Digital Economy Bill

Debate between Chi Onwurah and Lord Vaizey of Didcot

Tuesday 13th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Edward Vaizey (Wantage) (Con)]

I am very grateful, Mr Deputy Speaker, that you only showed me a yellow card, not a red card. I will remember that.

What a pleasure it is to speak in what, I gather, is a co-paternity Bill, conceived on many evenings between me and my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale). But I should point out that this is also a vengeful child because five of the nine Ministers who were present in the delivery room are now on the Back Benches or have left Parliament. I hope the Bill is kinder to its adoptive parents.

Let me speak briefly about the most important issue—the introduction of the universal service obligation. What a pleasure it is to hear Members from all parts of the House praise the Minister’s very successful rural broadband programme roll-out, which is bringing superfast broadband to 19 out of 20 homes throughout the UK. They are right to praise it, because it is the most successful Government-sponsored broadband programme in the world, and the Minister should take credit for that achievement.

I received an unsolicited email—it is a rare thing—from the director of the broadband programme in Oxfordshire. He pointed out that Oxfordshire is at 93% with 15 months of the programme still to go. Five million pounds has already come back to the county council from the Government funding and there is £2.8 million further to come—around £8 million of the public sector investment of £40 million, and he thinks that perhaps we will get it all back because of gainshare and take-up. He says:

“I cannot think of any large scale public sector contract which has delivered on time and under cost. Very good contract to work with in protecting the public purse and incentivising successful outcomes.”

I do not have a mains sewer in my house. I recall the comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Saffron Walden (Sir Alan Haselhurst). We must remember that the broadband programme is an infrastructure programme. You do not just flick a switch and deliver broadband. You have to dig up roads; you have to do engineering work. Openreach, especially the programme director, Bill Murphy, deserves a huge amount of praise for what has been achieved.

I confess that I am utterly confused by those people who want to break up BT and Openreach. Why would one simply adopt the campaign of BT’s competitors? Why would one wish to break up a highly successful British company, post-Brexit when we need all the champions we can get? Why would one break up a company that has delivered such a successful programme? In the words of the chief executive of Virgin Media, an able competitor of BT, “If you want better broadband, pick up a spade.” That is my message to TalkTalk, Vodafone and Sky, who all seek for their own reasons to break up a great British company.

I have two things to say to the Minister. I firmly believe that Openreach can deliver the USO, but it will need his help in easing regulation, particularly for long line VDSL. I also hope that Broadband Delivery UK will continue its excellent work and become a taskforce. A lot of the 5% that still has to be reached is in inner-city areas, and that is usually because of bureaucratic obstacles stopping the roll-out of broadband which have nothing to do with technical challenges. A good and effective BDUK, helping roll-out in cities, would be hugely helpful.

I echo the calls about the frustration with new build. I remember dealing with Linden Homes in my constituency. For the princely sum of £6,000 it could have delivered broadband to all its customers in a multimillion pound development. It point-blank refused to do so. The attitude of too many developers is shocking. The Government refused to change the planning laws when I was a Minister. Perhaps we should look at that again.

The reforms to the electronic communications code are long overdue; we took far too long to bring them forward. They apply just as much to mobile. I recall mobile operators telling me that when they wished to upgrade a 3G mast to a 4G mast at a site in an airport, the rent went up from £50,000 to £250,000. We must reduce the cost of rolling out broadband infrastructure, whether mobile or fixed, and we cannot have our cake and eat it. I heard the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah) talking about the loss to the public sector of the £300,000 that Newcastle City Council might lose, but the gain for Newcastle City Council in easing planning restrictions would be better coverage in Newcastle for her constituents and, importantly, for her local businesses, who create jobs and wealth in Newcastle. We cannot allow the landowners to ride roughshod over this Bill, perhaps in the other place. We must reduce the cost of infrastructure roll-out. We need to continue to look at planning reform, particularly, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon said, with the roll-out of 5G.

[Chi Onwurah]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman, an excellent former Minister, for giving way and it is good to hear a Conservative Member of Parliament taking on the landed vested interests, as it were, but will he say how this Bill will ensure that the benefits of reduced rentals accrue to the users of mobile phones, not simply the mobile operators?

[Mr Vaizey]

Benefits will accrue to mobile phone users through improved coverage. The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) mocked the mobile infrastructure roll-out plan. He got his facts wrong, but that brought home the huge cost and complexity of building those networks. Anything we can do to reduce the cost of roll-out will help the consumer in terms of coverage and, hopefully, cost.

I fully support the measures on age verification and the upgrading of the offence of copyright infringement. It is interesting that hon. Members on both sides of the House have called for a general debate on internet regulation, which is what that is. It will come more and more to the fore. I echo the comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) and others. It is almost impossible to deal with social media companies. They are like giant children. Suddenly they have 300 million users or 1.2 billion users, and they have to make up some of the regulation as they go along. There was the recent controversy when Facebook banned the iconic photograph of the child in Vietnam. The Government need to work, and work quickly, with those organisations, but even bringing them to the table causes some difficulty.

I fully support the measures on data sharing. That is a huge prize, but we must recognise the concern of consumers about having their private data used. This is about using anonymous data and breaking down the barriers between Departments, which can only benefit citizens.

Let me briefly echo one or two concerns. I had a huge amount of sympathy with what the hon. Member for Rhondda said about free TV licences being imposed on the BBC. It had nothing to do with Rupert Murdoch, by the way, and everything to do with saving money on the welfare bill. It is wrong that we are leaving the decision on free television licences to the BBC. It should be a decision for the Government. There are plenty of ways of updating and refining the way in which the free TV licence currently works, without getting rid of it. The Government should take back not the cost of the free TV licence, but responsibility for the policy.

As Ofcom takes on BBC regulation, I have some concerns that if it takes on the regulation of BBC websites, we will see press regulation by the back door. The press has been assiduous in not allowing its websites to become quasi-broadcasting sites, which would therefore be regulated by Ofcom. With Ofcom regulating the BBC, we must be cautious that we do not inadvertently bring in statutory regulation of the press, which I would oppose.

Broadband in Wales

Debate between Chi Onwurah and Lord Vaizey of Didcot

Wednesday 6th July 2016 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy (Mr Edward Vaizey)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak under your superb chairmanship, Mr McCabe, and I thank the hon. Member for Ceredigion (Mr Williams) for this important debate about broadband.

Let me echo the words that were said about tonight’s football match, which is an incredibly important game. Unfortunately, I will be at the Art Fund museum of the year dinner with the Duchess of Cambridge, but I know that her father-in-law is particularly keen on a Welsh victory tonight, as is the whole country. Gareth Bale sits firmly in midfield in my fantasy league team and Sam Vokes is a striker, so we are hoping for a good result tonight.

If the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Calum Kerr) thinks a Welsh sporting achievement and Andy Murray managing to make it to the quarter finals will rub English noses in it, let me remind him of the England rugby team and its 3:0 whitewash of Australia. It does not stop there either: perhaps we should talk about the test victory over Sri Lanka—I do not think Scotland plays cricket, but they may a bit. Of course, today Mark Cavendish won his 28th stage in the Tour de France, thus matching the record of the great cyclist, Bernard Hinault. [Interruption.] I see the Clerk leaning over to you, Mr McCabe, saying that I am out of order—that I have gone off the subject of broadband—but thousands of Welsh people tonight will be watching television and perhaps through a broadband connection, thanks to me.

[Chi Onwurah]

I admire the way the Minister has manged to segue from football back to broadband. Does he agree that it is to be hoped that all those in Wales watching the match tonight do not stream it from broadband connections, as their pleasure is likely to be interrupted regularly by the circle of death?

[Mr Vaizey]

No. I encourage them to watch it online. They can watch it online, on their iPads or on ITV Player.

Let me turn to the subject in hand. I have been in this job for six years and it may feel like wading through treacle, but when I hear someone as distinguished as the hon. Member for Ceredigion say those four words, “vast improvement in provision”, it makes those six years of hard labour worth it, because we have made a difference. I will come to some serious points, but I want to say that we have achieved a great deal and I will explain where we are.

I have always made the point that we had targets we wanted to achieve. We never said 100% of people would get superfast broadband under our programme. We said 90% would get it by the end of 2015 and we achieved that with 4 million additional homes and businesses, which will be 5 million by the time the programme effectively ends at the end of 2017. We have already completed 36 of the 44 phase 1 projects and we are well into phase 2, and on track to get to 95% by the end of 2017.

People seem to forget the baseline we started from when the programme was on the way. In Wales, fewer than one in three homes had access to superfast broadband in 2011, yet by the end of phase 2, which finishes this time next year, 96.7% will have been reached. This project alone will have provided access to superfast broadband for almost 750,000 homes in Wales. Half of all homes will have broadband because of this project. The figure is already almost 600,000 homes. The audited figure is 582,300, so we have probably passed 600,000 because we are always three months behind in auditing the figures.

It is worth remembering that in the constituency of the hon. Member for Ceredigion, for example, no superfast broadband was provided commercially—he reminded the House that I had made that point previously. Even though his figures are below the national figures and therefore look poor, it is telling that 55% of homes—20,000—in his constituency that now have access to superfast broadband have it because of this programme. Another 10,000 will be added by the middle of next year, with 85% superfast coverage in 30,000 premises that would not have been covered. Coverage in constituencies of Members across the House ranges from a lowly 79% in that of my hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Chris Davies)—luckily he has left the Chamber, so I can mention that figure publicly—up to around 92% in Ynys Môn.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Chi Onwurah and Lord Vaizey of Didcot

Thursday 9th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Vaizey]

I would happily work with the hon. Gentleman and the Welsh Government. I have always found him and the Welsh Government to be congenial colleagues in regard to the roll-out of superfast broadband.

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

We know that the Secretary of State wants to leave the European Union, but his Minister appears already to have left the United Kingdom to inhabit some fantasy “Broadbandia” in which everything is, in his words, an “unadulterated success”. For the rest of us in the 21st century United Kingdom, however, the reality is different. One in five broadband users still has less than half the speed that Ofcom classes as acceptable, and 70% of smartphone users in rural areas have zero access to 4G. Rather than living in “Broadbandia”, the rest of us are living in “Broadbadia“. Will the Minister stop fantasising and acknowledge the view of the Countryside Alliance:

“This rural broadband betrayal is devastating”?

[Mr Vaizey]

I know that the hon. Lady will want to join me in commemorating this important day, which is the 33rd anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s landslide election victory in 1983. In that year, there was no broadband and the Minister you see before you was sitting his O-levels. The Secretary of State, however, was on the great lady’s battle bus.

The hon. Lady might quote the Countryside Alliance, but the gardener Robin Lane Fox wrote an article in the Financial Times, which I know she reads, in which he talked about a move to the rural arcadia brought about by our broadband roll-out programme. He said that, like Falstaff, he was looking forward to dying babbling of green fields because he could live in the countryside with a superfast connection. Let us remind ourselves that Labour had a pathetic megabit policy, and that is still its policy. Let us also remind ourselves that we are two years ahead of where Labour would have been, and let us talk up the success of this programme instead of constantly talking down great broadband Britain.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Chi Onwurah and Lord Vaizey of Didcot

Tuesday 3rd May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Vaizey]

I hear what my hon. Friend has to say, but I wish the leave campaign would stop running this terrible fear campaign. I am confident that we are going to stay in Europe and continue to attract investment. I am pleased to hear that our Canadian trade envoy, to which I gather my hon. Friend had access, shows us how even as members of the European Union, we can still negotiate and engage globally with many other countries. Being a member of the European Union does not prevent us from working with countries outside the EU, and the leave campaign’s fear campaign has to stop saying it does.

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

On Sunday, the European Union slashed roaming charges by 75%, and they will be abolished altogether next year. That is a huge boost to British businesses with European ambitions as well as to Leicester City fans, now with Champions league travel to plan. The UK is Europe’s biggest digital economy. We buy and sell more online than any other country. Would the Minister like to estimate how long it would take him, even with his fabled charm, to renegotiate all our international digital agreements in the event of a Brexit, and what our £118 billion digital economy would do in the meantime?

[Mr Vaizey]

I think it would take ages—it would take absolutely years to renegotiate. I recently returned from a G7 meeting in Japan, proving again that the leave campaign’s fear campaign is completely wrong. I was able to spend some time with the European vice-president, talking about the great opportunities that the digital single market presents. It was a lot of fun. We want to be part of that digital single market—growing for Britain.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Chi Onwurah and Lord Vaizey of Didcot

Thursday 21st April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

I join the Minister in wishing Her Majesty a very happy birthday.

“Even if councils stopped…maintaining parks, closed all children’s centres, libraries, museums, leisure centres…they will not have saved enough money to plug the financial black hole they face”.

That was a quote from Lord Porter, the Tory chair of the Local Government Association. That black hole is of the Government’s making and local cultural institutions lose out doubly, because councils can no longer afford to match-fund European, Heritage Lottery or Arts Council grants. Our creative industries generate £84 billion per year. They are drivers of growth, economic regeneration as well as inspiration, hope and future jobs. Why are this Government starving their local roots?

[Mr Vaizey]

I certainly do not agree that we are starving local roots. We are increasing the amount of national funding that is going out of London, which is something that the last Labour Government never did at all, and I see examples of success all over the country. Hull, for example, is preparing to be the City of Culture next year. The Great Exhibition of the North the year after will celebrate our culture rather than doing it down. I ask the hon. Lady to have a word with her colleagues in Labour local authorities and ask them to stop closing their libraries.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Chi Onwurah and Lord Vaizey of Didcot

Tuesday 15th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Vaizey]

I do not want to labour the point, Mr Speaker, but I do not think you understand fully the effect your words have on me—you have absolutely made my day. However, in answer to the question, let me say that the Secretary of State recently announced that we will have a review of business broadband, because we do understand how important broadband is for businesses. Ofcom has also recently published its digital communications review, which will impose minimum quality requirements on Openreach that are much tougher than currently exist.

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

The Government claim to champion the critical contribution that small businesses make to our economy, but Ofcom’s latest figures, which the Minister did not mention, show that half of small businesses in business parks cannot get 10 megabits of broadband, a quarter cannot get 5 megabits and one in 10 cannot even get 2 megabits. My local chamber of commerce tells me of businesses where staff have to go home if they want to send an email. Responding to me in a debate last week, the Minister said that the Government’s broadband roll-out had been “an unadulterated success”. If that is success, what would failure look like?

[Mr Vaizey]

Failure—[Interruption.] As usual, my hon. Friends have anticipated my answer: there, on the Labour Benches, is the picture of failure. We have had to write off £50 million from the failed Labour scheme to deliver broadband in South Yorkshire. If a Labour Government had been elected, they would be two years behind us in the roll-out of superfast broadband; they had a target of 2017 to get to 90%—we have already reached it.

BT Service Standards

Debate between Chi Onwurah and Lord Vaizey of Didcot

Wednesday 9th March 2016 Westminster Hall

[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.

[Chi Onwurah]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Vaizey]

No. The hon. Lady has just had 10 minutes to set out her position and there was absolutely nothing in it. What is Labour’s position on the digital communications review? How would Labour get superfast broadband to the entire country?

[Chi Onwurah]

Fibre!

[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.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Chi Onwurah and Lord Vaizey of Didcot

Thursday 3rd March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Vaizey]

I have been closely involved with the Science Museum on the future of the National Media Museum, and I am pleased that it is now being put on a firmer footing. However, I would say to the hon. Lady that there is extensive support for the arts in Bradford, with something like £9 million of Arts Council funding. I point her to the excellent article by the chief executive of the Arts Council about the support it is giving to Bradford.

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

The Minister shows great artistry in the picture he paints, but we know that the regions were already losing out on arts funding by a ratio of 14:1 before the Chancellor chose to chop billions from northern local authorities struggling to maintain arts for all. The Sutton report last week said that the arts are becoming less and less accessible. Does the Minister agree that the arts are far too important to our culture and our identity to be left in the hands of a privileged few?

[Mr Vaizey]

I would certainly agree with the hon. Lady on that. Our forthcoming White Paper will announce new measures to increase access to the arts, but we have already supported, for example, music education hubs, extended the In Harmony scheme and introduced new schemes for the arts in schools, so I take great issue with her implicit criticism that we are not doing anything to increase access to the arts.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Chi Onwurah and Lord Vaizey of Didcot

Thursday 21st January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Vaizey]

Yes, I can guarantee that. We are moving as fast as we can to deliver superfast broadband, and we intend to reach 95% of the country by the end of 2017 and to have superfast broadband for everyone by 2020. We also have to think again about what we need to do in the decade after that.

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

In early December, the Minister cast himself as Santa Claus, announcing a “Christmas present” for UK homes and businesses: £60 million to provide satellite provision for those failed by his super-slow broadband crawl-out. As of Monday, a grand total of £8,000 had been spent and only 24 people had benefited from his supposed gift. Was it the fear of seeing him coming down their chimney that put people off or the fact that this is an inadequate stunt designed to fob off his Back Benchers and leaving millions digitally excluded for many Christmases to come?

[Mr Vaizey]

I thank the hon. Lady for that “Bah Humbug” question. I am delighted that, thanks to our superfast broadband programme, we have reached around 90% of the country. We have cast aside the Scrooge-like 2 megabits target that Labour had for the country as a whole, but we promised everyone guaranteed speeds of 2 megabits, and that is what we have done by providing subsidised satellite services.

Met Office

Debate between Chi Onwurah and Lord Vaizey of Didcot

Tuesday 27th October 2015 Westminster Hall

[Chi Onwurah]

No, it was not cricket. I was obliged to remain silent, but I intend to make up for that today. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) on securing this important debate and on his impressive opening speech. He speaks with experience and authority, as a local MP and a previous Minister.

[The Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy (Mr Edward Vaizey)]

He was a Secretary of State.

[Chi Onwurah]

And as a previous Secretary of State. He knows his subject comprehensively. I am sure that the Minister will extend my right hon. Friend the courtesy of answering all his questions as fully as possible.

As my right hon. Friend said in his introduction, the Met Office is a respected and successful institution. He touched briefly on the origins of what is now known as the Met Office. Those origins reflect many supremely British characteristics: naval power, trade, exploration, science and eccentricity. The Met Office was first founded as the Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade by Robert FitzRoy, who is most famous for being the captain of HMS Beagle, the ship that carried Charles Darwin on his famous voyage. More than 160 years ago, this House roared with laughter when a Member suggested that we might, one day, predict the weather in advance. FitzRoy led an interesting and troubled life, but pressed on in the face of scepticism about weather reporting. Today, his vision of a public forecasting service, funded by the Government for the benefit of all, has endured.

The modern Met Office is respected the world over and has an important place at the heart of the nation’s contingency planning and our culture. Indeed, the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (John Nicolson) emphasised its role in the heart of Scotland’s culture. We all like to poke fun at weather forecasters for getting it wrong, but the fact is that the Met Office is critical to our military security and civil planning. Its shipping forecasts make the jobs of those at sea a little safer, as the hon. Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster) rightly emphasised. Its global research links enhance our understanding of how the weather and climate affect our economy and way of life, and its parliamentary advice makes us all—at least, those of us who make use of it—a little wiser.

I hope the Minister will assure us that the Met Office is not on the Government’s list of public sector targets. In fact, I hope that he and his colleagues will go further and champion its work and the unique role it plays. Perhaps, they might even recognise the value that such public sector institutions play in our society and economy. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter said, this decision is not the end of the Met Office—far from it. It does so much more than providing the BBC with weather forecasts. In fact, its data will still drive those forecasts. The decision raises questions about the strategic relationship between the BBC and the weather provider. The police and the military will continue to rely on the Met Office for advice, while the public may receive different information. My right hon. Friend cited international examples that raise serious questions about this approach. Is the Minister concerned about that and has he discussed it with the BBC?

Many in the Conservative party believe that the BBC needs to be clipped, either because of misplaced ideas that it crowds out competitors or because of perceived bias. I find it difficult to divorce this decision and this debate from the wider context of the charter renewal process and the sustained attack that the BBC is coming under from the Government and their friends. The BBC is under immense pressure at the moment to prove to the Government and the wider public that it is efficient and good value for money. Obviously we are all in favour of value for money, but what matters is how we define value and over what period of time. Even if we accept that there is no risk to the national interest—which I have yet to be convinced of, although I will listen closely to the Minister—I am not persuaded that the cheapest option is always the best.

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[Mr Vaizey]

As I thought I was explaining but will try to make clearer, my understanding was that the public weather service will be freely available to all media outlets. The work that the civil contingencies secretariat, BIS and the Met Office are undertaking now will ensure that when that service goes live in the summer of next year, it will be able to be incorporated into the BBC’s more general weather. In effect, the public weather service is about severe weather warnings—gales, storms and flooding, as I said earlier—and it must be incorporated within the routine weather forecast: for example, whether it will rain tomorrow in East Dunbartonshire, or be cloudy or sunny. I am confident that that work will ensure that those two effectively separate parts of weather forecasting will be consistent and incorporated, not only by the BBC but by other broadcasters.

I will take this opportunity to address some of the other points raised by the right hon. Gentleman. It is not the case that Ministers were informed by the BBC of its decision. The Met Office informed the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills after learning that it was not on the shortlist for procurement, but I do not take any umbrage at the BBC’s not having informed us. As I said, it is a commercial decision for the BBC.

Are we getting value for money? Are we effectively paying twice for the service? It is important to understand that the Met Office was not giving general weather service free of charge to the BBC; the BBC was paying for it. Procurement is under way for the weather service that the BBC will use in future. That is commercially confidential, but I do not see how it can be argued that we are paying twice, given that the BBC is currently paying for a weather service from the Met Office and will pay for a weather service from another provider next year.

I know that there will be concerns, particularly from a constituency perspective, as the right hon. Gentleman rightly mentioned. As far as I understand it, the Met Office contract with the BBC is a small fraction of its total turnover, and I am not aware of any knock-on effect in terms of redundancies or job losses.

[Chi Onwurah]

To clarify, the point about not paying twice is that the British public pay the Met Office to produce a weather service, and now it will pay the BBC to pay somebody else to produce a weather service. The British public might be paying for two different weather forecasts, for the same weather.

[Mr Vaizey]

Clarity is clearly not my strong point this afternoon. As I said earlier, the BBC’s contract with the Met Office is a commercial contract, paid for out of the licence fee. The BBC will continue to pay for a commercial contract, whether or not we agree with whoever eventually wins that procurement—whether or not we morally agree, as it were, that it is the right company. It may well be a foreign company, although it could well be a British company. That is one thing, but the fact is that we are not paying twice for the service. The licence fee pays for a weather service provided by the BBC that happens to be provided by the Met Office. It is not provided for free. As far as I am aware—again, it is a commercial procurement process—at no point did the Met Office offer to provide that service free to the BBC.

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[Mr Vaizey]

I absolutely give the right hon. Gentleman that assurance; I will ensure that the points he has made in this debate are taken seriously and that we absolutely clarify for him exactly what the public weather media service will provide, although the answer may not completely satisfy him. I will also seek assurances from the civil contingencies secretariat and BIS officials that they are content with the arrangements, as it were, whereby the BBC is in effect contracting with another provider for what I would call its commercial weather service, which provides the day-to-day weather service that we all watch at the end of a news bulletin, whether that is a national or local news bulletin, as opposed to the more important severe weather warning work that the Met Office does.

[Chi Onwurah]

As the Minister is so successfully clarifying points, may I point out that my question to him was about the legal basis that is necessary for there to be an open tender, given that EU procurement regulations now exempt collaborations between two public sector entities?

[Mr Vaizey]

I will certainly consider the point that the hon. Lady makes. It may well be that the contract was de minimis anyway in terms of those procurement rules, and it may well be that the savings the BBC thinks it can make by procuring weather services from another supplier mean that even the social aspects were not of the utmost concern to them. Nevertheless, I, or perhaps even the BBC itself, will write to the hon. Lady to address her point.

This has been a very useful debate. Although it has been disappointing in some respects, in that I was unable to pull a rabbit out of the hat and put the Met Office back in play with the BBC, it is right that we respect the BBC’s independence in this area. We cannot always say whether the BBC’s decisions are right or wrong, and it must be a particular frustration for someone working at the BBC or even leading it to be constantly second-guessed. I second-guessed the BBC on the closure of 6 Music and with hindsight I think I have been proved right; that was a service to save. Many people are now second-guessing the BBC on its moving BBC3 from terrestrial television to the internet. Equally, it is perhaps a testament to the standing of both the Met Office and the BBC that a parliamentary debate should be called to consider the BBC’s decision not to procure its weather services from the Met Office.

In a sense, I will conclude in the way that I started, by saying that my final congratulations must go to the Met Office on accurately predicting the weather for all the Rugby World cup matches. Unfortunately, that did not help the northern hemisphere teams, but I look forward to an accurate prediction of the weather for Didcot Town versus Exeter, and I put on the record now my own prediction that Didcot will win 2-0.

Data Breaches (Consumer Protection)

Debate between Chi Onwurah and Lord Vaizey of Didcot

Monday 26th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport if he will make a statement on Government responsibilities and policies for protecting consumers and infrastructure following large-scale data breaches such as that suffered by TalkTalk.

[The Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy (Mr Edward Vaizey)]

Let me begin by saying that this is clearly a very serious matter. We are all aware that TalkTalk suffered a data breach last week. I want to reassure Members of this House, and TalkTalk customers who may have been affected, that law enforcement has been working very closely with the company since the breach was notified and of course continues to do so.

I commend the chief executive of TalkTalk for her openness and transparency since the company became aware of the attack. I know that she will do all she can to protect her customers. Nevertheless, this is a very serious incident. I understand that the company has offered free support to customers to ensure that they are alerted to any suspicious activity in relation to their bank accounts. I am also reassured that the Financial Conduct Authority has said that it is not aware of any unusual activity at the moment, and that further advice and guidance is available in a range of places such as Get Safe Online and Cyber Streetwise.

However, it is extremely important that companies do all they can to protect themselves, and of course their customers, from cyber-attacks. This Government and the previous Administration have worked extremely hard to ensure that companies have the tools they need to protect themselves. We have invested £860 million over five years in the national cyber-security programme, set up the national cybercrime unit inside the National Crime Agency, and launched the Cyber Streetwise and Cyber Essentials schemes. I am pleased that the number of businesses aware of Cyber Streetwise has doubled and that more than 1,000 businesses have now signed up to the Cyber Essentials scheme, which sets out basic technical controls.

A year ago we made it mandatory that any company that contracts with Government should be accredited under the Cyber Essentials scheme, where appropriate and proportionate. I am also pleased that almost every FTSE 350 company has included cyber-security on its risk register. The “10 Steps to Cyber Security” guidance gives large businesses and organisations comprehensive advice and there are simplified versions available for small and medium-sized enterprises.

Recent events show how vital it is that we maintain that momentum and that businesses act on our advice in order to protect their customers from harm. I will write again to the FTSE 350 companies, to reinforce the steps we expect them to take and the robust procedures that they need to have in place.

The Government take the UK’s cyber-security extremely seriously and we will continue to do everything in our power to protect organisations and individuals from attacks.

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[Chi Onwurah]

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for granting this urgent question.

When someone’s data are lost, criminals are given a gateway into their lives. I have spoken to one woman who lost £5,000 in a sophisticated scam following a previous TalkTalk breach. Today, up to 4 million people are wondering what data they have lost and where a cyber-attack will come from. They are checking their bank accounts, callers and credit cards. The Government need to reassure us that our digital lives are secure, and they need to help our digital economy to grow.

When did the Minister first speak to TalkTalk about the breach and its implications? Is he now aware of what data were taken and whether they were encrypted? What obligations were there on TalkTalk to report the breach to the Information Commissioner’s Office and to advise customers, and did it do that quickly enough? What rights of compensation do TalkTalk customers have and for how long, and how can they exercise them?

Will the Minister ask the Information Commissioner to update his guidance in the light of the current confusion? What additional resources will police have to respond to the up to 4 million inquiries from frightened customers, and will the breach be reported as one cybercrime or many?

For many years, we have been calling on the Government to take action to protect consumers and citizens from cyber-scams. This Government’s data policy is chaos illuminated by occasional flashes of incompetence. Will the Minister acknowledge that all the innovation has come from the criminals while the Government sit on their hands, leaving it to businesses and consumers to suffer the consequences?

[Mr Vaizey]

Of course, the hon. Lady is perfectly entitled to ask those questions, many of which are valid, but I have to take issue from the very beginning with her assertion that the Government have somehow been sitting on their hands. I do not think she heard my response to the urgent question. We have invested more than £860 million in cyber-security and we have a number of very effective schemes with which to engage business. It is worth remembering that that money was invested at a time of economic austerity and that that was one of the first decisions taken by the coalition Government.

The hon. Lady asked how many people have lost their data. The situation is fast moving and, given that the investigation is ongoing, it would be remiss of me to put a final figure on it. As I said in my response, law enforcement agencies have been in touch, and we have been in continuous discussion, with TalkTalk since Thursday.

On the question of what data have been taken, the chief executive of TalkTalk has issued a number of statements, saying that bank account details have been given out and that some credit card details, albeit tokenised, have been stolen as well.

The question of whether TalkTalk reported the breach to the Information Commissioner’s Office in time will be a matter between the Information Commissioner and TalkTalk, although I understand that it was reported on the Thursday. As I understand it, any rights of compensation and how long they will take will also be a matter for the Information Commissioner.

I am delighted that, since last month, the Information Commissioner falls within my Department. It is precisely that kind of joined-up government that is needed to make our combating of cybercrime and cyber-fraud as effective as possible. I will certainly meet the Information Commissioner to discuss the issues.

The police have extensive resources with which to combat cybercrime, and we are the Government who set up the national cybercrime unit.

Superfast Broadband

Debate between Chi Onwurah and Lord Vaizey of Didcot

Monday 12th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

I, too, congratulate the Backbench Business Committee on holding this debate and the hon. Members who have pushed for it. I applaud the many informed and moving contributions that we have heard, particularly from my hon. Friend the Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen), my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), and my hon. Friends the Members for Burnley (Julie Cooper) and for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith).

I am pleased to stand at the Dispatch Box for the first time as shadow Minister for the digital economy.

[Mr Vaizey]

What took you so long?

[Chi Onwurah]

Well, it has been a long time. Before entering Parliament in 2010 I spent 20 years as an electrical engineer building telecoms networks around the world. I confess to having had a geeky worry that my technical knowledge would suffer as part of the privilege of being elected to the House. The Government have been so ineffectual, however, that my technical understanding remains as relevant as ever. Ministers should be ashamed of that, because it is their failure.

The UK has the sixth largest economy in the world, and is a developed nation with aspirations to lead the digital world. It is a country where Government services are “digital by default”, yet we have heard from many speakers in all parts of the House about the dire state of our digital infrastructure. I am not going to repeat all the terrible tales that we have heard: 1.8 million homes that cannot get broadband; dial-up speeds; businesses unable to do business. The economic benefits of better digital infrastructure—or, in some cases, of any kind of digital infrastructure—have been emphasised. The UK’s productivity problem was mentioned, and it is one of the biggest challenges that our economy faces. We have the second worst productivity in the G7. Ministers contribute to the problem, with a lack of productivity when it comes to providing the digital infrastructure that this country needs. The Government’s 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 Minister laughs, but this is serious for many of his MPs. Better infrastructure increases productivity by

“supporting the development of new, more efficient, business models, enabling business process re-engineering to improve the efficiency and management of labour intensive jobs, and enabling increased international trade and collaborative innovation”.

Many Members on both sides of the House have given examples of that. As the new Leader of the Opposition and the new shadow Chancellor told conference this year, at the heart of our forward-looking narrative will be plans for investing in the future, including “investment in fast broadband to support new high technology jobs”.

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[Chi Onwurah]

rose—

[Mr Vaizey]

I give way to the hon. Member in whose constituency 0% of homes were being connected commercially and now, thanks to this Government, about 80% are connected.

[Chi Onwurah]

Me?

[Mr Vaizey]

No, I am giving way to the hon. Gentleman on the Back Benches.

[Mr Vaizey]

As my hon. Friends will be aware, I should have singled out the hon. Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen) because a Labour Government in Wales are responsible for rolling out superfast broadband and—guess what?—according to the Labour party, superfast broadband is brilliant in Wales but terrible in England. I was interested to hear that the hon. Member for Stirling (Steven Paterson) could not make up his mind whether he wanted to condemn or support the roll-out of superfast broadband in Scotland by the Scottish Government and the SNP. I take all such critiques with a great pinch of salt.

[Chi Onwurah]

The Minister said that I wished for a policy that is the same as that in Australia, but that is not what I said. I said that we needed a target as ambitious as Australia’s and the one in place by the new conservative Prime Minister there.