Digital Economy Bill

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

Tuesday 13th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

Steady!

[Mr Edward Vaizey (Wantage) (Con)]

It is a beautiful Bill!

[Mr Whittingdale]

We were very close in our ministerial team!

The Bill is something of a Christmas tree and contains a number of different measures within it. Let me speak first about the two major provisions, which both relate to connectivity. The reform of the electronic communications code has been something that communications providers have been urging for a considerable time. Indeed, it was part of the deal struck with mobile phone providers by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid) in return for their guarantee of extending coverage. An attemp was made to introduce it in the Enterprise Bill in the last Parliament. It has been around for a long time.

I found out from my own constituency about 18 months ago that Vodafone had a problem with one of its transmitters, which led to a large number of my constituents losing the service. That was impossible to put right for something like eight weeks as a result of Vodafone being unable to access the transmitter.

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[Calum Kerr]

Yes, Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk is very good, too. But self-praise is no praise.

My hon. Friend the Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey gained support from Ofcom and the Government for allowing customers who have signed up to mobile contracts to switch or cancel if they find they have inadequate coverage, and I encourage the Government and Ministers to revisit this and consider whether it might be more explicit.

It is not just in the wired world that change is needed. We welcome the long-overdue measures to reform the electronic communications code.

[Mr Vaizey]

Hear, hear.

[Calum Kerr]

rose—

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[Mr Edward Vaizey (Wantage) (Con)]

I am very grateful, Mr Deputy Speaker, that you only showed me a yellow card, not a red card. I will remember that.

What a pleasure it is to speak in what, I gather, is a co-paternity Bill, conceived on many evenings between me and my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale). But I should point out that this is also a vengeful child because five of the nine Ministers who were present in the delivery room are now on the Back Benches or have left Parliament. I hope the Bill is kinder to its adoptive parents.

Let me speak briefly about the most important issue—the introduction of the universal service obligation. What a pleasure it is to hear Members from all parts of the House praise the Minister’s very successful rural broadband programme roll-out, which is bringing superfast broadband to 19 out of 20 homes throughout the UK. They are right to praise it, because it is the most successful Government-sponsored broadband programme in the world, and the Minister should take credit for that achievement.

I received an unsolicited email—it is a rare thing—from the director of the broadband programme in Oxfordshire. He pointed out that Oxfordshire is at 93% with 15 months of the programme still to go. Five million pounds has already come back to the county council from the Government funding and there is £2.8 million further to come—around £8 million of the public sector investment of £40 million, and he thinks that perhaps we will get it all back because of gainshare and take-up. He says:

“I cannot think of any large scale public sector contract which has delivered on time and under cost. Very good contract to work with in protecting the public purse and incentivising successful outcomes.”

I do not have a mains sewer in my house. I recall the comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Saffron Walden (Sir Alan Haselhurst). We must remember that the broadband programme is an infrastructure programme. You do not just flick a switch and deliver broadband. You have to dig up roads; you have to do engineering work. Openreach, especially the programme director, Bill Murphy, deserves a huge amount of praise for what has been achieved.

I confess that I am utterly confused by those people who want to break up BT and Openreach. Why would one simply adopt the campaign of BT’s competitors? Why would one wish to break up a highly successful British company, post-Brexit when we need all the champions we can get? Why would one break up a company that has delivered such a successful programme? In the words of the chief executive of Virgin Media, an able competitor of BT, “If you want better broadband, pick up a spade.” That is my message to TalkTalk, Vodafone and Sky, who all seek for their own reasons to break up a great British company.

I have two things to say to the Minister. I firmly believe that Openreach can deliver the USO, but it will need his help in easing regulation, particularly for long line VDSL. I also hope that Broadband Delivery UK will continue its excellent work and become a taskforce. A lot of the 5% that still has to be reached is in inner-city areas, and that is usually because of bureaucratic obstacles stopping the roll-out of broadband which have nothing to do with technical challenges. A good and effective BDUK, helping roll-out in cities, would be hugely helpful.

I echo the calls about the frustration with new build. I remember dealing with Linden Homes in my constituency. For the princely sum of £6,000 it could have delivered broadband to all its customers in a multimillion pound development. It point-blank refused to do so. The attitude of too many developers is shocking. The Government refused to change the planning laws when I was a Minister. Perhaps we should look at that again.

The reforms to the electronic communications code are long overdue; we took far too long to bring them forward. They apply just as much to mobile. I recall mobile operators telling me that when they wished to upgrade a 3G mast to a 4G mast at a site in an airport, the rent went up from £50,000 to £250,000. We must reduce the cost of rolling out broadband infrastructure, whether mobile or fixed, and we cannot have our cake and eat it. I heard the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah) talking about the loss to the public sector of the £300,000 that Newcastle City Council might lose, but the gain for Newcastle City Council in easing planning restrictions would be better coverage in Newcastle for her constituents and, importantly, for her local businesses, who create jobs and wealth in Newcastle. We cannot allow the landowners to ride roughshod over this Bill, perhaps in the other place. We must reduce the cost of infrastructure roll-out. We need to continue to look at planning reform, particularly, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon said, with the roll-out of 5G.

[Chi Onwurah]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman, an excellent former Minister, for giving way and it is good to hear a Conservative Member of Parliament taking on the landed vested interests, as it were, but will he say how this Bill will ensure that the benefits of reduced rentals accrue to the users of mobile phones, not simply the mobile operators?

[Mr Vaizey]

Benefits will accrue to mobile phone users through improved coverage. The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) mocked the mobile infrastructure roll-out plan. He got his facts wrong, but that brought home the huge cost and complexity of building those networks. Anything we can do to reduce the cost of roll-out will help the consumer in terms of coverage and, hopefully, cost.

I fully support the measures on age verification and the upgrading of the offence of copyright infringement. It is interesting that hon. Members on both sides of the House have called for a general debate on internet regulation, which is what that is. It will come more and more to the fore. I echo the comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) and others. It is almost impossible to deal with social media companies. They are like giant children. Suddenly they have 300 million users or 1.2 billion users, and they have to make up some of the regulation as they go along. There was the recent controversy when Facebook banned the iconic photograph of the child in Vietnam. The Government need to work, and work quickly, with those organisations, but even bringing them to the table causes some difficulty.

I fully support the measures on data sharing. That is a huge prize, but we must recognise the concern of consumers about having their private data used. This is about using anonymous data and breaking down the barriers between Departments, which can only benefit citizens.

Let me briefly echo one or two concerns. I had a huge amount of sympathy with what the hon. Member for Rhondda said about free TV licences being imposed on the BBC. It had nothing to do with Rupert Murdoch, by the way, and everything to do with saving money on the welfare bill. It is wrong that we are leaving the decision on free television licences to the BBC. It should be a decision for the Government. There are plenty of ways of updating and refining the way in which the free TV licence currently works, without getting rid of it. The Government should take back not the cost of the free TV licence, but responsibility for the policy.

As Ofcom takes on BBC regulation, I have some concerns that if it takes on the regulation of BBC websites, we will see press regulation by the back door. The press has been assiduous in not allowing its websites to become quasi-broadcasting sites, which would therefore be regulated by Ofcom. With Ofcom regulating the BBC, we must be cautious that we do not inadvertently bring in statutory regulation of the press, which I would oppose.

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[The Minister for Digital and Culture (Matt Hancock)]

They say that success has many fathers, and I hope that is true of the Bill because this debate has been a veritable custody battle. My right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale), whose name appears first on the back of the Bill, gave a second opening speech to explain where much of it has come from. My right hon. Friend the Member for Didcot—[Hon. Members: “Wantage.”]—made a brilliant speech. I think of my right hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey) as the Member for Didcot because of that great big power station, which he so resembles; sadly, it has now fallen down. He developed much of the detail of the Bill and deserves enormous credit for his work.

Between us, the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, who, with me, will take the data measures through the Committee, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, who we could say is the mother of the Bill, and I—I am honoured and privileged to be the Bill Minister—all claim credit for parts of the Bill. It has been a team effort, and a huge amount of work over several years has gone into bringing the Bill to this point. I want to thank all the Ministers and the many officials and stakeholders who have been involved in its development.

This has been an excellent debate, with insightful and thought-provoking contributions from all sides of the House. We have heard about the increasing importance of digital technology and infrastructure to our constituents and the economy. I am glad that there seems to be a consensus about the importance of the subject. We have heard some impassioned pleas to ensure that we protect the vulnerable, and the Bill takes steps to do so.

Technology is transforming the world in which we live—our homes, work and daily lives—and the Bill seeks to make the benefits of those transformations as big as possible while mitigating some of the inevitable costs. We need to ensure that our laws and infrastructure keep pace with this great change. We must tackle the problems the change brings and seize on the opportunities.

We have the best superfast broadband coverage and highest take-up of all major European nations, but we want us to have more. Although nine out of every 10 homes and businesses can now access superfast speeds, and we are on track to hit the target of 95% coverage by 2017, we want high-speed broadband for all. The Bill takes the next step, with the universal service obligation. In the same way, as we deliver through infrastructure the internet that enriches our lives, we will also take steps to protect children from online pornography, addressing harms highlighted by many in the Chamber.

Likewise, the Government Digital Service has made the UK Government one of the first digital-by-default states, in a model replicated the world over, but we can do more. The Bill will strengthen how we use Government data to deliver better public services.

[Mr Vaizey]

I read press reports about the Government Digital Service being broken up and distributed around Departments. I always thought that the service was a fantastic innovation. It behaved like a start-up, challenging and pushing the envelope. During his remarks will the Minister give a helpful update to the House on the position of the Government Digital Service?

[Matt Hancock]

I reassure my right hon. Friend that the Government Digital Service goes from strength to strength. It secured significant extra funding in the spending review and is delivering, as it has done and will continue to in future.

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[Matt Hancock]

The hon. Gentleman tempts me on the BBC charter. I can tell him that it will be published shortly, and that there will be a debate in both Houses to take note of it, which is the normal process.

[Mr Vaizey]

Talking of publishing documents, I wonder whether, given the brilliance of the Bill and the forthcoming charter, my right hon. Friend could also illuminate the House on whether he plans to publish a fantastic digital strategy showing how the United Kingdom can thrive by investing in its hugely successful technology industries.

[Matt Hancock]

The Government as a whole are an enthusiast for industrial strategy, and digital must underpin the industrial strategy. As the digital Minister, I am a great enthusiast for digital strategy, and I pay tribute to the work that my predecessor did and the service that he gave. He did an enormous amount of work in both the cultural and the digital spheres to ensure that the United Kingdom was at the forefront of digital nations; indeed, I would say that all his work contributed to a strategy. He said that he wanted, in future, to use Broadband Delivery UK as a taskforce to go around the country improving the delivery of broadband. It was almost as though he was looking for a job.

[Mr Vaizey]

While we are on the subject of how hard I worked as a Minister, let me point out that I worked incredibly hard on radio. I wonder whether my right hon. Friend could illuminate me on when he will introduce the proposals for the deregulation of radio on which I worked so hard.