone 10 Mbps. He helpfully gave me a number of contacts to improve our speeds and I also contacted Better Broadband for Norfolk, an organisation set up by Norfolk County Council and BT to help all those areas in Norfolk that get bad speeds.

I can now report to my noble friend Lord Ashton of Hyde that our broadband speed is still 0.03 Mbps. Nothing gets done. I have given up being frustrated by all this but I feel sorry for others in the village—architects, photographers, designers, et cetera—who rely on good broadband speeds for their business, let alone schoolchildren trying to research their homework.

My question to my noble friend is: why are the Government spending hundreds of millions of pounds on superfast broadband speeds when they have not got the basics right? Surely they should ensure that everyone has adequate speeds before embarking on a product that not everybody wants or needs. For all the good it will do me, I look forward to my noble friend’s response.

Digital Understanding

Earl Cathcart Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Earl Cathcart (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness’s Motion is excellent for those who receive adequate broadband speed. For those who do not, it is meaningless. In answer to my recent Written Question on poor broadband speeds, the Minister said that in this Parliament, the universal service obligation would give “everyone” a “legal right” to request 10 megabits per second. He also said:

“All homes and businesses can now gain access to broadband speeds of 2 Megabits”.


That is just not true. In spite of me and my fellow parishioners constantly asking BT and Openreach for better speeds, nothing ever happens. Our speeds are woefully poor to non-existent, as my noble friend Lord Ashton found out when he stayed with me in Norfolk this summer. He tested our speed and found it was a mere 0.3 megabits per second, which was nowhere near the promised 2 megabits he assured us we had in his written reply.

So where do the Government get their information, which is quite clearly so inaccurate, from? Could it be from Ofcom, which acknowledges that,

“many homes and small businesses still are unable to receive broadband speeds that are adequate to reliably perform a range of common online activities. Almost a quarter of a million UK premises … cannot get a download speed of more than 2Mbit/s.”?

A quarter of a million premises might just about be right for rural Norfolk—I bet the figure is far higher for the whole country. So where has Ofcom got its figures from? It certainly has not visited my home, as my noble friend did, or it too might have discovered a speed of only 0.3 megabits, which is worse than many third world countries.

Since my Written Question and my noble friend’s visit, has his department met Ofcom to enquire why progress in rural areas is so slow? If not, why not? Has his department met BT or Openreach regarding expected progress? Again, if not, why not? Or is getting acceptable speeds to rural areas just too difficult or too expensive?

The Government have just announced another £400 million to boost high-speed broadband, when many parts of the country still do not have the promised 2 megabits Would his money not be better spent providing the basic service that has long been promised the country? Those still languishing in broadband poverty would no doubt welcome the Motion of the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, if only they had adequate broadband speeds, so they could rise to the challenge.