Digital Economy Bill

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Tuesday 13th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Worcestershire (Nigel Huddleston), because he made the fundamental point about the size of the digital economy in the United Kingdom and its importance to so many of our constituencies, including my own.

One of the things I want to highlight first is that we in Stroud have a strong and growing e-learning centre, effectively, with a large number of small and medium-sized firms contributing to its success. Of course, e-learning depends to a large extent on effective internet coverage and good access. My constituency has five valleys and a substantial vale, and not all of those places are easily connected. That has certainly proved to be the case in the final move towards universal coverage. I therefore make a plea to the Minister to recognise not only the strength of e-learning in my constituency but the power of the digital economy in general, and I urge him to think of ways, in addition to those he has already come up with, to make sure that clusters of small businesses in areas that need additional contact are indeed supported.

The Minister’s predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey), talked about the importance of infrastructure and about the similarity of the infrastructure for the internet to other infrastructures, and I would pick up on the issue of road infrastructure to illustrate that point. An impressive motorway or a road leading almost to somewhere, but not quite getting there, is useless. That is part of the problem with the internet coverage in areas that are, I admit, difficult to deal with, but that do need special attention because they are also often the areas where growth will come if we get the right kind of connectivity. There is a cluster of businesses in rural areas that really do need attention. [Interruption.] I can see that my point is getting a lot of approval from Members on both sides of the House. Obviously Scotland is—

[Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does he agree that this is also about the inability of certain services to switch to being online while some people are excluded from having these fast internet connections?

[Neil Carmichael]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. He raises an important point. My hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse) raised the issue of what people get, in that sometimes they do not get what they expect to get and sometimes they do get it and then it becomes less later. That is the sort of problem that we have. Consumers are concerned about it, and rightly so. It is also clearly a problem for small businesses, as I said. These matters need to be dealt with.

I want to endorse something that my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) talked about: copyright and protection of intellectual property. He made a strong point. The Culture, Media and Sport Committee will benefit from his expertise in this matter. He rightly pointed out that copyright on the internet is sometimes vulnerable and we need to make sure that measures are strengthened in that respect.

I now turn to something completely different, which is not in the Bill although I think it should be: subtitles. This connects with the interests of, for example, Action On Hearing Loss. The Bill offers a great opportunity to improve access to information for people with hearing difficulties by changing the structure of services. Would the Government consider using the Bill to improve the provision of subtitles on on-demand services, given the drastic improvement of their provision on linear television following legislation that has since become outdated? We need to look at this area. I am half deaf myself. My left ear does not work at all, but I can still hear. Nevertheless, that gives me a huge amount of sympathy and understanding for those who cannot hear at all. There could be an opportunity to help them, and the Government should be looking at it.

It is certainly right that young children should be prevented from looking at pornography. It is also absolutely right that we should be thinking in terms of the measures that the Government have introduced. However, some of the operators in this field, and some of the social media operators, operate almost like fiefdoms, and we have to really get some control over them. If an outfit is told to switch something off but does not do so, I am not entirely sure what the Government are going to do about it. Will they say, “We are going to fine you now,” and then hope for the best? The problem is that so many of the types of structures that we want to restrict, or even prevent from operating altogether, are international, based in countries where we do not have any jurisdiction, and sometimes—certainly in the case of Russia—with which we have a very difficult relationship. The Government need to think carefully about how they are going to put some real strength behind these measures, which are quite sensible in terms of aspiration but have to be delivered in a way that works.