Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Harding of Winscombe Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 6th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I support the Bill. This is very technical legislation, but technical does not make for unimportant, even today. In fact, my experience in business is that it is in the detailed technical and operational delivery that businesses succeed or fail—and when it comes to building national infrastructure, the same is true.

The strategy is relatively easy. I spent seven years as the chief executive of a telecoms company and, during that time and in the five years since, I have not found any community, business or politician who wants a different outcome. Everyone wants ubiquitously available, safe to use, affordable and, above all, high-speed connectivity at home, at work and on the move, on an ever-increasing number of devices, everywhere. The direction of travel is not up for debate. What is are the technical details to get us there as effectively as possible, which is what this Bill is about. As technical and detailed as it may be, it is none the less extremely important. It is in the shaping of these detailed laws and regulations that we determine whether we have the effective digital connectivity that we are all so agreed upon.

I am supportive of both parts of the Bill and will speak very briefly on the first half, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Fox, said, is, I suspect, less contentious. I will then speak in more detail about the second half.

I am pleased to see in Part 1 a clear framework for regulating the security of connected devices. I have been involved in a related area of digital regulation—child internet safety—for over a decade, and that experience has taught me that it is necessary to put regulation on to a legal footing. For far too long, technology companies have tried to persuade us that self-regulation is the right route for the digital world, yet we are seeing in every area of digital, as here, that self-regulation leads to no regulation and that we need to do our job as legislators and set the rules of the game. The digital world is really no different from the physical world, where responsible capitalism works best when we set legal guardrails and encourage commercial creativity and innovation within them. As such, I welcome Part 1.

Turning to Part 2, even those stakeholders concerned about it are united in their agreement that enabling the rapid and effective build-out of mobile and fixed digital connectivity is an essential part of modern society. The devil really is in the detail here. I believe the Bill strikes the right balance between protecting property owners’ rights and the broader benefits to the whole of society of speeding up the delivery of faster connectivity.

Again, we should take our cues from the physical world. The Government are right not to move away from the changes in valuation methodology made in 2017, bringing telecoms infrastructure in line with other much older physical utilities, and right to extend this approach to renewals. I appreciate that this has meant a material reduction in rent, but as telecoms matures, surely it is fair to consumers, and ultimately landowners, to treat it in the same way as other essential utilities.

It is also important that, wherever possible, we enable rather than restrict competition in the building of these telecoms networks. When I first came into the industry in 2010, BT was not investing at all in building full-fibre networks. For the best part of a decade, the UK lagged behind many other countries because BT preferred to upgrade its copper, in large part because there was no credible threat to its Openreach-monopoly copper infrastructure. We are in a very different position today, with several alternative fibre providers building scale networks, which is providing consumer choice and spurring on Openreach to invest. It is in the detailed changes to telecoms regulation that this has been made possible; among other things, by forcing Openreach to make its ducts and poles open to alternative providers.

This physical infrastructure access—or PIA, to those of us in the industry—is a very important ingredient in speeding up the rollout of fibre broadband. It has enabled competition, which in turn is driving investment. As currently drafted, the Bill extends the effectiveness of PIA by allowing the sharing of existing ducts under private land, which will significantly speed up and extend rollout, and resolves the anomaly of different rules for cable duct infrastructure if built before or after 2017. However, it is not clear how telegraph poles are treated. This is where the detail starts to really matter. I ask my noble friend the Minister to clarify that operators cannot only lay cable to a telegraph pole and string fibre in the air between poles but can roll fibre up the pole itself. That may seem obvious, but if we do not get this sort of detail right in regulations, you cannot build the connectivity.

Another key area where we need to be careful about protecting competition is in access to multiple-dwelling units, or MDUs. I have huge sympathy with Members of the other place who have proposed amendments aimed at making it easier for Openreach to fibre-enable blocks of flats where it is having trouble contacting landlords. It is so important that we do not exacerbate existing non-digital inequalities in the digital world, which is exactly what happens when the fibre rollout goes past blocks of flats in many communities across London and other cities.

But—and it is a big “but”—there is a very big difference between the cabling in multiple-dwelling units and the ducts and poles in rural areas. Ducts and poles are now part of the PIA regime I mentioned earlier, so competing fibre providers can all use them. Openreach’s existing copper cables in multiple-dwelling units are its to use alone, so relaxing the rules for Openreach in MDUs such that it does not need permission from the landlord to upgrade to fibre is not only an extraordinary power of entry—one we do not even give the police—but gives Openreach a huge competitive advantage. Tempting though it might be in the short run, relatively recent history shows that embedding an infrastructure provider’s monopoly—in fact, embedding this infrastructure provider’s monopoly—is never good for consumers in the end. I encourage my noble friend the Minister to resist similar amendments should they be brought to this place.

With the not inconsiderable challenges our economy faces as we emerge from Covid, we need detailed supply-side changes such as this Bill that will help drive growth across the country via digitally enabled, safe, secure and competitive markets. As such, I am pleased to support it.