Oral Answers to Questions

Matt Warman Excerpts

Thursday 8th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Michael Ellis]

It is extremely important that we do that, and my hon. Friend is a doughty champion for his constituency. He is absolutely right about the importance of the work that our volunteers do to encourage footfall.

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

10. What progress his Department is making on developing the Government's internet safety strategy.

[The Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Matt Hancock)]

We are committed to making the UK the safest place in the world to be online. In October, we published the internet safety strategy Green Paper. On Tuesday the Prime Minister confirmed that we will bring forward the social media code of practice and an annual internet transparency report, as proposed in the Green Paper, and we will publish a full response in the spring.

[Matt Warman]

It is clear that teaching internet safety in schools will be a crucial part of all that the Government are doing for the future. At the moment, there is a huge number of disparate endeavours from a range of sources. It seems to me that they are in some ways less than the sum of their parts. I wonder whether the Government would consider backing a body such as Internet Matters to really deliver gold standard education in this area.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Hancock]

I will take that as another consideration in the gambling review, the response to which we are looking at right now.

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

T6. Back to the app. Too many users of Android phones have been unlucky enough to read the words “Matt Hancock has stopped” when the app crashes. Can the Secretary of State reassure us that, for all the fun we have had over this, it is a genuinely meaningful attempt to get in touch with constituents and that, as the owner of the fastest-growing social network in the country, he will continue to press on?

[Matt Hancock]

I can assure my hon. Friend that I have not stopped and I will not stop communicating with my constituents, which is what this is all about.

Telecommunications Infrastructure (Relief from Non-Domestic Rates) Bill

Matt Warman Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 10th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

Let me begin by thanking my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare), although he is no longer in the Chamber—and, indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately)—for being so kind about the work that I have done on broadband. When my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset said that I would not speak in the debate, I was going to leap to my feet like some sort of digital gazelle, but I thought I would keep the House waiting. We have heard several extensive speeches about the many benefits of Government investment in digital infrastructure, but my speech will be somewhat briefer.

My hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent said that some of her constituents were not able to do something as old-fashioned as making a mobile telephone call. Mobile telephone calls are, in our modern world, pretty old-fashioned, but we should not forget that not many years ago they were simply impossible in this place. Since then, we have not only been through the period of the invention of mobile phones; we have been through a period during which all our constituents railed against the installation of mobile phone masts. Now we have come full circle, and they rail against the absence of mobile phone masts. The digital revolution has thoroughly revolved.

I want to make some brief points about the Bill. It seems obvious to me that, although adopting this approach to encouraging digital infrastructure investment means that the Government are forgoing a certain amount of revenue from business rates, their fostering of digital innovation and infrastructure investment will ensure that the amount they get back through the broader benefits of economic growth is many times greater than the amount that the business rates themselves cost the state and the taxpayer. That strikes me as a definition of the way in which the Government should be using public money, pump-priming economic growth to allow the development of an economy that works in the digital way that, as we have heard, our children will expect, and that all modern businesses already expect.

I commend the Government for taking that approach. It is also commendable that, by giving the relief a five-year term—which my right hon. Friend the Minister hinted could even be extended—they are giving firms an incentive to invest in installing fibre now, even if they do not turn it on, so to speak, for a number of years. I hope that we will secure the economies of scale of broader investment while continuing to benefit from business rate relief on that investment. That can only be a good thing, and it also addresses some of the concerns raised by the industry before the introduction of the Bill.

We should bear in mind that the growth in demand for fibre will only increase. When I was a journalist writing about the launch of the iPlayer—the BBC cunningly launched it in Christmas Day, because it knew that demand would be rather more limited—the BBC did not think for one moment that it would itself be broadcasting in 4K come 2016-17. Still less did it think that we would, as a matter of course, live in households in which half a dozen people wanted to download the 4K streams that broadcasters now routinely provide.

It is no small irony that, by all accounts, when Bazalgette built the London sewers he offered quadruple the capacity that was required in Victorian London. Now we see that that quadruple capacity has been more than exhausted by a growing population, and we should take the same approach when it comes to investing in our digital infrastructure. To point out that a prominent Bazalgette is still involved in the life of our digital nation is not in any way to draw a comparison between sewage and the modern digital output with which he is concerned. The huge benefits provided by the man who brought us “Big Brother” and a host of other programmes are not to be described in that way in the slightest degree. All we can say is that this is clearly a family that has contributed a huge amount to the life of our nation, at every level of our infrastructure.

In this day and age, there is never an excuse for underestimating the amount of digital capacity that we will require. Although 4K may appear to be perfectly adequate for our purposes today, we will look back on it in a number of years and see that it is paltry in comparison with what we will be using on a routine basis, whether that involves virtual reality, driverless cars, or all the technologies that will eradicate the digital scourge of fly-parking mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Amanda Milling).

We should not only encourage the Government to proceed with the Bill as quickly as possible, but encourage any Government to ensure that this sort of rate relief applies to investment in digital infrastructure, whether mobile or fixed, thus ensuring—following the launch of the iPlayer not so very long ago—that the internet of things that is now coming upon us will be fully served. That will be thanks to the investment of Governments such as this.