Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Bill

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 6th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, it is a delight to follow my noble friend Lady Harding, and a great pleasure to be in the Chamber with her. When I was a Minister, I worked closely with her when she was the chief executive of TalkTalk, so it will be enjoyable to respond, to a certain extent, to some of the points she made.

I begin briefly by outlining my interests. I work as an adviser to a US bank called LionTree, which has advised a UK alt-net provider called Hyperoptic. I am also, amazingly, the patron of the Institute of Telecommunications Professionals. I have no idea how that came about, as I know nothing about telecoms and I am not a professional. I was also chairman of Speed Up Britain, which is one of those lobby groups that the noble Lord, Lord Fox, pointed out in his remarks. It competes against Protect and Connect in trying to persuade your Lordships to take alternative views on how to reform the Electronic Communications Code, but I am no longer its chair; I just wanted to put that in context.

But, obviously, the reason I wanted to take part in this exciting debate—which is really where the action is today—was because of my six years as the Minister for Broadband, where I suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune of people constantly telling me to hurry up and deliver exactly what my noble friend Lady Harding was talking about, which is what everybody wants: ubiquitous broadband everywhere, for as many devices as possible. It was a hard slog, but we made progress.

Like everyone else who has spoken, I will take the Bill in two parts. Starting with product security, I do not think this is a controversial part of the Bill, so it can be skimmed across relatively quickly. I doubt that there will be any amendments to it at all; it is a necessary piece of legislation in an age of digital technology where cybersecurity is at the forefront of our minds. We know that the Government recently published their national cybersecurity strategy. To give this Government, and recent previous Governments, credit, they have invested absolutely correctly in cybersecurity, both at the national security level and in encouraging businesses to take cybersecurity seriously, so the Bill is very welcome.

Like all other noble Lords who may be taking part in this debate, I have read the briefings that have come in to me from both Which? and a company called NCC Group, and they all seem to make extremely valid points which may well be worth exploring in Committee. For example, Which? has suggested that online marketplaces should be covered so that products that are sold on them reach a minimum standard; that there should be a minimum time period in which a company guarantees to update the software on a connected device; and that connected devices fall within consumer rights law. NCC Group has suggested that there should be some form of third-party verification of online devices to ensure that they are compliant. That seems eminently sensible. It also has a minor obsession, which I cannot really understand, with e-scooters, so my simple question to the Minister is: is an e-scooter a connectable consumer product? I think it probably is, but they can of course be hijacked and the brakes put on remotely. A very interesting and worthy point of debate is the amendment to the Computer Misuse Act to see whether there is a public interest defence to ethical hacking. Those are just some points to put on the record which I would be willing to explore with other noble Lords in Committee, should they be minded to table amendments.

But let us now turn to telecoms infrastructure, where I carry the scars on my back, as it were. In fact, it is probably my fault that we are here debating this at all, because I was in charge of the first reform of the Electronic Communications Code. But as he has not made it to this place yet, let me firmly blame Oliver Letwin for everything that went wrong there, because the minute he got hold of it, it became an All Souls seminar, and it took about three years to get it through Whitehall. However, we did deliver some changes. I make no apology for the changes that were made because, at the time, obviously, the relationship between the infrastructure provider—whether it was a mobile infrastructure provider or a fibre infrastructure provider—was very unequal with the landowner. If you wanted to get your mast or to lay some fibre across somebody’s land, the landlord had all the bargaining chips in their bag, and—quite rightly, of course—they extracted generous rents to provide for their land.

Contrary to what some people may think, the telecoms business is not overly lucrative. For example, the margins for mobile telecoms providers in this country are about 1% or 2%; it is a very fiercely competitive marketplace. In fact, my noble friend Lady Harding is partly to blame, because TalkTalk has ensured that the prices that consumers are prepared to pay for broadband and mobile phones are far lower than you would be prepared to pay on the continent. It is a relatively low-margin business, and there is no doubt that the high rents that landowners were charging were hindering the rollout of infrastructure.

There is an argument—and Protect and Connect put this—that the pendulum swung too far the other way when the Electronic Communications Code was reformed and rents dropped far too precipitously but, if I had to take a side, I would much rather lower rents and investment in infrastructure and quicker rollout than the higher rents that were in place before we reformed the Electronic Communications Code. The simple fact is that if we want mobile and fixed connectivity, it is all about the planning. The technology is actually a complete sideshow; the real pain is getting the planning. I will go off on a slight tangent here. The extraordinary lack of joined-up thinking in many local authorities is a wonder to behold. I was talking to a mobile phone company the other day which, obviously, wanted to put in small 5G masts and was told by the lamp-post department of a London council that the lamp posts were not to be touched, so the lamp-post department was stopping the other departments in the council fast-forwarding 5G in the local authority area.

I was lucky enough to get full fibre broadband in my small village in Oxfordshire, Sparsholt. I wonder how that happened. I pay tribute to Craig Bower from Oxfordshire County Council—I am sounding a bit like an MP here—Martin Crutchley from Openreach and local resident Maia Sissons, who got everyone in a row. I saw over the five to 10 days how much planning, extraction, digging and so on had to take place to fibre up simply a rural hamlet of 100 homes. That is happening all over the place. Whether it is a TalkTalk, CityFibre or Openreach engineer, we are very lucky to have people doing this work. It is difficult, time-consuming and takes a great deal of planning.

If we are to move forward, we must keep that in focus, which is why I would support amendments on the points to do with both telegraph poles and multi-dwelling units. I am told by Openreach that a letter has gone to the Minister setting out a way by which telegraph poles may be brought into the scope of the Bill, which is a very exciting development. If that way can be found, I would certainly support an amendment that would allow telegraph poles to be upgraded. Again, just as a point of interest, in both my home in London, in Shepherd’s Bush, and my home in Oxfordshire, the fibre cables are delivered on a telegraph pole, so telegraph poles are important. Openreach says there are something like 1 billion miles of fibre on telegraph poles all over the country.

I part company with my noble friend Lady Harding on multi-dwelling units. This goes to the heart of some of the issues to do with infrastructure rollout and a problem I had when I was the Minister. I was constantly berated for putting all my eggs in the Openreach basket and asked why I was not fostering competition and all these extraordinary alternative providers, such as TalkTalk and CityFibre, which could really hold the candle to BT Openreach and really take it on. Funnily enough, when broadband came to my village in Oxfordshire, I was alerted by an alt.net provider, and I rang the provider up. I said, “I would love to get broadband from you: I will go through the front door.” It said, “No, sorry, it was a mistake. We put the flyer in but, actually, we’re not interested in fibering up your village.” If you want as much connectivity as quickly as possible to as many homes as possible, you have to put Openreach at the centre of your strategy.

It is a misplaced intellectual argument to say that Openreach cannot upgrade multi-dwelling units where there could be many people living on low incomes who will depend on digital connectivity because, somehow, it is anti-competitive. I also think it is a slightly spurious argument to say that Openreach has greater powers than the police to enter your premises thanks to this legislation. It is not as if someone from Openreach is going to get into your flat and make themself a meal of spaghetti Bolognese while it busily upgrades the telecoms infrastructure in your multi-dwelling unit.

We all know that getting hold of, identifying and getting a response from landlords in multi-dwelling units can be extremely difficult. Making a simple upgrade to increase the connectivity for dozens of people living in those flats seems eminently sensible to me. The argument that it will prevent alt-net providers providing fibre rollout has long since gone. Only yesterday, CityFibre raised £5 billion in debt to continue its expansion. The fact is that alt-net providers have very rich pickings in central parts of our urban environment, whether it is London, Manchester, Bristol, Newcastle or anywhere else where they can put their networks into flats. Where I live, in Shepherd’s Bush, we have had three or four fibre providers digging up the road, one after the other, because they know that it is a competitive enough environment for them to put in an investment.

My next point was mentioned in, I think, the speech from the noble Lord, Lord Fox; although I am obviously not the chair of Speed Up Britain, it is quite clear where my sympathies lie. It is worth pointing out that Protect and Connect is supported by what is known as a land aggregator, an invention from the US, where so many of these clever financial wheezes are invented. It buys up the land where mobile sites are—a sensible business approach—and so ends up having thousands of sites all over the country. It is then clearly in its commercial interests, but frankly not in the interests of UK plc, to ensure that the rents extracted from those sites are as high as possible.

I urge noble Lords to get behind this Bill. I will certainly look at supporting amendments to make it easier to upgrade existing infrastructure in multi-dwelling units. I also hope that my noble friend Lady Harding and I can work together on the specifically denoted “telegraph pole amendment”.

I want to finish on one important point. It is now traditional in these speeches for me to lavish extraordinary praise on our Minister. I note that I have not even mentioned him so far in my speech. In conclusion, therefore, let me say how pleased I am to see the Minister on the Front Bench. I do not know how long he will be there, given what is happening across the way—he may be our Prime Minister in a week’s time, voted in by application—but to see this Renaissance man move from Raphael to Open RAN, from Modigliani to mobile and from Botticelli to broadband is always a wonder to behold. I look forward to his concluding remarks.