Superfast Fibre Broadband

Lord Fox Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking my noble friend Lord Foster for securing this debate, which serves as a useful preface to the Digital Economy Bill and the discussions that will ensue on that. I shall ask a number of questions of the Minister, but I understand that he has a limited time in which to answer them. This is part of the continuing debate that I am sure we will all be having as the Bill makes its way towards us.

First, I want to acknowledge the scale of the rollout challenge that has been undertaken. We can see from the numbers that it has come a long way. We should thank the hardworking teams in Openreach, who have done some pretty tough stuff to get us as far as we have. We should not debate this matter without making that acknowledgement. However, the UK’s broadband capacity is very important, as is access to it, and we need to be honest with ourselves about how far we have got on this rollout journey.

I want to set the scene slightly, while avoiding too much history. It is worth looking at the facts. BT has a number of irons in the fire. It has a considerable asset in its copper network and, understandably, like any company, it will want to leverage the value from that asset. Meanwhile, it is increasingly selling digital products down the network. These are products that add further strain to capacity where it is constrained, down the network that it has been tasked to build. It also has a business selling network services. This portfolio of businesses is not generally compatible with the building and operating of what should be a dull and efficient utility—let us call it a superefficient utility. To put that in context, it is the equivalent of asking a consortium comprising Network Rail, Eddie Stobart and Tesco to build and own our roads. We would not do that. I know Ofcom’s previously stated preferred option for how the ownership of Openreach might change and I am not going to spend much time—because we do not have it—debating that future ownership model, which clearly will be an issue, but I would welcome the Minister’s view on that.

Leaving that aside, does it matter who owns it and how it works? Do the ends justify the means anyway? My noble friend Lord Foster gave us a snowstorm of percentage signs and download speeds, proving how well or otherwise we are doing. Perhaps we should be somewhat wary of how those speeds are measured. My noble friend Lady Scott pointed out that, essentially, these are theoretical models based on the make-up of the network, how it gets there and postcodes. Who does that measuring? We know, as we heard from all the speakers so far, that the rates quoted rarely match those actually experienced in the office and at home. Above all, as my noble friend Lord Foster said, we should remember that the rate-determining link in the broadband delivery chain for most people remains a strand of often quite old copper wire linking them to a cabinet somewhere in the general vicinity of where they live or work. Will the Minister comment on having some independent verification of the measures we use for download speed? How would he seek to add to the confidence that consumers and buyers of these services can have in those speeds?

Perhaps we are looking at this the wrong way round. The focus on download speed is itself revealing, reflecting an aim by almost everybody to send stuff to people. It reflects an ambition to sell to consumers: the better the download capacity, the more we can put down the pipe and the more money we can make. But this is not a one-way street and for many who aspire to be part of the digital economy the priority is often the other way round: upload speed is equally important, and almost always lower in the available packages. Our budding designers, fintech entrepreneurs, games makers and whoever else need effective upload speeds to deliver their work to the next stage in their value chain. To realistically assess our success to date, this needs to have equal status with download speeds. Does the Minister agree with this analysis and will he push Ofcom and others to include stretching upload targets in the data we set for the network?

Finally, there is the industrial strategy—two words used by many people but we have yet to find out exactly what they mean. We heard from a Minister in the Chamber yesterday how important infrastructure will be in the industrial strategy—whatever that looks like. Last month, as I think the noble Baroness, Lady Pidding, said, we heard from the Prime Minister in her party conference speech that we need better broadband connectivity to create equal opportunity across our country. Mrs May clearly does not think that what we have to date is good enough and I am happy to agree with Theresa on that. While it is important that we all adopt a realistic understanding—we need to develop that—of how far we have got, we also need to understand that the current targets are not good enough. The world has moved on substantially since those targets were set. We must raise the bar higher and be more ambitious, rather than merely meet the current set of targets. So my final question is: how will the Minister ensure that the industrial strategy will deliver a 21st-century broadband network, rather than the 20th-century one that we are currently trying to build?