Chi Onwurah
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Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Nuttall. I congratulate the hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) on securing this important debate. I too must declare an interest: I worked as a chartered electrical engineer in telecommunications for 20 years before coming into Parliament, although I never worked for BT. I always wanted digital connectivity—broadband and mobile telecoms—to be higher up the parliamentary agenda. However, I am disappointed that it has moved higher up because of service failure rather than because of the social and economic potential that digital and telecommunications connectivity offers. The notoriety of certain cabinets—was it cabinet number 7?
Chi Onwurah
Such notoriety is not to be welcomed, but I believe we will see more and more cabinets getting a national profile.
The economic benefits of communications infrastructure —or, as we have heard in some contributions, any kind of infrastructure that does not involve running up and down the street—are well known. We have heard detailed contributions about the limitations of that infrastructure from the hon. Members for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Corri Wilson), for Strangford (Jim Shannon), for Rochester and Strood (Kelly Tolhurst), for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Martyn Day), for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O'Hara) and for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Calum Kerr), and we have heard some heart-rending stories about the impact on their constituents. We also heard from the hon. Members for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) and for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman).
As the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk said, we should have connectivity from Hampshire to the Outer Hebrides and everywhere in between. The economic benefits of better communications have been accepted by the Government. Their own broadband impact study states:
“It is now widely accepted that the availability and adoption of affordable broadband plays an important role in increasing productivity.”
The UK has one of the worst productivity records in Europe.
As well as economic benefits, there are social benefits to connectivity, which we have heard about in detail in today’s debate, from online shopping, which is often cheaper, to access to more public and private services and remote healthcare. It is not right that some people cannot access those essential benefits of modern living because of the lack of a digital infrastructure. As has been said, the internet opens up a world of free education; indeed, it is a window on the globe. However, many people are missing out.
Many hon. Members focused on basic telephony; others emphasised mobile and broadband. The Minister recently admitted that his mobile infrastructure project was a failure, but he still claims that the broadband roll-out has been a success. Only last week, he was once again rubbishing Labour’s pledge to have fully funded 2 megabits per second universal broadband for all by 2012. We have heard today that far too many people—more than official figures admit—still do not have even that service. The Minister trumpets the universal service obligation of 10 megabits per second by 2020, but he should note that within eight years the broadband universal service that he proposes will have increased by only 1 megabit per year, and his commitment is entirely unfunded.
The importance of broadband for the rural economy has also been emphasised. A third of small and medium-sized enterprises do not have access to superfast broadband, so we have tabled amendments to the Enterprise Bill, which we will be debating in the House today, to improve the broadband available to SMEs, which, as is often said, are a driver of the economy.
Broadband is the fourth utility. That has been the consensus of today’s contributions. The Government have a responsibility to deliver it, and they have failed. I, too, do not wish to focus the blame entirely on BT—it is not BT’s responsibility, because it was the Government who did not ensure that there was competition so that we have the standards we need.
Ofcom’s recent consultation on the strategic review of communications found:
“The single biggest issue attracting comment”
was “quality of service”. It went on to say:
“Openreach’s performance is a particular source of concern.”
It concluded:
“These problems can only be addressed through more effective network competition or through regulation.”
It also stated:
“Over time we have found it necessary to apply more prescriptive regulation in order to address concerns about Openreach’s performance.”
That is a clear admission that competition cannot now be relied on to improve service standards, because the Government have failed to foster a competitive market-led roll-out.
I do not know whether betting is in order, but may I ask the Minister to forecast how many times he will be called to the House in the next Session to try to explain his failure on broadband and digital infrastructure? We have a related debate on this subject tomorrow.
The Ofcom review focused on two things: service standards, as we have heard, and opening up duct and pole access to support competition. How will the Minister determine that we have finally achieved a competitive environment in broadband and digital connectivity? What will he do if that is not achieved? In the absence of competition, how will he ensure that the service standards set out by Ofcom are met? What will he do to ensure that the targets are not gamed by BT and others, and that there is appropriate action if they are not met? How long does he think it will take for BT’s service standards to meet the expectations set out in today’s debate? An important point made today was that expectations are rising. As broadband and digital connectivity become more and more essential, what measures will he take to ensure that such expectations are met in this country?
All the measures set out in the Ofcom report are subject to further consultation and debate, and no doubt many lawyers will be present. Ofcom will need the right kind of political support to ensure that those measures are put in place. Our digital infrastructure is critical and strategic, and we have wasted five years in the policy wilderness not improving our digital infrastructure. The Minister will need to focus minds on that rather than on the exit from Europe that his Secretary of State is focused upon.
The Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy (Mr Edward Vaizey)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Nuttall. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) on securing this excellent debate. She has unleashed tales of woe from colleagues in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and no doubt there are similar tales of woe in Wales, so the question is: what are we going to do about this? Before I move on, I should thank the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Calum Kerr) for his judicious response to the debate on behalf of the Scottish National party—he took a better approach than his party’s approach to Sunday trading, I must say. He has vast experience in the sector and made a very balanced case about the issues.
Of course, that contrasted with the traditional speech given by Labour’s shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah), who is clearly launching Labour’s long march to power by promising 2 megabits to the country. Labour remains entirely silent on which policies will deliver the superfast speeds that people now want.
Mr Vaizey
How are they going to pay for the fibre that she is shouting about from a sedentary position? Of course, there is nothing. There has been only one failure in the superfast broadband roll-out programme that I have supervised and that was in south Yorkshire, where we inherited a useless Labour contract and had to write off £50 million of taxpayers’ money. Everything else has been an unadulterated success. We now have 93% of the country able to receive fibre, 90% of the country able to get superfast speeds of 24 megabits and above, and 50% of the country able to get ultrafast broadband speeds of 100 megabits and above.
I should say, though, that I have no truck with Openreach and its customer service levels. This morning I read an article in The Times by Danny Finkelstein, who is a remain campaigner. He is so depressed about the woeful leave campaign that he set out some measures that he thought the leave campaign should concentrate on. So, I shall give a speech on behalf of Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition.
Let me begin, as a member of the Opposition, by regretting the low levels of satisfaction with BT Openreach under the last Labour Government. There were low levels of satisfaction for pretty much everything under the last Labour Government, but they were woefully low for BT Openreach. They have improved under this Government, but they remain very much behind other providers. TalkTalk runs Openreach close in levels of customer satisfaction, but Virgin and Sky are way ahead. Perhaps BT should spend less money on sports rights and hire Sky’s customer services director instead.
As the Minister responsible for telecoms, I find myself a bit like a person who has been forced to adopt an unruly teenager. I go around telling my colleagues that he means well and is doing his best, but they simply tell me about the latest outrage they have suffered at his hands. That is the unfortunate position in which I find myself when it comes to Openreach customer service. I hold regional surgeries for MPs so that colleagues can tell me about the mess that Openreach has made of one or another connection, and I try to sort things out as best as possible. I also write to MPs every quarter to update them on the roll-out.
In defence of Openreach I should say briefly that, rather like the BBC compared with ITV, it suffers because it is the national provider and we all feel that we have a stake in it. There will inevitably be more complaints about BT. For example, I noticed that my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) decried the fact that BT has not rolled out to the whole of Cheltenham in a way that he perhaps would not decry Virgin, because he does not expect Virgin to deliver a 100% roll-out in Cheltenham. Yet, when he thinks about it, BT and Virgin are in exactly the same position: they are both private telecoms providers rolling out a network.
Nevertheless, BT has a universal service obligation and is seen as the national provider. I acknowledge the fact that it has put in £10 billion of investment, that it has hired 3,000 engineers, that it is bringing its call centres back to the UK and that it continues to innovate with new technologies such as G.fast. Indeed, when I dealt with BT over Christmas and new year in relation to the floods in the north, it pulled its finger out and did a good job for many people who had suffered outages because of the flooding. There was a particularly important issue with emergency resilience. Still, there is absolutely no question but that BT must do better. I have spent five years in this job being inundated with tales of woe.
One other point in BT’s defence is that, because of functional separation and the fact that Openreach’s network is used by other providers, it can often be the case that the customer is contracting with, say, TalkTalk, or another provider, and the network is being provided by Openreach, and something falls between the two stools. Sometimes the provider with which the customer has contracted has simply put its order in wrong to Openreach, but it is very convenient for that provider to blame Openreach for its own failure.
As I say, Openreach must do better. As the Minister responsible, I find it particularly frustrating that I have to step in to sort out these problems. Why has Openreach not put in place a hit squad to deal with some of the more prominent complaints that come from MPs? We represent our constituents, and most of us are fairly judicious people; we do not raise complaints to Openreach unless we think they are serious. My hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Julian Knight) mentioned a 99-year-old lady who suffered a stroke. On behalf of a Labour colleague, I dealt with a factory that had been built to be ready to open specifically on the basis of when Openreach was going to connect it, but Openreach was already a year behind schedule. That cost that factory many tens of thousands of pounds. It continues to baffle me why it cannot get its act together and sort out these prominent problems.
I had to intervene on new builds. When a housing development is being put together, one would have thought it was the most obvious thing in the world that the people buying the houses are likely to be relatively young and likely to have children, and therefore likely to want, in this day and age, fast broadband connections. However, it took me a year to 18 months to bang together the heads of BT and the house builders to get an agreement. Thankfully it was put in place at the beginning of the year and now new housing developments will have superfast broadband. One would have thought it was the most obvious thing in the world that there would be lots of customers on a new housing estate of, say, a thousand homes, selling for possibly £250,000 each.
I am really pleased with the Ofcom digital communications review. On the timing, I have said on the record that by the end of the year I want to see not necessarily a full and final agreement but clarity on where we are in relation to what Ofcom is calling for in its review. There are three parts to it. First is opening up BT’s network, which really needs to be done. BT has to look at what Ofcom is proposing and come to the table with credible answers. Secondly, BT has to make concessions to what Ofcom is saying about the governance of Openreach. Thirdly, there are consumer issues, one of which is automatic compensation. We might need to consider legislation, but my current understanding is that we will not need it. We need automatic compensation for consumers and small businesses that have suffered problems with service quality. That is another thing on which I want us to be close to agreement by the end of the year.
Ofcom will start publishing its quality of service reports in early 2017, and I want to ensure that that happens. We need much clearer information from providers. I, for one, would love them to get rid of this landline rental charge that they put on our bills. They put on their adverts a nice, big, juicy low price for broadband, and then an asterisk and a line saying, “By the way, you’ll have to pay £25 a month for landline rental.” All providers, whether it is Virgin, BT, Sky or whatever, should get rid of landline rental and just charge people for what they are buying: broadband, TV and a telephone service.
I hope that the Advertising Standards Authority will crack down on how providers advertise their speeds. At the moment, if only 10% of customers are receiving the advertised speed, in the eyes of the ASA that is supposed to be okay. I totally accept that the ASA does a good job—it is a great example of self-regulation—but it really needs to go further on that. In my humble opinion, at least 75% of people should be getting the speeds that the broadband providers are advertising.
As I think you have probably worked out, Mr Nuttall, I am completely at the end of my tether. I agree with all the complaints made by all my colleagues in this debate and am going to ensure that action is taken. I hope that if we debate this subject again in a year’s time we will have seen some action. Members may see a different Minister if I do not succeed, but we will do our best to make some progress.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered BT service standards.