Shared Rural Network

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran]

I thank my noble friend for her question. She describes the North York Moors as “super sparse”; I would say they were super beautiful when I was last there. On using the emergency services infrastructure, I will write to my noble friend if my understanding is incorrect, but where she is absolutely right is that the priority in terms of the use of emergency services infrastructure is for emergency services personnel. Nothing we are planning should interrupt that and there should be no disruption to the emergency services network as a result of this proposal, but we believe that, where it is possible and appropriate, that infrastructure should be made available to share with commercial operators to deliver the coverage improvements that are needed.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness remarked that the impact on your Lordships’ House had not been raised. I would like to raise the impact on my house—I declare an interest in having a property on a hillside in Wales with very limited mobile coverage provided by, I think, one company, and very poor internet coverage. I very much welcome this Statement and I share the concerns raised by the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson and Lord Foster, about the detail of how this is going to happen.

I am not at all clear whether this is just about mobile phone coverage and a gigabit of that, or whether it is meant to solve the broadband problem as well, because that is equally crucial. Secondly, I am not terribly happy about having to wait until 2025, which I think is much longer than was originally thought. Is the Minister considering some sort of interim targets between now and then? Thirdly, I am extremely worried about finding myself in the 5% and not benefiting from this at all when it happens. Can the Minister say what the Government plan to do about that remaining 5%— even if it is only 3%, as she says—because I may be one of those people?

[Baroness Barran]

I will try to clarify those issues for the noble Lord. This Statement is purely about mobile coverage in rural areas. The Government have made a number of other important Statements on broadband investment, again focusing on those parts of the country least well served today, but the two are separate. On interim targets, I can only repeat what I said earlier: we will be getting detailed plans from the mobile operators, and when we have them we will be working to agree targets. I am afraid I cannot give the noble Lord particular hope on the final 5%; there are currently no plans to cover that because of the costs involved.

Lotteries Regulation

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Tuesday 16th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

My Lords, before I begin, I would like to mention my noble friend Lord Judd. I am sure the whole House will join me in wishing him all the best for a speedy recovery.

[Noble Lords]

Hear, hear.

[Lord Collins of Highbury]

I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement made in the other place. On this side, we welcome the Statement but somewhat regret that the Government have taken seven years to make up their mind about to deal with the society lottery sector. Although society lotteries were in existence at the time that the National Lottery was established, I do not believe anyone expected then that they would continue to thrive without having some effect on the National Lottery.

The Statement makes mention of the extraordinary sums that have been made available to good causes through lotteries—something we should all celebrate. This country embraced both the National Lottery and the society lotteries. It is right that the Government review regulations from time to time to make sure, as the Minister said, that they achieve a balance between enabling the sustainable growth of society lotteries and protecting the unique position of our UK-wide National Lottery.

I have three questions for the Minister. First, the Statement made it clear that there is concern about the proportion of funding going to good causes, the level of executive pay and other transparency issues. It suggested that the Gambling Commission may need to look closely at this, to the point where legislation may be required. Does this mean that the Government are concerned about the efficacy of the present regulations, does it apply to all society lotteries, and can a bit more be said about the timescale for this process? I am concerned that, if something is going wrong, we should act relatively quickly.

Secondly, can the Minister say a bit more about the timescale for the regulations bringing in the new annual sales limits and prize funds? When there was a change to the lottery limits in 2009, the implementation was immediate, but we are hearing that these changes might not happen until 2020. It is not clear what evidence is being sought on the ambition to move to £100 million per annum. Can he say more about that and about what sorts of timescales will be involved?

Thirdly and finally, on the age limit for National Lottery products, is there any need for consultation? Surely we all accept that to gamble you need to be 18; you cannot walk into a casino below that age. I do not think further consultation on this is necessary. There should be one rule: if you want to gamble, you need to be an adult and the minimum age for gambling products should be 18. It is as simple as that.

Brexit: Movement of People in the Cultural Sector (European Union Committee Report)

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Wednesday 15th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, who succeeded in introducing an important extra dimension to our debate. I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Jay, and his committee on their report. It clearly and concisely sets out why movement of people is fundamentally important to the cultural sector and makes excellent suggestions about how the needs of the sector, and thereby our national interests, could best be met following Brexit. They say that there is nothing new under the sun, and I am afraid my speech will certainly follow that rule; it may remind some of your Lordships more of Groundhog Day.

It is discouraging—indeed, alarming—that 10 months after the report’s publication we are not much clearer about whether or how its suggestions will be followed. The Government’s response last November is shockingly thin. After a promising start, it offers just three rather brief and bland policy statements in response to the report, including the rather unlikely suggestion that,

“EU exit could be an opportunity to stimulate training in the UK”—

as if the conservatoires were not already seeking to do just that. It is hardly surprising that the sector remains confused, concerned and uncertain about its future prospects and how to plan for them.

I shall focus on music, especially classical music—my own passion. Like so much of the cultural sector, this is a UK success story and not only earns us substantial economic returns, as we have heard, but helps to promote our values and culture and to enhance our standing in the world as an “exporting powerhouse”, to use the Minister’s earlier words. It is an important element of UK soft power. We have world-class conservatoires that attract top-quality students and teachers from around the world. We have outstanding conductors, instrumentalists and singers, including some of the world’s highest-profile and highest-earning pop stars. We have wonderful orchestras, opera companies, music festivals and performance venues. It is no wonder that our cultural offering is one of the main reasons cited by tourists for visiting the UK.

The music sector relies on movement of people. Many musicians working here in the UK come from abroad, and especially from the EU, and UK musicians spend time travelling or living abroad, not just to earn their living but to stimulate their creativity and artistry by sharing and learning from ideas and skills from elsewhere. Mobility is a key preoccupation of the sector, and both it and the committee’s report are clear about the issues that need to be addressed—I will not repeat those in great detail because we have already heard them from many other noble Lords.

Recent ISM research found that 85% of respondents visit EU or EEA countries at least once a year; 22% visit more than 11 times a year; and 35% spend a month or more per year working in those countries. Furthermore, one in seven musicians has had less than a week’s notice between being offered work and having to take it; for example, to replace scheduled performers falling ill. Touring is an important part of such travel, often involving visits to several countries, along with instruments and equipment.

The preferred solution, for both the ISM and the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Jay, would be a multi-country, multi-entry touring visa for musicians, valid for at least two years and matched by reciprocal EU arrangements. The ISM is clear that other approaches mentioned in the committee’s report—for example, based on existing permitted paid engagement or permit-free festival arrangements—would fall short.

What is needed from the Government—why not even from the Minister today?—is concrete reassurance regarding how the sector’s essential mobility needs will actually be met in an affordable and manageable way. This should reflect the fact that many musicians are highly skilled but fall below the proposed £30,000 salary threshold for skilled work visas and, as the report highlights, that many in the sector are self-employed and could not afford to travel as they do now if it involved expensive healthcare insurance or having to make duplicate social security payments.

I will pass over issues relating to the transportation of instruments and equipment, which other noble Lords, and indeed the report, have covered well.

As we approach the summer, many of us look forward to the music festival season. The various country house opera festivals, led by Glyndebourne, are promoting their wares. The Proms programme for 2019 has been published, including five concerts featuring Berlioz, in this his anniversary year—and I declare my interest as chairman of the Berlioz Society. Numerous other festivals will be taking place across the UK, from the large-scale such as Edinburgh, to more modest events such as the Llandeilo Festival of Music near my home in Wales. Two weeks ago, I was at the splendid Hellensmusic festival near Ledbury, which features master classes for young instrumentalists given by leading musicians from across Europe, as well as an innovative programme with the local primary school run by a violinist from Denmark.

Virtually all of these festivals and events will involve musicians from abroad, as well as from the UK, some recruited at short notice as last-minute replacements. The opening concert at Hellensmusic actually had to be cancelled because the scheduled performer—a remarkable and irreplaceable Kurdish-Iranian singer—was shockingly refused a visa. We all benefit enormously—as listeners, as performers, as communities and as a society—from their presence and contributions. It would be catastrophic if this free musical exchange between the UK and the EU and beyond, in both directions, could not continue after Brexit.

Brexit is supposed to be about the UK establishing itself internationally as an open, confident, independent, free-trading nation. The cultural sector is a major unique selling point, or USP, for the UK and should be a key part of achieving that aspiration whatever the eventual outcome of Brexit. The Government claim to recognise the importance of continued mobility of people for the sector. I hope, therefore, that the Minister in his response is able to give more details about the likely mobility provisions of the proposed co-operative accord with the EU on culture and education, mentioned in the White Paper, thereby helping to demonstrate how, whatever the outcome, the mobility needed to assure the future of this important sector will be maintained, in line with the report, as an important element of the UK’s global standing after Brexit.

National Lottery Heritage Fund Grants: Conservation Management Plans

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Wednesday 24th April 2019 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Aberdare]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they will take to ensure that Conservation Management Plans for parks and gardens which have received National Lottery Heritage Fund grants are properly preserved and safeguarded for public availability and use.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Lord Ashton of Hyde) (Con)]

My Lords, the Government recognise the importance of maintaining a record of the UK’s landscape heritage. The National Lottery Heritage Fund will make available on request a list of funded projects potentially containing conservation management plans, to enable interested parties to request copies of those plans as needed. The fund will also strengthen the emphasis on creating a legacy record for funded projects and on making this publicly accessible wherever possible.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, the National Lottery Heritage Fund has provided sterling support for parks and gardens throughout the UK through some £50 million of grants. In the process it has accumulated an invaluable archive of conservation management plans covering the history, ecology, archaeology, social context and design of those parks and gardens. That physical archive has now been destroyed, much to the dismay of numerous garden conservation and archival bodies. Beyond the welcome but limited steps in his Answer, what can the Minister do to ensure that proper procedures are put in place so that, in future, important material of this kind held by the NHLF and other bodies with responsibilities to the public is properly looked after and made available? Will he encourage all such bodies to publish their records management policies and procedures to ensure greater transparency and oversight?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

The noble Lord paid tribute to the National Lottery Heritage Fund for supporting landscape projects. It has given more than £1.1 billion to more than 13,000 landscape projects since it started. Historic England has also looked at maintaining archive records and has set up the heritage information access strategy programme, which is due to be delivered by 2022. It will facilitate the free uploading and storage of information in a publicly accessible database by any organisation. However, the problem remains that the copyright of these conservation management plans rests with the grantee, or sometimes the contractor, not with the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Electronic Communications (Universal Service) (Broadband) Order 2018

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Tuesday 5th June 2018 Lords Chamber

The nearly 1 million premises set to benefit from the USO will not be getting what they see as high-speed broadband. They are certainly not getting superfast broadband, and they are very definitely not getting full fibre with speeds up to 1 Gbps. They will not have broadband on the same footing as water or phone lines. Yet again, we have ambitious language far exceeding actual delivery. Sadly, with the unambitious USO we have before us, the digital divide will continue.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I add my support to the Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, and I share his concern that the proposed broadband universal service obligation is disappointing. I have not studied the helpful documentation accompanying the order in great detail but my overall reaction, as someone with a home in west Wales—I am following the script set out by the noble Lord at the beginning—with no current mobile telephone coverage and rather limited broadband options, is that the situation of myself and others in the same boat is unlikely to be much improved by the USO as proposed. I welcome the principle of the USO and the fact that it includes a minimum upload speed as well as a minimum download speed, but 1 megabit is not enough.

One of the great potential benefits of universal broadband, as we have heard, is that it makes it possible to run a small or even medium-sized business from anywhere in the country, however remote. However, such businesses depend at least as much, if not more, on their ability to upload data to their customers and partners as on being able to download material from the internet. Unlike private users, they are less likely to spend time and bandwidth downloading films, videos and social media postings. I recognise that full fibre, much as I would welcome it—either right to the premises or, indeed, to anywhere reasonably nearby—is unlikely to reach all of the rural areas where many of the 5% of premises not currently receiving superfast broadband are located. What will the order do to promote the development of new approaches and technologies that can reach those locations? It seems to me that far too much reliance has been placed on Broadband Delivery UK, Openreach in particular, to achieve the 95% coverage, using largely old-fashioned technologies with limited expansion capability.

We were rescued from a BT Broadband service that rarely, if ever, reached 0.2 Mbps by a local ISP, appropriately called ResQ, which offers a line-of-sight fixed-wireless service with speeds of around 10 Mbps for both download and upload. Surely it would be better to incentivise and promote competition in developing new approaches, whether based on fibre, fixed wireless, satellite or even the use of 4G mobile networks, with the capability of reaching premises everywhere in the UK with speeds more like 30 Mbps than the 10 Mbps in the order. Members of your Lordships’ EU Internal Market Sub-Committee who visited the Harwell space centre recently heard from a smallish satellite company with plans to offer global high-speed broadband coverage via satellite. There are opportunities to explore technologies other than fibre.

I note from the Government’s impact assessment that a USO specifying 30 Mbps download and 6 Mbps upload could reach 2.6 million premises in scope, as opposed to 1.05 million for the proposed approach. That is well over double the number of premises able to access superfast broadband for a relatively modest extra investment.

Finally, I ask the Minister to explain how the USO will actually be enforced. If I am not getting my 10 Mbps, what do I do? How soon must the service be provided and by whom? I also note with concern that if it costs more than £3,400 to provide it, the end user—that is, me—is going to have to pay the extra.

The UK is already a considerable way behind many other nations in its rollout of truly high-speed broadband. In my view, the introduction of the USO, which is indeed welcome in principle, should be grasped not as a way of trying to catch up a bit but as an opportunity to get ahead and to open the doors to all the potential internet-based applications of the future. We do not know yet what those will be but we can be pretty sure they will require more broadband capacity, rather than less.

[Earl Cathcart (Con)]

My Lords, I am sure that my noble friend Lord Ashton of Hyde will know what I am going to say before I say it so I will not disappoint him—or the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson. I live in Norfolk and as in many other areas of the country, as everybody has said so far, we receive appalling broadband speeds. It is so bad that when Defra sends me a long farming document, I cannot download it, so I have to ring up my agent in Norwich, get him to print it out and send it to me in the post. That is hardly 21st-century communications but at least the post is reliable.

We have been promised speeds of 2 Mbps and now the universal service obligation of 10 Mbps. As my noble friend found out for himself when he stayed with me last summer, our speeds are very slow. He measured our speed and found it was a mere 0.03 megabits per second—hardly the promised 2 Mbps, let alone 10 Mbps. He helpfully gave me a number of contacts to improve our speeds and I also contacted Better Broadband for Norfolk, an organisation set up by Norfolk County Council and BT to help all those areas in Norfolk that get bad speeds.

I can now report to my noble friend Lord Ashton of Hyde that our broadband speed is still 0.03 Mbps. Nothing gets done. I have given up being frustrated by all this but I feel sorry for others in the village—architects, photographers, designers, et cetera—who rely on good broadband speeds for their business, let alone schoolchildren trying to research their homework.

My question to my noble friend is: why are the Government spending hundreds of millions of pounds on superfast broadband speeds when they have not got the basics right? Surely they should ensure that everyone has adequate speeds before embarking on a product that not everybody wants or needs. For all the good it will do me, I look forward to my noble friend’s response.

Digital Understanding

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, on this debate; on her visionary, inspiring and rather daunting speech; and indeed on all her work to promote digital understanding and effective usage of digital technology. I was planning to speak mainly on some rather specific aspects of digital skills, based on my experience as a member of the House’s Digital Skills Committee, but, listening to the noble Baroness’s speech and the debate so far, I feel that some of the points I had planned to make fall rather below the threshold of quality that other speakers have achieved. I am going to try to rescue one or two points from my speech, with apologies if I get totally lost as a result, and congratulations to the other speakers.

My first point is about the role of government, which the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, has just raised. The Digital Skills Committee—rightly, in my view—has suggested that the Government have a role as the conductor of the orchestra. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley of Knighton, could have made something of this, but I will merely endorse that role: giving a lead, ensuring co-ordination and harmony between the different groups involved, achieving an overall balance and engaging all the different audiences that need to be reached.

My second point is the importance of building young people’s digital understanding right from the moment they start school, or even before, both in and outside the classroom. Like the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, my grandchildren spend most of their time looking at iPads or iPhones; however, one of the things they looked at was a wonderful kit based on the extraordinary Raspberry Pi computer. My nine year-old grandson, within around an hour of unwrapping that at Christmas, was doing some very basic programming. We could usefully learn from and encourage techniques like that.

My third point, which is another essential in this area, is to improve the careers advice and guidance offer. I have said before in this House that I am a great fan of the work that the Careers & Enterprise Company is doing to help schools improve in this area, both for skills and for understanding. The CEC’s “passport for life” is a promising initiative to provide a standardised and verified digital record of achievement that young people can share with employers.

I had also intended to endorse the view of the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, that one of the key audiences whose digital understanding might usefully be improved is Parliament. I was very interested in a study that Doteveryone did last year, mentoring four MPs. I am sure that there are lessons to be learned from that study and that we should be looking at how we can extend that sort of learning to improve our ability to address these issues. This is a huge challenge, and I look forward to hearing from the Minister that the Government have fully studied the score and are ready to step onto the podium.