Shared Rural Network

Debate between Lord Foster of Bath and Lord Stevenson of Balmacara

Monday 28th October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for repeating the Statement made in another place. Before I start on a detailed response, I should say that I find it hard to work out exactly what has been announced today. The money that the Minister was talking about was already announced. I am not in any sense accusing her of simply repeating a previous announcement, because there is a focus to it that was not there before. However, if the money was already available and there was nothing new in it, the arrangement seems conditional—this sounds a bit like Brexit—on a legal agreement being established in an uncertain timeframe, with uncertain consequences if it is not so done. It is therefore a sort of precursor, or perhaps a preheating, of an announcement yet to be made that an agreement has been so made.

The agreement that is being announced is one that the operators seem to have come to themselves. As was clear from the Statement, it has caused a bit of a problem. Rather unusually, it has caused the Government to suggest to Ofcom that the previously announced spectrum auction, which it has been working on for six to nine months, has to be changed at rather late notice to ensure that there are not unfortunate geographical restrictions placed upon it. If it does not all come together in an appropriate timescale, and if we do not get the solution from the operators that the Government are clearly signalling, then the whole thing goes back to square one. We will be back where we were before, with a patchy and not very satisfactory solution despite the money. I am sounding downbeat about this because, while I want to welcome it, I am a bit confused about the overegging that appears to be happening here of what is a good idea but which certainly has not yet been delivered. It is rather unusual for the Government to take steps this way forward. Perhaps there is an election coming and they wanted to get some news out. Maybe that is what it is, so perhaps I am being silly about this.

To roll back a little, we are starting from a very bad place. As the Statement makes clear, coverage from the four operators in the United Kingdom is about 66% of the UK’s geography. That translates to figures I have seen showing that about 90% of UK parliamentary constituencies are not getting complete coverage: there are, right across the country, places for which no coverage at 4G level is available from any operator, let alone more than one. We are starting from a very bad position.

We went through this in some detail when dealing with the Digital Economy Act. As Members on the Bench opposite will recall, we suggested that the Government were hopelessly unambitious in their targets and that the USO of 10 megabits should be replaced by a target of 1 gigabit for the provision of basic services through wi-fi, linked with mobile operation, to make sure that 100% of the country was covered. Under this plan, which as I understand it is skewed towards a solution which will allow for the more rapid rollout of broadband, we will get to only 95% geographical coverage. That will, of course, be much less in terms of the number of properties covered and may not reach the individuals and SMEs in rural constituencies who need these services. Nevertheless, it is certainly an improvement.

I hope, however, that the noble Baroness will explain the difference between the current ambition for a 4G solution and where the Statement ended up, saying that this is to prepare the way for the country’s 5G. As I understand it, a 5G solution to the problems we face will require probably five or 10 times as much infrastructure involvement. Is that included in this process, or is this yet to come? Are we really talking about a 4G solution?

In welcoming this, we should recognise that industry coming together to come forward with a proposal has done us all a great service. At the heart of this is the rather coy announcement that if you have a contract with an operator—as is the norm; you tend to have only one mobile phone and one operator servicing it—you will receive coverage, wherever you are. My rather naive technological brain suggests that that must include some form of roaming connection. Can the noble Baroness confirm that the Government have finally grasped this nettle and that a solution to the problem faced only by Britain—on the continent, you are linked up immediately to whichever operator has the best service available—will now be embraced? She seems to pose as a solution that, if coverage is everywhere, we will get rid of not only partial not-spots but also total not-spots, and that that can be done only if all the operators work together. If that is true, then I welcome it; it is the answer to the questions we have been posing for some time.

Finally, can the noble Baroness confirm that there will be targeted figures to measure success against? Consumers need to know that the solution proposed today will work. Some sorts of targets are needed, because it is a long time until 2022. If we could have some sense of what those markers will be and how they will be met, that would be helpful.

Whether it is 5G or 4G—and 4G is at least a step forward for most people—it is important to know the benefits available. The ability to access it while travelling on the railways and motorways is key to future development. Can the noble Baroness confirm that that will be part of the proposal? Can she say whether the funding available, which is conditional on a legal contract, will still be available if, at the end of the day, a deal does not go through and we do not have the legal construct to allow us to continue? Can she tell us that that money will not be lost?

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

My Lords, on these Benches, we welcome the Statement in so far as it goes, but we also note that it is not yet a done deal. I had the privilege to chair your Lordships’ Rural Economy Committee. We very quickly discovered that, on connectivity, rural areas have been left way behind. The Government told the committee that they have always recognised the need for rural areas to benefit as much as anywhere else from digital infrastructure to transform the economy. Yet, as the Statement acknowledges, it is rural areas that have really lost out. There has perhaps been recognition of a need, but so far there has been no action to cater for it.

This Statement, as some other recent Statements have done, suggests a welcome, if belated, change of heart. But it will take until 2026 to eradicate partial not-spots and reduce the total not-spot land-mass from 7% to 3%—way longer than was originally promised by the Government. Will the Minister continue to look at the option of mobile roaming in rural areas to provide at least an interim solution to help with the partial not-spots?

The shared rural network deal includes dropping the coverage requirement in the forthcoming auction of the spectrum that is to be used for 5G. Given that this deal has not yet been signed, can the Minister explain why Ofcom has today announced the start of a consultation on a new auction arrangement that does not include any coverage obligation? What will happen, for instance, if this deal does not get signed? The Minister says that she is satisfied that this deal improves on the originally proposed coverage requirements. What is the Government’s analysis of future 5G coverage? If we are still going to go by percentages, will she at least acknowledge that, if we eventually get to 55% 5G coverage, rural areas will still be losing out? Surely it would have been better to include a “rural first” requirement, so that rural areas do not get left behind?

The Statement also refers to the rollout of high-speed broadband. Since rural areas also lag behind with this form of connectivity, and so will be most reliant on the broadband universal service obligation, why will the Government not follow the advice of your Lordships’ Rural Economy Committee and increase the paltry upload and download speeds in the USO?

Finally, government efforts to mandate fibre to the premises on most new housing developments are welcome, but developments of fewer than 30 houses seem set to be excluded. Since such small developments are often in rural communities, is this another example of rural areas losing out? Will the Government think again? That said, we welcome the shared rural network deal and hope that it comes to fruition.

Electronic Communications (Universal Service) (Broadband) Order 2018

Debate between Lord Foster of Bath and Lord Stevenson of Balmacara

Tuesday 5th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall start with a brief quote from the Guardian in August 2017:

“Britain is a broadband laggard with an average speed ranking it 31st in the world trailing most of Europe, Thailand and New Zealand. A new report has found that across the UK … it takes about an hour to download a … Hollywood film … The average speed in the UK is less than a third that of Singapore, which tops the global league table measuring broadband in 189 countries, where it takes an average of 18 minutes to download a [similar] film … The UK falls well short of the average speeds enjoyed by European countries … The report found that overall the UK lags behind 19 European countries, 17 of them in the European Union”.


Our conversations in this House about broadband usually take the form of a question or short debate on why reception and coverage received by individual Members of your Lordship’s House in such and such a place are so bad; others join in. Notspots are mentioned. Rural areas where 3G and 4G mobile coverage are to be found get discussed in little groups gathering around this Chamber as if they were places with Michelin-starred restaurants and secrets to be shared only discreetly and with close friends. Occasionally we might hear people drop in scary words like “latency” and “contention ratios”. This is followed by a reassuring statement from the Minister that things are going well, investment is pouring in, and that coverage is in excess of the target and is fast approaching 100%. However, if one listens carefully, the Minister never explains 100% of what, and that is a question I want to come back to. I confidently expect that this debate will be no different.

I have no substantive issues to raise on the order before us, and indeed I want to compliment the team at DCMS for the high quality of the paperwork that has been provided, in particular the Explanatory Memorandum. What I want to do is try to set out why the government approach to this issue was wrong in the Digital Economy Act 2017 and is wrong now, and to beg them to use the powers they have in that Act to try to push forward urgently towards what we have referred to in earlier debates as the “two-gig economy”.

Therefore, my starting point is an amendment to the Digital Economy Bill that we won on Report in February 2017. The early election that year meant that we did not get to ping-pong on the Bill and the amendment fell in the Commons. I like to think that our substantial win in the Division Lobby would have got us further down this track, had it been a normal year. As my noble friend Lord Mendelsohn, who moved the amendment, pointed out at the time, our amendments were about making sure that the universal service obligation being introduced met the Government’s published objectives, as set out strongly in the Ofcom technical advice to the Government at the time. It still seems incredible that the Government have come forward with the slowest of the available options. The only option that meets all the requirements was Ofcom’s scenario 3, with download speeds of 30 Mbps and upload speeds of 6 Mbps, compared to what is being proposed in the USO: 10 Mbps download speeds and 1 Mbps upload speeds, which is what we proposed.

At this stage, it is worth commenting that, in my view, responses to the government consultation showed support for higher speeds than what made it into the USO. Possibly reflecting that, I think it fair to point out that the Minister’s introduction to the report on the consultation said:

“I want to be clear that setting the minimum speed at at least 10 mbps is not the limit of our ambition. To support our vision of full fibre connectivity, in the 2016 Autumn Statement, the Government announced a £1.1bn package of measures to support investment in digital infrastructure, aimed at ensuring the UK has the digital connectivity it needs for the future, including full fibre networks and 5G”.


That is pretty good. I think we can all go along with that. Of course, it fits very nicely with the thrust of our amendment, which was to set a very high aspirational target for the USO— but a tough, unachievable floor for the ordinary day-to-day work—require the rollout of the USO to start in rural areas and prioritise small and medium-sized enterprises. We found all those ideas in Germany, whose Government had recently legislated successfully for precisely that approach.

In framing our amendment, we asked ourselves who could possibly argue against setting an aspirational target for broadband connection speeds of 2 Gbps or more, or object to the cost-effective minimum standard of 30 Mbps download speeds. We thought that the Government would welcome us specifying that rollout must be rural and SME-focused. Indeed, we spiced up the amendment even further by adding a requirement on the Secretary of State to ensure fair competition—“This is the Labour Party talking. We want fair competition and we want it now”—and calling for universal service obligations for mobile coverage. We thought that we were playing bingo and had won the full house, but we were wrong.

Looking back at the debate on the amendment, the key points that come out are as follows. The Ofcom report to which I referred is clear that the Government’s preferred USO speed of 10 Mbps will not be sufficient. It argues that even if it is possible and data usage might not require any more—a point that it says is unlikely, even when the technology gains in compression and transmission techniques are taken into account—other issues such as contention rates and latency would render 10 Mbps unfit for usage in a very short time. The best that the Ofcom report can muster in defence of a 10 Mbps download speed is that if it were adopted, it would have to be reviewed almost immediately.

Other countries have shown what happens to innovation and productivity if due care and attention is not placed on the needs of SMEs or on ensuring the widest geographical reach possible. The issue here is linked to the vacuous reliance on coverage in a geographical sense, rather than in terms of the ability of the infrastructure to provide it, now and in the future, if it is to grow and develop. Coverage of 95%—even 98%—may be where we are at geographically or in terms of the number of properties reached, but it does not feel like that to anyone trying to use the internet to start up a business in rural parts of the UK. We need a measure for this in terms of whether one can use one’s equipment wherever they are in the United Kingdom.

Last week, I was climbing in the Scottish Highlands. We could not get coverage in the glens, not unexpectedly, but once I was at the top of Sgurr Fhuaran—I will just mention that it is 1,057 metres high—I found that I was on 4G. I sent messages and photographs. I emailed my friends, as well as the many fans and admirers of my brilliant climbing skills. In fact, I have them here in my pocket if noble Lords wish to see them. It was so good that I could have tweeted about it. But these are activities which I cannot do at my home only 25 miles away from this place. I cannot even have a smart meter, of which I have heard so much, because the connectivity in Little Missenden, where I live, is so bad. Do not get me started on the connectivity in this place.

What on earth is the point of ignoring, in a USO, mobile telephony? The Government wanted to resist that from the start, even though it has been dealt with in a different way. It may be in the various directives, but it makes no sense. That is a point I want to develop.

We are at the cusp of another revolution in technology. If you have lived through and enjoyed 2G, 2.5G, 3G, and even if you are experiencing 4G, you may understand better than I do what is going to happen when we get to 5G. I gather it is not just an upgrade. This is a new, real-time communications technology which will fit seamlessly with wi-fi, providing the infrastructure is upgraded. It is the technology that will make the internet of things viable and allow us to use many other newer technologies not yet thought of. With the capacity and response times achievable with 5G, it can only happen if we install fibre now and that must mean fibre to the premises.

Driving back from Scotland on Saturday, with aching limbs and a slow puncture, I was listening to digital Radio 4. That prompts another thought for the Minister: when are we going to have digital switchover on radio? While I was waiting for my car to be repaired, I had a chance to catch up with a programme called “The Bottom Line” with Evan Davis. He and his guests were discussing what 5G will do to our current use of the internet and, in turn, to our economy. I will not repeat all the points that were made, but it was a very rich and good discussion about what we should be doing to prepare for 5G. It is available on iPlayer and well worth listening to. The point repeated by the panel time and again is that we are well behind the rest of Europe in terms of delivering fibre to the premises. FTTP must be of a new standard, because without that, we will fall even further behind the rest of the world.

FTTP has been recommended by the infrastructure commission to be part of the universal service obligation. Fibre reflects the current and likely future patterns of consumer and citizen behaviour and the increasing use of mobiles as the growing means, particularly in the younger demographics, of accessing all sorts of digital and other services, often in parallel in real time.

My main regret is that we were not successful in getting our amendment to the Digital Economy Bill into the Act. The Act gives the Minister the power to review the USO, so my plea is that he does not regret the situation that we are in and begins to review the USO immediately. Surely the architecture of the USO has to be consistent with the Government’s productivity plan, industrial strategy and the national infrastructure plan. The argument is that without some ambition, the USO itself may become a constraint on all these important challenges.

The Government seem to be caught by the failure of the market structure which they are working with. The USO’s construction has necessarily been shaped with the imperfections of the market structure that has succeeded in getting us on the journey, but is inadequate to address current or future technology. The department needs to use the powers in the Bill to up its game. I beg to move.

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

My Lords, may I begin by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, on securing an opportunity for us to discuss the Government’s universal service obligation proposals? I very much enjoyed his characterisation of the many debates that we have had on this issue and related issues in this House. I suspect that the noble Lord has, as I do, a good idea of what is in the Minister’s folder and what we are likely to hear at the end of this debate.

I certainly agree with the noble Lord that we should be supporting the principle of a broadband universal service obligation, and I agree with him entirely that the USO lacks ambition. Indeed, by the Government’s own admission, the USO is simply a safety net and frankly, not a very good one at that. I have looked at many Ofcom documents and I cannot find a single one in which they express real enthusiasm for a USO of just 10 Mbps. The lack of ambition shown in the USO is common to much of the Government’s whole approach to broadband rollout.

I want to begin by declaring two interests. First, I live in the wilds of rural Suffolk in a home as yet untouched by superfast broadband, and not even by fast broadband. At the weekend, I used the excellent Ofcom app to check my broadband speed and discovered that I have a download speed of just about 3 Mbps and my upload speed is precisely one-third of 1 Mbps. I hope your Lordships will forgive the pun, but I will be champing at the megabit to take advantage of the USO when it comes along.