Telecommunications Infrastructure (Leasehold Property) Bill

Lord Clement-Jones Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments & Lords Hansard
Thursday 4th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)]

My Lords, I join the Minister in congratulating our telecoms providers on rising to the challenge of providing relatively comprehensive connectivity to the nation in response to Covid.

However, I am reluctant to speak to Amendment 3 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, other than to say that I do not support it, for the reason that it appears to place additional burdens and apportion impractical and potentially onerous rights. It would be injected into the Bill in its closing stages when we do not have the capacity as a House either to examine the issues or to reflect on the Electronic Telecommunications Code and the impact of the new rights being given to operators. My approach is that it is best not to introduce additional complexities to Bills during ping-pong.

However, I intervened on the Bill as far back as 19 May 2020 with my amendment to prevent vendors defined by the National Cyber Security Centre as high-risk. From the outset, I welcomed the aims of the Bill. My intentions were narrow and were to protect our critical infrastructure and, by definition, since that is built for the longer term—20, 30 or perhaps 40 years —to protect it from being compromised by firms that today might seem benign but in the long term may be able to jeopardise our security as technology becomes more complex.

My amendment was described as being anti-Huawei, although its wording was much broader. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to other noble Lords who joined me in that endeavour because I was constantly being told by the Government Benches that the amendment was inappropriate. However, the noble Lords, Lord Alton of Liverpool, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, and Lord Adonis, stuck with me as we continued to argue that Huawei or, indeed, any other future telecoms provider that might jeopardise our national security should be removed from being able to operate with impunity in this country.

I truly regret that the Bill was delayed in our seeking those safeguards, but that is what we exist for here as a scrutinising Chamber. We give the Government an opportunity to think again and that is what has happened through those amendments. We currently have before us in the Telecommunications (Security) Bill the right place to discuss those matters as we go forward, and the Government have also seen the light of day on the use of Huawei.

I therefore thank the Minister for her openness throughout the year in having given us valuable time and discussing where we might go with our amendment. I thank all noble Lords who participated in the Bill for having put up with us and a slightly otiose amendment. Nevertheless, we got there in the end.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her comprehensive introduction. I agree with her emphasis on the importance of internet services and the need to eliminate digital exclusion. It is hard to think what the consequences would have been if we had suffered this pandemic just 10 years ago, when our broadband services were less extensive and much slower than now.

In the name of inclusivity, I welcome the first part of today’s business, Motion A. Throughout the course of the Bill, my noble friend Lord Fox, the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara and Lord Liddle, the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, and others have been arguing for as inclusive a definition as possible of those who could be regarded as tenants, without straying into the territory of licensees or licences. It includes those with assured shorthold tenancies or assured tenancy agreements, as well as students living in short-term lets, where a tenant has, or tenants have, exclusive possession of the let property.

We have been concerned throughout to ensure that all tenancies such as renewable tenancies are included, even if they are not, strictly speaking, leases and that there should not be any grey areas that need to be interpreted by the courts. I am pleased that the Government have now produced an even more inclusive definition than the one that I argued for on Report. My sincere thanks go to the Minister and the Bill team for their care and consideration on what we have always regarded as an important issue.

However, I do not welcome Motion B. The original purpose of the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, which was strongly supported on these Benches—I remind the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, that it was introduced not at ping-pong but on Report—was to ensure that the code is fit for the purpose of delivering the Government’s manifesto commitment of broadband capable of 1 gigabit per second to every home by 2025. The need for this has become even more important, particularly since the Covid-19 lockdown has demonstrated our increasing dependence on good broadband connectivity for remote working, education and many other aspects of life, as the Minister mentioned.

Sadly, it is clear that the Government are backtracking in their ambitions—the 2025 1 gigabit per second target has been watered down and the budget for rollout expenditure slashed by two-thirds. Even so, it is clear that the Electronic Communications Code needs regular review to ensure that the Government’s objective, however watered down, is met and that operators have all the rights under the code that they need.

My noble friend Lord Fox rightly commented on a universal service obligation of a miserable 10 megabits per second and I completely agree with him. However, looking to the future, I am glad that during the course of the Bill we have started a genuine debate around whether we can describe broadband as a utility and what the appropriate rights of entry are.

I am also grateful to the noble Baroness for answering what the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, described as a blizzard of questions on telecoms supply chain diversification in her extremely informative letter last month. Some of the work being carried out on open RAN, mentioned by my noble friend Lord Fox, is ground- breaking for the interoperability and competitiveness of our 5G networks. It is good to see that international collaboration is regarded as essential and is ongoing.

However, at the end of the day I am left with a sense of bafflement. This has been a ridiculously modest Bill, given the challenges of the broadband and 5G rollout ahead. Of course, as the Minister has mentioned, we now have Access to Land: Consultation on Changes to the Electronic Communications Code, which was issued in January. Notwithstanding this Bill, it seems clear the Government think that further changes are needed to clarify the position on rights to upgrade and share. Why not an earlier consultation? Why were these issues not considered before this piece of legislation? Are these long-standing questions or are they thoughts that have arisen during the course of the Bill? Is there another Bill on the way? We know from the representations made that the operators are calling for other changes that are not included in the Bill or the consultation.

I have another quote from Matt Warman. In his introduction to the consultation he says:

“The government is committed to ensuring that the Code is fit for purpose in order to deliver our digital connectivity targets.”


That is excellent. A review of the kind envisaged in our amendment would have been perfect for that purpose. The Bill has taken an inordinate time to get through, but it is clear that more reforms are in the pipeline. The question remains: could we have been spending our time better and enacting a more comprehensive Bill with a wider range of revisions, instead of this piecemeal approach?

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, like others, I start by joining the Minister in thanking all our digital providers for the work that they have been doing during the pandemic, which, of course, will continue for some time to come. I hope that it will provide the basis for a learning experience about what it means to live in the digital economy that we all share hopes for.

As the Minister said when she introduced the Motions, this Bill is a modest one. However, when she says that it affects some 10 million people, that means that it has important implications. We never objected to the ideas behind the Bill and, indeed, wanted to help as much as we could to make sure that it became law as quickly as possible and allowed access to the digital economy that is so necessary in the modern world to people who otherwise would not have had it because of problems with their freeholder. We must accept that broadband is a utility.

I welcome the Government’s amendment. I think that the right word has been used, in that it “improves” the amendment originally moved by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, on Report, which we also supported, to try to make sense of the definitions in terms of who was to be affected, whether it was leaseholders, renters or whatever. The language is much better as a result and that is good.

Unfortunately, the removal of the amendment just discussed by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, seems to have a bit of a downside. I talked with the Minister before we got to this stage in proceedings and made it clear that we would not insist on our amendment being retained within the Bill. I think that we did that more in sadness than in a spirit of support, because it relates to important issues that have been raised in today’s debate.

The Minister was kind enough to praise our aspirations for the Bill, but she was also rather devastating in demolishing all the points that I thought that we had broadly agreed were important. She pointed out how inept our drafting was and how problematic it would have been had the amendment stayed within the Bill. Such are the joys of opposition. We are never going to achieve the skills of the draftsmen available to the Government. I wish that sometimes more credit would be given to the ideas that we have put forward, rather than worrying about their expression.

At the end of the day, I suppose that the consultation on the Electronic Communications Code announced by the Government in January does the trick on some of the issues underlying our amendment. However, as the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Fox, said, it also exposes that fact that a large number of wider issues, often led by other departments in government, still have not been resolved. I urge the Government to push forward on the permitted development issues and on the street works, including the need for the antennae and cabinets that will be required if the 5G support for the 1 gigabit-enabled economy is ever to see the light of day.

I could delay the House with a further discussion of the need for much more ambitious targets, a better USO and more investment, but these have been covered and this Bill is not really the right place for them. I leave my comments with a question for the Minister: does she have in her mind a route map for how we are to achieve the 1 gigabit per second-enabled infrastructure? I am confident that, since this issue will not go away, we will be resuming discussion of it in the not-too-distant future.

Finally, I share the Minister’s concern that the telecoms operators, which we have praised already for the work that they have done during this pandemic, should continue to get the best tools and the best access so that they can continue to innovate and provide superfast quality broadband to as many people as possible. Unfortunately, I harbour a niggling concern, rather like the noble Lords, Lord Fox and Lord Clement-Jones, that one problem that will get in the way of this delivery is the scope and scale of the current Electronic Communications Code. As the noble Lord, Lord Clement- Jones, said, is not the real question how we are to get beyond that to think again about how a utility as important as the internet can be allowed to be installed without the current plethora of planning and other restrictions, and control of the streetscape and the environment in which it has to be inserted, being in the hands of other departments? It seems to suggest that more work is required, but that is for another day.