Digital Economy Bill

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

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

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing the Bill and I am grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to the debate. I sense a good deal of commonality in the views that have been expressed today.

We on our side welcome many of the objectives of the Bill. This is a fast-moving industry, and clearly the current legislation is no longer fit for purpose. Like others in the debate today, though, we are concerned about the Bill’s lack of ambition. It was an opportunity to reach into the future, to design a strong and healthy digital sector that would have secured its reputation as a market leader in the world. Inherent in that model would have been robust systems and checks to address concerns about issues like data privacy, cybersecurity, big government and a lack of digital resilience. The Bill ducks many of those issues, although they are in fact undermining people’s trust in the online world.

The Bill also fails to address the revolution in jobs and skills that was very eloquently flagged up by my noble friend Lord Puttnam and a number of other noble Lords in the debate. Instead, it merely addresses a series of relatively uncontroversial provisions. A number of people have described it as a Christmas tree Bill—in fact I think we have got as far as a forest now—on which a number of disconnected policies have been hung. We agree with that analysis. It leaves us with a strong sense of frustration and the inevitability that we will be back here next year and the year after with further iterations of the Bill, which can best be described as a “patch and mend” approach to the challenges that we are facing. This approach has been compounded by the late changes to the Bill on issues such as age verification and net neutrality, which clearly will need a significant input from this House to perfect. I am sure that as ever we will rise to this challenge and the Bill will leave this House in better shape than when it arrived.

I turn to some of the specific policies in the Bill. First, a number of noble Lords raised concerns about the broadband universal service obligation. This is not surprising as it is an issue that has caused massive frustration over the last few years, peppered as it has been with failed government promises and missed targets. This is our opportunity to get it right. As many noble Lords have said, though, the Government’s objectives in the Bill are simply not ambitious enough, and I am sorry to say that I disagree with my noble friend Lord Young on this matter.

The proposal for 10 megabits per second is less than half what is needed to achieve the updated definition of superfast broadband. It will leave some households in the slow lane and others completely out of range of the new offer. That is why we will be tabling more ambitious amendments for a future-proofed state-of-the-art broadband provision, as well as independent evaluation of the speed of delivery.

We agree with the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and others that we should be embracing the future technology that mobile can deliver, particularly in reaching the most isolated communities. We believe that we should be setting similar ambitious targets for mobile, which are so far missing in the Bill. My noble friend Lord Gordon made a compelling case for the sharing of mobile masts and the need to reconsider roaming, particularly in those dead zones where no provision is currently available.

Secondly, we welcome the Government’s initial steps to control children’s access to online pornography. We have, of course, rehearsed those arguments many times in this House. I pay tribute, as others have done, to the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, for her tenacity in continuing to pursue this issue. However, we are concerned that many of the proposals have been introduced late in the proceedings in the other House and we have not had the chance to give them sufficient scrutiny. We recognise that no system of parental filters or age verification can provide the perfect answer to this huge social challenge. However, during the course of the Bill’s proceedings, we hope to work with the Minister and the industry to produce a robust system that, on the one hand, protects children and, on the other, addresses the legitimate concerns of adults regarding privacy and the right to access pornography legitimately. In particular, we want to be assured that websites which flout the system cannot find simple tricks to circumvent the system that we are establishing; that age-verification providers are properly regulated; that on-demand material is subject to the same tests as those of other online services; and that the new role allocated to the British Board of Film Classification is properly overseen by an independent body.

We are also aware that the relationship between the new EU rules on net neutrality and the systems in place for parental filters needs to be resolved by the new amendments promised by the Minister in the other place. We look forward to scrutinising those amendments when they appear to make sure that they are fit for purpose.

There has been a widespread view around the Chamber today that we will not sort this problem by legislation alone. We have consistently joined with others in the House to press the case for compulsory sex and relationship education in schools, and we will continue to press this case during the course of the Bill’s proceedings. We hope that the Government, belatedly, will come to see the sense of those arguments.

Thirdly, we want to address the real concerns about digital government and data sharing. We can all think of areas of government where improved data sharing makes perfect sense, but we need to make sure that it does not become the default option. Proper controls need to be put in place to safeguard access to personal data and ensure that information is used only for the purpose originally requested. We will be tabling amendments to make sure that proper independent controls are in place to sign off and oversee the use of data.

We are also proposing the establishment of a big data commission to review the collection and use of data by government and by commercial bodies. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, quite rightly raised particular concerns about private bodies increasingly being involved in delivering public services. There need to be controls over how they use publicly accessed data. We will want to see a public register where all disclosures of data will be logged so that everybody has the right to see what is going on. We would also like a requirement for breaches of data security to be reported as a matter of course.

We would like the Bill to include measures to tackle online abuse and trolling, which a number of noble Lords have mentioned. In particular, we want to look further at how to control abuse on social media which, as we know, is an increasing scourge on our society.

Fourthly, we want to revisit the unwarranted decision by the Government to transfer responsibility to the BBC for setting the over-75s concessionary TV licence. We are not ready to let this issue lie, as some noble Lords have suggested. Apart from the fact that it is a clear breach of the Conservative manifesto, it sets a worrying precedent by passing part of our welfare system to an organisation with no direct accountability to the electorate.

As part of the scrutiny of the BBC’s new royal charter, we will also want to check that the new powers of Ofcom to regulate the BBC are proportionate. In scrutinising these clauses, we also want to ensure that the predominance of public service broadcasters on TV listings is protected and extended to online on-demand services.

Several noble Lords mentioned the importance of providing audio-visual services for those with disability across all on-demand providers. We very much welcome the Minister’s commitment today and look forward to receiving details in due course.

Like others, we welcome the proposed repeal of Section 73, with all the benefits that it will bring to PSBs. We would like to follow it up by ensuring that any profits that occur from it are reinvested in programme development. We are also concerned about the concept of a transition, and we would like to explore exactly what is intended by it, as we feel that speed is of the essence in introducing the changes.

In the spirit of equalising offline and online transactions, we also welcome the Minister’s commitment today to extend public lending rights to e-book lending; again, we would like to explore its reach. On the basis of parity, we also look forward to exploring whether VAT should continue to be paid on downloaded books.

Finally, our colleagues in the Commons played a significant role in the cross-party initiative to tackle automated ticket touting, or bots. We will be tabling an amendment to end the use of digital ticket purchasing systems which buy event tickets in large numbers through automated systems, thereby blocking access for real fans, whose only choice then is to buy them on the secondary market at inflated prices. As I understand it, the Minister in the Commons raised concerns about the wording of the amendment tabled there but expressed some sympathy for the cause. I very much hope that the noble Lord will agree to work with us on this issue to find the right words to end this rip-off in ticket sales.

On that issue, and on many others, we look forward to working with the noble Lord as we follow these changes through the course of the Bill, and we look forward to his response.