Superfast Fibre Broadband

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been a very good debate. As someone who is technologically a bit illiterate, I have learned much too much too quickly, and I am probably going to get confused as I try to go through some of my points.

Anybody who has got teenage children—I have children in their late teens—will know the agony of trying to match their expectations in terms of what you provide in your home environment. In Buckinghamshire, we have just experienced the rollout of fibre. I thought I could relax and retire at that point. It has been a nightmare because what you are not told is that there is a headline figure of 30 megabit downloads, but you do not realise that it is still two miles to the nearest exchange, it is still copper wires—why copper when everyone is giving up the landline, I do not understand—and you still have to compete with others in the same area, which is called the contention ratio.

That leads to a question about exactly what target we are aiming for. We have had a number of very good and interesting responses on that. There are already disagreements between the Government’s principal adviser, Ofcom, and the Government about whether it is 30 megabits or 24 megabits. We are still talking about people getting, on average, up to 2 megabits, not 10 megabits, which seems to be what Ofcom regards as sufficient to meet the needs of a typical household—not my household—to access government e-services, do basic web browsing and make video calls. We are not addressing what the noble Lord, Lord Fox, picked up, which is the way demand can change, and, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans pointed out, people in rural and other communities have been relatively low users from necessity not choice. We are not measuring up to the demand that we are expecting over the next 30 years. It may well be that increases in data usage are coming and will largely be in urban areas on fibre, but if we roll this out and, as the noble Lord, Lord Foster, suggested, get behind an inclusion strategy that shows people why they could and should be using digital, then we are talking about huge increases which I do not think are envisaged.

If connection is the main aim, we are probably not going to get to the right place quickly enough. It is a necessary but not sufficient way of progressing. We will have to think much harder about education, skills, the current barriers, how content changes will make differences and the possibility of subsidies and additional support for people. Without that, we will continue to have a suboptimal solution to a problem which has to define us in the new economy that we are approaching.

To sum up, most people are saying that there is an opportunity here—presumably we will return to this in the Digital Economy Bill—to do something that is a step change not an evolutionary change. If we do not do that, if we do not aim high for the gigabit society, we will be rushing to catch up. We are not in a good place, as the figures mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, show. We are way behind other countries in western Europe in terms of the support that is being provided. Sweden and Spain now have 80% of homes served by fibre. We are a long way away from that. I spent some time in a very small place in south-west Ireland called Skibbereen. It is not well known, but it has one of the best internet offices I have experienced. You can get speeds that reflect almost frightening capacity and it is full of people taking their work in to the Ludgate Hub, as it is called, in order to try to build their businesses in a rural environment. Without it, there is no doubt that they would have had to travel to Dublin in order to survive. That is the future we should be thinking about. We should gain more experience from it and try to aim higher than we are currently.

Finally, when we come to the Digital Economy Bill, I hope that we will also look at consumer rights. The Bill takes some grudging steps towards trying to make sure that those who use the new technologies have redress, but we have failed to achieve some of the changes that could have been put into the Consumer Rights Act 2015 in terms of making sure that consumers have those rights. I give notice to the Minister that we on this side will want to come back to some of these issues when we get to the Bill. It is good that providers will have to be more responsible for what they provide in terms of broadband speeds and effectiveness, but there has to be compensation on a much greater scale than is currently the case from those who do not supply it. We also have to make sure that those who acquire products on the internet using the superfast gigabit services that are coming down the track will have the same rights as ordinary consumers.