Telecommunications Infrastructure (Leasehold Property) Bill

Tobias Ellwood Excerpts

Report stage & 3rd reading & 3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 10th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Chi Onwurah]

The right hon. Gentleman anticipates the point that I was about to make in my speech, and I will clarify the differences.

Despite the lack of ambition in this Bill, we will not be opposing it. The Government are taking baby steps when it comes to digital infrastructure, but we will not stand in their way. Indeed, we will help them. We will be pushing a set of practical amendments in line with the Government’s stated intentions on tenants’ rights, competition and excluding high-risk vendors from UK telecommunications networks in the absence of the management and mitigation plans that we have been promised. There is also an important amendment on cyber-security education.

Amendment 2 expands the definition of persons who can request an operator to provide an electronic communications service to include rental tenants and other legal occupants who may not own the lease to the property that they occupy. Although the Bill’s explanatory notes and comments from the Minister suggest that tenants can make the request, the Bill itself does not make that clear, referring to them as lessees. Many tenants are desperate for gigabit broadband to enable them to work from home or grow their business. What if the landlord is difficult to reach or indifferent to their situation? Should not the person who actually lives in the building have some rights?

I will not try your patience, Mr Speaker, by expounding at length on the dire state of both home ownership and leasehold—or fleecehold as it is more properly known. The Government could end the misery of millions if they took on the large landowners and followed Labour’s commitment to end leasehold altogether. The system is broken, and that is one reason home ownership rates among young people are a third lower than they were in the early noughties. There are 4.5 million households in the private rented sector. We know also that tenants can easily find themselves in precarious and insecure circumstances through no fault of their own, or even with nowhere to live as a result of a section 21 notice. We therefore have a large proportion of our population condemned to renting for life, but with few rights and less certainty. Although the Government seem unwilling to address the housing crisis, they could, at the very least, ensure that tenants benefit from this legislation, and that is what our amendment seeks to do.

Much of the publicity around today’s debate relates to amendments 1 and 4, which seek to limit or prevent operators with high-risk vendors in their networks from taking advantages of the provisions of this Bill. Mr Speaker, as this is an issue of national security, I do hope that you will forgive me if I take quite some time to discuss these amendments.

My first job when I left Imperial College was with Nortel, a Canadian world leader in the then emerging telecommunications sector. If someone had said to me that a couple of decades later we would be incapable of building a European telecoms network without a Chinese vendor, I would have been astonished. Essentially, though, that was the Government’s position when they confirmed that Huawei would be allowed to participate in the UK’s 5G network, despite national security concerns. Huawei is bound by China’s National Intelligence Law 2017 to

“support, co-operate and collaborate in national intelligence work.”

We are not Sinophobes or Chinese conspiracy theorists. We do not believe that trade and cultural exchange with China are a bad thing, as some have suggested. There are also many great people working for Huawei in this country dedicated to improving our national infrastructure.

[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

We are going to venture into this subject in depth, but I just wonder whether the hon. Lady agrees with me on the following. When we are developing a relationship with China—yes, perhaps we want China to do business on level terms with us—is it right that Huawei, as she has described, is able to be used by its intelligence services, but western companies such as Apple, Amazon and eBay are not even allowed to operate in China under the terms and conditions that they are freely able to operate in the west?

[Chi Onwurah]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. He raises two important points: one of reciprocity between how Huawei acts and how vendors from Europe and the US are able to act in China; and also one of the risks associated with that potential relationship with the Chinese security services. It is a risk that has been examined by the National Cyber Security Centre.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Mark Hendrick]

As the shadow Minister will be aware, the Government made an announcement on 28 January that they were going to give a very limited role to Huawei in the development of the infrastructure. They have also taken advice from GCHQ and the NCSC about the level of involvement that Huawei should have. Why does she disagree with that? [Interruption.]

[Mr Ellwood]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Colleagues in a sedentary position have reminded me that there is a declaration of interest to be made, so I humbly ask the hon. Gentleman if he would state his relationship with Huawei.

[Sir Mark Hendrick]

rose—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. A point of order should go through the Chair. It is either an intervention or a point of order; it cannot be both.

[Mr Ellwood]

I was trying to be courteous to the situation, Madam Deputy Speaker, but the message has now been given.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his point of order. I hope that Members will not interrupt the debate with too many points of order. I am sure that the hon. Member for Preston (Sir Mark Hendrick) is clear that if there were any need to make a declaration, I would expect him to do so.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

I rise to speak to the amendment standing in my name and in those of my colleagues.

The reason we have tabled this amendment is that we are genuinely concerned, like the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah), that this country has got itself far too bound into a process in which we are reliant on untrusted vendors—in this particular case, Huawei. We recently heard a Government Minister express the view that Huawei is a private company. Let us be absolutely clear at the outset: this company is not a private company. Ultimately, it is essentially almost completely owned by Chinese trade unions, and they, of course, are completely locked into the Chinese Government. This an organisation wholly owned by China.

It is often bandied around, including by some of the security guys the other day, that this is somehow all to do with market failure, as if out of nowhere companies from the west in the free markets—the free world—no longer wanted to get involved in this process. That is completely and utterly without foundation. The single biggest problem we have faced is that, nearly two decades ago, the Chinese Government set out to ensure that they dominated the market. As this organisation has access to nigh-on unlimited funds, it has spent that period underbidding every single time in these processes, from 2G through to 4G and now, as we understand it, 5G.

[Mr Ellwood]

I commend my right hon. Friend and the others who have put their name to amendment 1 for raising the profile of this difficult and complex issue. I think the Government should be on warning that while the amendment may not be pressed to a Division because of what the Minister says later, this House believes that we need to wean ourselves off Huawei. Does my right hon. Friend agree that there is an easy way out of this? There are six global vendors when it comes to 5G: ZTE, Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, NEC and, of course, Samsung. The last two are not allowed to operate outside Japan and Korea. If they were invited to do so, that would enable us to push away Huawei and ensure that our national infrastructure is protected.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

I agree with my right hon. Friend, and I was going to come to those points.

As I saying, if we look at this strategy, we see that when this all began, there were something like 12 companies in this marketplace. One by one, they have disappeared. Why have they disappeared? They simply cannot compete with Huawei’s pricing. These telecoms companies—telcos, as we call them—have bit by bit found themselves going to the cheapest bidder, providing the technology is as good as the others. By the way, it is certainly not an argument that Huawei has better technology; there is no evidence of that whatsoever. In fact, I think Dr Ian Levy said a year ago that he thought Huawei’s security issues were a shambles, and that is correct. Huawei does not somehow have extra brilliant technology. What it does have, however, is money, which allows it to bid down.

The hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central said that she is a believer in free markets. She will know that the free market relies on companies being able, when they sell their goods, to make enough money to reinvest and improve the quality of their goods. That is how a proper rules-based market works, but not with a company like this, which is able to strip that away. One by one, these companies have gone, not because of market failure but because it has been a policy position of the Chinese Government using Huawei to dominate this market over nearly two decades.