Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Bill (Third sitting)

Debate between Ruth Edwards and Julia Lopez

Committee stage
Thursday 17th March 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Julia Lopez]

I thank the hon. Member for tabling these amendments. I represent an urban constituency and, as the Minister for digital connectivity, I am very alive to any concerns about the digital divide. I have tested the legislation to make sure that we are not exacerbating that. The amendments relate to circumstances in which an operator can upgrade or share the use of their apparatus without specific permission from a landowner or a court order. Crucially, the amendments relate to rights that the Bill grants retrospectively to agreements that are already in place. The amendment seeks to expand those rights in circumstances where apparatus is situated on, under or over land owned by private landlords.

Retrospective legislation must take particular care to strike a balance between impacts on individual rights and any public benefit that the legislation aims to deliver. The Government believe at this time that expanding retrospective upgrading and sharing rights in the way these amendments suggest would not be justified. Upgrading and sharing electronic communications apparatus offers a wide range of substantial benefits. Those are benefits that the Government specifically recognised in their 2017 reforms, when limited automatic rights were introduced for operators to upgrade and share their apparatus. The exercise of the new upgrading and sharing rights was made subject to certain conditions. Those conditions were intended to strike the right balance between the rights of individual landowners hosting apparatus and the public benefits delivered by operators upgrading and sharing their apparatus.

The changes made in the 2017 reforms therefore permit upgrading and sharing to take place without a landowner’s specific consent only where any impacts on that individual will be limited. However, it was recognised that any use of those rights could have some impact, albeit very limited, on individual landowners.

[Ruth Edwards (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

I remind the Committee of the declaration of interest that I made: I have worked for a number of providers, including BT and techUK, that will be affected by the legislation, and I carried out cyber-security consulting for MHR last year. I agree with the Minister about the need to seek a balance between the rights of landowners and the rights of operators. However, we cannot lose sight of the fact—this is a point she has been making powerfully—that we must get behind upgrading our digital infrastructure as fast as is practicably possible.

I am aware that we are about to debate amendment 8, which would make it more expensive for operators to access land, and put them at a disadvantage compared with other utility companies. Does the Minister agree that adopting amendments 9 to 12—and then 8—would risk sending a mixed signal to the market? On the one hand we are making it more expensive and difficult for our operators to access land, but on the other hand we are rolling back the scrutiny that they have to access private property at the moment.