Digital Economy Bill

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 13th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his introduction of the Bill and welcome all noble Lords who have put their names down to speak. It is going to be a very rich debate and we are looking forward to it. It is the season of awards; it would be wrong to let pass the very successful innovation from the Minister’s department of a book of the Bill. It is the best thing I have read since I came into your Lordships’ House and I recommend it to any of those who have not been lucky enough to be on the Minister’s—obviously very private—circulation list. It is a wonderful innovation and I found it most useful as I prepared for this speech.

The Digital Economy Bill before the House includes some very sound ideas which this side can support, not least because some of them have surfaced in previous Bills in your Lordships’ House. However, we by no means consider it a good piece of legislation as a whole. Indeed, its weaknesses lie as much in what it omits as what it contains. To start, a Labour version of the Bill would properly recognise the importance of the digital economy to our country and, in so doing, would be much more ambitious about delivering both ultrafast broadband and secure mobile network coverage to everyone who needs them, wherever they live. In fact, Labour called for a USO to be introduced back in 2010, with a fully costed plan for it to be achieved by 2012. We are still not there. The 10 megabit speed promised in the Bill is less than half what is needed to achieve superfast broadband, and it will not be sufficient to bring the benefits outlined by the Minister. There are also significant doubts about the pledge to extend coverage to the entire country, particularly in rural areas, along with no detail from the Government on how this is to be achieved or at what cost to local residents. At the moment, we do not even have the proposed standards to be legislated for, as we wait for Ofcom to complete a report on this issue, but I hope this will be published before we begin Committee stage. In Committee, we will be pressing for a much higher standard to be set for the universal service obligation, with fibre to the premises as standard and a minimum speed of 1 gigabyte.

Where are the policies to complement this welcome initiative? There is nothing in the Bill about improving the teaching of digital skills in schools, nothing about training or apprenticeships and nothing on conditions of employment for those using these technologies to forge careers in the creative industries or across industrial sectors more generally. We will probe these issues in Committee.

There are welcome measures in the Bill about access to digital services, with Ofcom gaining powers to set conditions for automatic compensation to be paid to users where providers fail to meet a specified standard or obligation. We welcome the proposal to help consumers switch communications provider—something we proposed in the 2015 Consumer Rights Bill, but which the Government turned down at that time. We would like consumers to have more ability to access mobile signals across the country and to be able to set a financial cap on those services. We welcome the proposal to improve consumer rights against nuisance calls and wonder whether the Government would be prepared to go further and pick up our suggestion—again from the Consumer Rights Bill—of a default-off proposition for cold marketing calls.

The Bill also seeks, albeit belatedly through a Commons Report stage amendment which was hardly discussed in the other place, to deliver the Conservative manifesto pledge to introduce robust online age-verification checks. We share the objective of protecting children from viewing harmful material on the internet but it is unclear how the Government’s proposals would work in practice. We also wonder whether the regulatory oversight issues have been properly thought through. This is a difficult area, but we are very concerned by the idea that, under the new clauses, the designated age-verification regulator appears to be given powers to censor material that is not illegal, and to have powers to take down websites even though they may have satisfactory age-verification procedures in place. This cannot be right. Children have to be protected, but censorship is not the way to do things in this country. We also take the view that age verification is only part of the story and Ministers should use the Bill to make provision for effective sex and relationship education for young people. In addition, we will put pressure on the Government to introduce measures to deter internet trolls, and to ensure effective prosecution and penalties for those who engage in this illegal behaviour.

The Bill contains ambitious proposals to enable data sharing for a public benefit, as part of a wider aim to deliver public services in a digital by default mode. We welcome the general approach, but there are legitimate concerns about privacy and the security of personal data, in response to which we want to be sure that not only will Ministers be held to account for what personal data are being shared, and for what purposes, but that the scope and scale of this change is subject to challenge by those affected. We are also interested in reviewing how consumers can be better briefed about cybersecurity affecting their personal details held by commercial and charitable bodies. At present, there seems to be no requirement for such bodies to notify customers when their security is breached.

We were pleased to see the fintech section in the Bill, and welcome the proposal to support broader access to electronic payment systems for non-banks, which might just mark the first appearance of real competition in the banking sector. I am also glad to see the section about personal debt, and the late but welcome recognition by HMRC that its current approach needs to do much more to tackle unmanageable personal debt. We may have some proposals in this field about a breathing space and a need for parity between formal and informal debt solutions for the Government to consider.

Following the signing of the BBC’s royal charter, the Bill contains details of Ofcom’s new role as regulator, along with clauses that would put into law the Government’s wish that the BBC take over responsibility for providing free TV licences for the elderly, along with any future policy responsibility. As debates in the other place showed, this is a controversial proposal that raises issues about the independence of the BBC now and in the future. Is it right that the BBC, which should be focusing all its efforts on making great programmes, has also to take on a social policy brief? Is it not time to make the independence of the BBC a reality by ring-fencing its funding requirements and preventing future Governments undertaking the sort of dawn raids that we saw in 2010 and 2015?

We are looking to add a number of provisions to the Bill. There is now all-industry support for action to prevent secondary ticket operators using computerised systems—so-called bots—to snap up seats at concerts and sporting events as soon as they go on sale, before then releasing them at premium prices. We want to introduce restrictions on the current practice of search engines promoting links to pirate sites, and we want to deal with the problem of illegal streaming through IPTV boxes. We will propose better accessibility for on-demand services—I was pleased to hear the Minister mention that this was in the Government’s thinking—and we will also press for a review of the prominence regulations and the listed events regime. We welcome the announcement just made of extending public lending rights to e-book lending but might wish to push further to check whether a tax on reading should continue to be paid on books that are downloaded, since this seems very unfair.

Finally, I return to my opening point about the need for the whole country to prepare for the digital economy. As the Minister said, there is a section in the briefing documents relating to Clause 87, about a new entitlement to digital skills training to help consumers make use of new digital services as well as to improve their chances in the employment market. This is, of course, a proposal we welcome but the devil is in the detail. The main thrust of this clause is simply to amend the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009, with the intention of creating a duty that will work in a similar way to the current entitlement for basic literacy and numeracy. However, the factsheet goes on to point out that that funding will come from the existing adult education budget, administered by the DfE. We will want to probe what this will provide in practice. In particular, we are concerned that there may be no new money for this. Indeed, the document says that, as the AEB is finite, training providers will decide how to allocate resources to meet demand. I sense here the familiar problem posed by “wicked issues”—one department wants to will the ends of a policy but is not able to will the means because it has failed to bring on board the funding department.

We look forward to working with the Government on these issues and to hearing the contributions of other noble Lords this afternoon.