Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Bill

Lord Clement-Jones Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Committee stage
Wednesday 29th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

My Lords, when the Electronic Communications Code was revised in 2017, the department committed to keeping track of developments and assessing the impact of those changes. I was grateful to the Minister for holding a meeting about the Bill prior to Second Reading, but when I queried the status of that review the response was that the Government had never explicitly committed to making its findings public. This leads me to Amendment 45.

Amendment 45 would require the Secretary of State to undertake a review and lay the findings before Parliament. This could be a new exercise or a matter of pulling together existing information. The amendment calls for a particular focus on issues around rents, but it also includes a request for a judgment on the extent to which the 2017 revisions have accelerated the rollout. This is a theme touched on by the other amendments in this group. I am sure the Government feel that they have a good story to tell, so I invite the Minister to accept the invitation to tell it.

Amendment 48 brings together a number of topics which were lightly touched on earlier today and calls for a comprehensive strategy for resolving issues around landowner rights, competition within the sector and so on. We believe that the department has a number of working groups which are supposed to deal with these issues. It would be helpful if the Minister could tell us when those working groups last met and when they are next due to meet. There is clearly work to be done to speed up the rollout of telecoms infrastructure and to ensure fairness in the system, which has also been a theme throughout the debate today.

We hope that the Government can clearly signpost how they are addressing the various issues raised in these amendments. If not, they are very likely to be revisited on Report. I beg to move.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

I shall speak to Amendments 47, 49 and 50, and I support the amendments in this group to which the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, has just spoken: Amendments 45 and 48.

As regards Amendment 47, as I said at Second Reading, we all seem to be trapped in a time loop on telecoms, with continual consultations and changes to the ECC and continual retreat by the Government on their 1 gigabit per second broadband rollout pledge. In the Explanatory Notes, we were at 85% by 2025; this now seems to have shifted to 2026. There has been much government bravado in this area, but it is clear that the much-trumpeted £5 billion announced last year for project gigabit, to bring gigabit coverage to the hardest-to-reach areas, has not yet been fully allocated and that barely a penny has been spent.

Then, we have all the access and evaluation amendments to the Electronic Communications Code and the Digital Economy Act 2017. Changes to the ECC were meant to do the trick; then, the Electronic Communications and Wireless Telegraphy (Amendment) (European Electronic Communications Code and EU Exit) Regulations were heralded as enabling a stronger emphasis on incentivising investment in very high capacity networks, promoting the efficient use of spectrum, ensuring effective consumer protection and engagement and supporting the Government’s digital ambitions and plans to deliver nationwide gigabit-capable connectivity.

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[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

I am sorry to interrupt the Minister. As he knows, certainty is absolutely crucial for business. What is always created when new legislation supersedes old legislation is uncertainty. What confidence can the Minister possibly have that the impact of this Bill will be beneficial to rollout?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

With such an accelerating market, thanks to the pro-investment environment that the Government are creating, it is quite challenging to quantify the extent to which progress is attributable to any single piece of legislation in a market that reflects so many factors. That is one reason why we think it would be of limited value.

My noble friend Lord Northbrook asked me to comment on the Centre for Economics and Business Research report on the 2017 reforms. We believe that the CEBR report does not provide a sufficiently rounded picture in its assessment of how the 2017 reforms have affected the pace of telecommunications delivery. The Government, as I have said, acknowledged in 2017 that reductions in payments could make landowners less keen to enter into agreements to host apparatus on their land. We expected an initial slowdown following the implementation of the 2017 reforms while the market adapted to them, but our understanding, informed by our conversations and consultation, is that both new and renewal agreements are now being successfully concluded. For instance, we were informed in January this year that, since 2017, 900 agreements had been renewed and that 83.5% of those agreements were concluded consensually, to give noble Lords some data.