Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Bill (First sitting)

Kevin Brennan Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 15th March 2022 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

I remind Members that we should confine ourselves to questions, not to straightforward dialogue.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

Q This is quite an interesting Bill. I served on the 2017 Bill Committee, and at the time I thought it was interesting that a Conservative Government wanted to severely restrict private property rights. Nevertheless, I think we were content to support the principle that the legislation might unlock a problem. But, Anna, are you saying that that is not what has happened? Is that a fair assessment of the overall criticism of the Bill by both large and small landowners who have an interest in this?

Anna Turley: Yes, I think that is the case. The fact that we are back here again shows that roll-out has not improved, nor has connectivity. We have had further subsidies through the shared rural network. More than 300 cases going through court have been bogged down, whereas prior to the 2017 legislation barely a handful of cases went to court. That has resulted in a huge amount of litigation and conflict between site owners and operators, which simply did not arise before. That is holding back our roll-out and affecting GDP. We are falling behind our international competitors. The changes in the 2017 code mean that there is now so little incentive for people to host sites on their land that we are at risk of further jeopardising our connectivity goals and achieving the outcomes that we all want.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q You presented the case that someone might own a bit of land, and they would have previously got £1,000 for the site and now they are only getting £50. I can honestly say that that was not envisaged when the Bill was discussed in Committee in 2017. The Government never suggested that; everyone knew that the legislation would suppress rents for private property owners, but no one really understood that there would be a 90% suppression. Is that genuinely typical, or are those outliers in terms of what has happened to people’s private property rights and their ability to raise rent from their property?

Anna Turley: Going back to your point about the Bill, that was not what was envisaged at the time. The impact assessment predicted a reduction of around 40%. Even Speed Up Britain has said that the average reduction is around 67%. We would dispute that, but without the evidence it has been incredibly difficult to show that. We have a huge number of cases where the operators have come in at a 90% to 95% reduction. That is par for the course.

There is an incentive for the operators to take cases to court to try to push for the biggest cuts that they can, because they can apply that across the board. The frustration is that we see them come in with large rent reductions, often bullying small landowners, families, small charities and community groups. Those people are having to accept cuts of between 90% and 95% because they simply do not have the wherewithal to go through lengthy legal processes to combat the huge strong legal arms of those organisations. They are simply having to submit to that.

To go back to your point about outliers, we have also tried to get information about the impact on local authorities, because a huge number of local authorities host these sites, as well as a number of hospitals and other public buildings. Again, we are seeing 80% to 85% cuts to local authorities. Leeds City Council, for example, has taken a reduction of 85%. That is thousands of pounds lost to local authorities. At the same time as we have heard that dairy and other farmers are being encouraged to expand and diversify their income, or local community and charity groups are being told to be entrepreneurial and to diversify their income, local authorities have had huge cuts over the past decade, as we know, and they are trying to get their income wherever they can. It seems crazy for them, essentially, to be subsidising private companies that might be making £10 billion in profit last year. That is money taken away from our local authorities, small charities and community groups, and it is not a small handful of them; this is happening across the board.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q My final question is to Dr Trotman. What is your response to the charge that you are in effect trying to thwart the Government’s levelling-up agenda in what you are doing? Are you trying to stop essential national infrastructure rolling out? The state can reasonably suppress private property rights in order to bring about such a policy aim. This is a case in which the state, reasonably, is doing just that. What is your response?

Dr Trotman: First, we have to understand what the Government’s levelling-up agenda is to begin with. If we look at the levelling-up White Paper, out of 332 pages, there are only 39 references to “rural”, so maybe the Government’s objectives do not relate to rural areas. There needs to be a levelling up not just of north and south, but of rural areas compared with urban.

We have always said—I said this earlier—that, as far as we are concerned, our overall objective is universal coverage, because we can see the benefits. The very fact that I am Zooming into this meeting at the moment illustrates the benefits of effective and affordable broadband connections. We understand what the benefits are and we want to see faster deployment, but we also want to see both parties playing fair. This is where I said that the ADR mechanism is a workable solution, if we can get it right.

We have to look at the positives of this as well. There is one big positive in terms of rural wayleaves on fixed-line infrastructure. With the NFU, we secured from Openreach and Gigaclear—the two big infrastructure providers for fixed-line connectivity—a wayleave agreement. We have had that since 1 October 2018, and it works. If we can get it right for fixed-line rural wayleaves, what I do not quite understand is why we cannot get it right for fixed-line urban wayleaves—Anna’s point about local authorities is a good one—and in the mobile sector.

The major criticism that we have of the 2017 changes and of this Bill is the fact that we are talking about mobile infrastructure. We are also talking about the tactics being employed by mobile operators, which at the beginning of 2018 were not that conducive to effective negotiation. Basically, it was, “We’ll offer you a little carrot, but if you don’t agree, we will hit you over the head with a big stick.” Hopefully, we are getting away from that, but again, it underlines the point that we have a major market imbalance, which we have to get right if we want to get to the point of universal coverage.

[The Chair]

Before I bring in Rebecca Long Bailey, Eleanor Griggs, did you wish to say something?

Eleanor Griggs: I have just a couple of points. If statutory powers are given, there needs to be some sort of accountability on the part of operators, with, essentially, sanctions if those powers are abused or not used responsibly. That sort of thing needs to be considered, because at the moment there does not seem to be any comeuppance for the poor behaviour that my members have had to endure. Are we looking at consensual agreements that are reached by negotiation, or are we looking at consensual agreements that are reached because somebody cannot afford to defend their position or get slightly more favourable terms at tribunal? It is quite cost-prohibitive, certainly for the smaller individual landowners. I do not know about the monopoly landlords that the Bill’s impact assessment talks about quite a lot, but it is quite prohibitive for our smaller members.

I would also like to make the point that the NFU has an annual digital technology survey. The most recent figures—we have not quite had the 2021 figures in yet—are the 2020 figures. Going back to 2015, 29% of our members reported that their outdoor mobile signal was reliable. By 2017, that had risen to 42%. Obviously, that is a really big increase from 29% in 2015 to 42% in 2017. By 2020, it was still at 42%, so no advances have been made from the introduction of the code, essentially; that is quite important. Various other figures mirror that—smartphones with access to 4G and things like that. It just shows a stagnation from 2017 onwards. We just need to be careful that that does not continue or, in the worst case scenario, get any worse.