Matt Warman
Main Page: Matt Warman (Conservative - Boston and Skegness) Broadband
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Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered broadband speeds and advertising.
This House has considered broadband many times before and will, I am sure, do so again. It is only fair for me to begin by saying that this Government, like the previous coalition Government, have made real efforts to roll out broadband across the country. With their track record, they genuinely lead the class in Europe, and we should all welcome the additional money in today’s Budget for yet more broadband. But this debate is not about the provision of broadband itself; it is about a rather simpler fact—the price that people pay for the speed they think they are buying when they sign up to a service.
I shall draw a brief analogy. If you went to a supermarket to buy a bunch of organic grapes, Mr Owen, and you paid for those organic grapes at the checkout but found out afterwards that, in fact, you had only a tenth of the grapes that you thought you had bought and they were not actually organic, you might be rather grumpy. That is analogous to the situation with broadband advertising.
Sir Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on obtaining this debate. Is it not the case that, in effect, those who advertise in that way obtain by false pretences? They use statistics selectively and in a misleading way to obtain business.
Matt Warman
Elsewhere, I have called that practice a fraud on the consumer, and I agree with my right hon. Friend that current practices are simply not fair, reasonable or easily understandable to consumers. Presumably, hon. Members are here because they know that, according to the regulations, just 10% of people who sign up for a service have to receive the advertised speed, so 90% of people do not receive that speed.
John Howell (Henley) (Con)
I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. Is this debate not also about the need to educate people about their broadband service? It is no use saying that it will be 20% or 30% faster; we need to be specific and ask for specific things to be detailed.
Matt Warman
I agree, and I will come on to what those things might be. I think we can all agree that is a pretty well attended Westminster Hall debate. That is because we all agree that things are not working. That is a good place to start.
Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend for securing the debate. In many places where broadband is delivered, people ring up BT or another provider, which says, “You will get x speed,” but when they actually get the service in their home, they find that it is a lot slower. That is one issue. There is also a general issue of areas getting broadband but not enough people signing up for it. The problem is a combination of all those things. I think that if people actually got what they thought they were going to get, they would sign up.
Matt Warman
I agree. There is a genuine issue with consumer confidence in headline speeds actually being delivered.
Julian Knight
My hon. Friend is being most generous in allowing so many interventions. He mentioned that only 10% of people get the broadband speed they want. Will he reflect on the fact that, if that happened in any other sphere of consumer interaction—financial services, for example—there would be major investigations and fines?
Matt Warman
I agree. That is why you would be so angry about the bunch of grapes that I imagined you buying, Mr Owen. We need new guidelines from the Advertising Standards Authority. To be fair to the Government, they are keen on such new guidelines emerging, but we should bear in mind that someone, at some point, thought that 10% of people being able to get the advertised speed was a perfectly decent guideline. We need to move on from that mentality.
Fiona Mactaggart
I am grateful. One of my constituents, who does not receive the advertised broadband speed, consulted a telephone engineer, who said that the cable that carries the signal is incapable of carrying the advertised speed. That cable is provided by BT, which knows that it is not capable of carrying the advertised speed. Surely that is fraud.
Matt Warman
I agree. That is the second of the two issues that I hope to be able to raise. The first is that I think we can all agree that 10% is not enough, and we should have different rules for the number of people who are able to receive a certain speed. We should also be clear about whether the technology is able to deliver what people are sold. I would like there to be a more accurate way of describing the number of people who are able to receive a service and much tighter and more accurate descriptions of the kind of technology that is used to deliver that service. That comes back to the right hon. Lady’s point.
Julian Sturdy (York Outer) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making a powerful argument. On that point, is it not the case that a community may get fibre to the cabinet, but speed is lost when the signal goes on to copper, so there can be different speeds right across a rural community?
Julian Sturdy
Houses in such communities get completely different speeds right across the board. Is that not an issue that we must tackle?
Matt Warman
Exactly. The right hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) is right to mention that this is not just a rural issue but an urban one too.
Michael Tomlinson (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (Con)
My hon. Friend is being generous; he has given way to 100% of the official Opposition’s Back Benchers who are here and nearly 100% of the Government Back Benchers. This is not just a rural and urban issue; it affects semi-rural areas, too. Will he reflect on the fact that in individual postcodes, speeds differ vastly from those that are advertised, possibly because of different exchanges?
Matt Warman
Absolutely. We need to end up in a position where at least half the people to whom a service is advertised—the distribution of advertising, particularly postal advertising, is often based on postcodes—should be able to receive the service that they are invited to pay for.
Matt Warman
I should have said no at the beginning, but since I have been so consistent, I shall give way.
Rebecca Pow
I thank my hon. Friend—I am trying to make it up to 100% on the Government Benches. Does he agree that this whole thing is a minefield? We have just had more money for connecting Devon and Somerset. We all thought that everything would be fine and everyone would get the right broadband speed, but a minefield of confusion has transpired. Should not we have much clearer labelling, adverts—everything, really?
Matt Warman
Yes. As I understand it, we could have a separate debate about the broadband roll-out in Devon and Somerset, so let us park that.
We need to end up in a situation where at least half of the people who are offered a service can receive it. On the one hand, that would be a fivefold increase on what is currently offered; on the other, the half of people who, by implication, could not receive that service would still be let down. So a starting point for the ASA to consider would be not only that 50% of people can receive the advertised speed but that a certain amount either side of the average can also receive within a certain percentage of that speed. Let us say that 50% receive the advertised speed and 20% either side can receive within 10% of that. That way, customers would basically know what they were getting.
That would be a revolution compared with the shambles we have at the moment. It would restore consumers’ confidence that the service they were paying for was what they were getting. I hope it would also encourage some businesses to adopt the good practice that, to be fair, BT has adopted of trying to provide each individual customer at the point of signing up with a personalised suggestion of what their speed will be. We should not pretend that the industry has not tried to make progress, but we should certainly acknowledge that the ASA guidelines do not compel it to do so, and that is a position that we would like all to get to.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
The hon. Gentleman has outlined clearly the difficulties for domestic properties. In my constituency, a large number of people who have become self-employed and work from home were misled by advertising that they would get broadband at the speed they needed—the fact of the matter is that they do not. Does he agree—perhaps the Minister will respond to this—that there is a need for people who were misled by advertising and have not had delivery of what they need to get compensation?
Matt Warman
The hon. Gentleman pre-empts my next sentence. Business or consumer, if a person does not fall within the prescribed bounds of the new guidelines, which I hope will be much more stringent, they should be entitled to get out of the contract immediately, whatever terms they signed up to. Getting into the realms of compensation would probably open up a can of worms and not solve the issue for that consumer or business, but people should certainly be able to escape immediately and try to find another solution.
The second part of the discussion is to say that where a service is advertised as fibre, it should be entirely a fibre service. If a service is compromised by the use of copper as it enters a person’s premises, at the very least they should know that when they sign up to that service. If they do not, my fear is that we will encourage the continuation of a network that is not a full-fibre network across the country. That is what our constituents would all like to see, and it is what we and they all know is essential to planning for a new world, whether it is the internet of things or simply keeping up with our cousins abroad who are rolling broadband out even faster than we are.
Victoria Atkins (Louth and Horncastle) (Con)
I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend and neighbour for giving way. May I say that I am delighted to see so many Lincolnshire MPs in the debate?
Victoria Atkins
And other counties—sorry. As my hon. Friend the Member for Boston and Skegness (Matt Warman) knows, I held a broadband summit in my constituency, and many constituents in rural areas made the point that they get so far and then the copper lets them down. Is it not critical that advertising for services is straight with the consumer and tells it like it is?
Matt Warman
Exactly. A fibre service should be fibre from beginning to end. If it is not, providers should not be ashamed of telling the consumer that it is not. At the moment, part of the fraud being perpetrated on consumers is that not only can just one in 10 sometimes get the service they are paying, for but many of them are signing up for a service that is simply not in the ground full stop. Those are two simple issues that I hope the Advertising Standards Authority, in a process that it has already begun, will be able to resolve relatively swiftly.
There are not many things on which we come to the House asking for simple and attainable solutions that do not cost anyone any money. However, I would submit—not only to you, Mr Owen, but even to the Minister—that we could solve this problem relatively quickly if the ASA is listening, which I hope it is. My two requests are simple. They are that at least half of all consumers should be able to receive the service they are paying for, with 20% either side being able to receive within a certain range of that service, and that a service that is fibre should be fibre from beginning to end.
Fiona Mactaggart
May I suggest that the hon. Gentleman’s ambition is too low? I cannot think of anywhere else I buy something and am guaranteed to get only 50% of what I buy—I expect 100%. It seems to me that, from the beginning of the contract, we have been satisfied with less than 100%, and the consequences are that not just rural areas but urban areas such as Slough—big business areas—are not being treated properly.
Matt Warman
I am surprised that it has taken 15 minutes for someone to raise that point, but perhaps I should not have taken so many interventions. I agree with the right hon. Lady that the accusation could be made that I am not being ambitious enough. The fact remains that a large number of our constituents will be signing up to part-fibre services. The only practical way to have large-scale advertising of those services is to stick with an “up to” model, and 50% with a range either side is a heck of a lot more stringent than we have had thus far, but it is attainable. I would like the ASA to come back and say, “Actually, we could be tougher, and we think that is perfectly reasonable,” but I suspect the pressure is on it to stay closer to 10% than 50%. I therefore accept the principle of her point, but given that an awful lot of people will still require copper connections in the near future at the very least, we are lumbered with a situation where we have to try to make a nod towards the problems they will face.
I accept that there is a sort of third way of saying, “If you have a full-fibre connection, you can demand that it is within 90% of the advertised speed,” or something like that. It is important that we preserve the sense of such advertising, which can be clear and relatively straightforward. I think it might be too complicated to say, “If you are on a full-fibre connection you are guaranteed to get within 90%, if you on a part-fibre connection you are guaranteed to get within 50%, and if you are on a satellite connection, it will be a rather different ball game altogether.” We have to be pragmatic when we seek to influence the deliberations of the ASA, but, as I said, the Government and many Members are on the same page in seeking to get the guidelines amended. We all acknowledge that the way broadband is currently advertised to consumers is fundamentally broken. If we do not fix it, we risk compromising consumer faith in the service offered. More fundamentally, if we do not force advertisers to be open about when their services are full-fibre, as our constituents deserve, we risk not just bad advertising but the roll-out of broadband in the country being further delayed and even less perfect than it already is.
This debate is not purely about advertising. If we get the rules on advertising right, that will foster the improved roll-out of broadband across the country and greater take-up of services already available to consumers, and that enhanced take-up will result in further money going back into the system and further roll-out of the broadband service. I hope that we can all support my relatively modest—perhaps too modest—proposals, that the Government can support them and that, further, the ASA will listen to them. With that, I will hand over to all my colleagues who have intervened already.
Several hon. Members rose—
Matt Warman
I thank the Minister for that response and echo what he said. We are clearly all on the same side of this argument, and it would be good if the ASA took note of that. I would be surprised if the ASA was not looking at a majority rule of some sort. I am sure we would all agree not only that that is the right thing to do but that implementing an improved standard of advertising cannot come soon enough. As we have discussed, it should ensure that more than 50% of people receive the speed that they pay for and that fibre means fibre.
I thank all Members who have taken part in this debate. Mr Owen, you are, of course, my favourite Chair as well—I look forward to serving under your chairmanship in the next broadband debate.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered broadband speeds and advertising.