Electronic Communications (Universal Service) (Broadband) Order 2018

Viscount Waverley Excerpts

Tuesday 5th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, I had not originally intended to intervene on this important matter but the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, is to be commended on raising it. I speak as someone who lives and works in a rural part of West Sussex and has business tenants in the same location. It is not that it is that rural: I am two miles from the expanding village of Southwater, with its 10,000 residents. It rejoices in having a data centre for the Royal & Sun Alliance insurance company, which doubtless has its own dedicated connection with the outside world. We are five miles from the town of Horsham and about 18 miles from London’s second airport.

All this is in an acknowledged growth area and commercial hub known as the Gatwick Diamond, an area where successive Governments have expected growth to take place. Yet despite constant badgering of both BT and Openreach, my statistics for my sub 4-megabit service are, on a good day, probably comparable with the ones quoted by the noble Lord, Lord Foster. I relate to what he said. It often downloads at less than 2 megabits and is seemingly incapable of upgrade. This is about not the final mile but provider inertia, and the half mile downstream of the green cabinet before the line gets any juice. What is in between is understood to be a dated piece of twisted pair cable, which ought to have been dug up and replaced about 25 years ago. Sadly, the mobile signal is also poor in that area and, at the moment, I have not succeeded in establishing a line of sight to enable me to get a 4G signal.

This matters because I cannot at present allow my equipment access simultaneously to Microsoft 365 and Dropbox; the thing simply will not function. Sometimes I have to bring my Dropbox material up to London on a memory stick and upload it here. In fact my little 4G mobile dongle, which I travel around with, will when in signal enable me to do it far more effectively than that other paragon of communication efficiency, a Southern Rail train. The aspirations of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, would be heaven indeed because things such as internet banking would be revolutionised. Online returns to VAT, PAYE and income tax portals would be made viable because those things all rely on sufficiently fast communications for them to create a proper handshake and get a connection.

Before we get bogged down in the technicalities of up or down speeds, I would like to mention a word which has been implied but not mentioned before by other noble Lords: capacity. I know about capacity because, at certain times of day, I cannot get any internet access at all. I may as well go away and make a cup of coffee and a sandwich while it tries to do an initial start-up. Some while ago one of my office tenants left, specifically because for their small graphic design company the broadband speed was so utterly woeful that a member of staff had to take the material home with them to Worthing and send it from there. There are real problems with this because in West Sussex there are a very large number of microbusinesses operating from home. There are tens of thousands of home-workers in West Sussex alone, according to the information that I have been given by the county council.

Since the separation of BT and Openreach, seemingly the two do not talk to each other—at least, not very effectively—and I wonder quite what gives there. I know this because my wife is very often the one who is at home, trying to get some answers out of BT. Is the tenant’s application for a faster service being processed? Might we get one as well, and why do the neighbours 200 yards down the road have one? When she asks, “Who do I go to?”, BT’s reply is, “We don’t really deal with that side of the thing—that’s Openreach, because we deal only with the cabling”. Can we cut through exactly who provides what and get end-to-end configuration supplier to user? Were this a rail franchise, I think it highly likely that it would long since have been stripped of its operating licence.

What is the problem? Where is the Government’s willingness to impose this USO that we have talked about for a very long time? I would like to think that we will get somewhere with this order, but I remain unconvinced because all the things that have been done in the past have simply been ignored. There are people like me and others up and down the country who are fed up with this whole system. As has been mentioned by other noble Lords, you seem to be able to get a much better signal elsewhere. In my case, it was in the middle of the Peloponnese, somewhere in Greece, where I could get a 4G signal and have a conversation with my daughter who had some problem. That is going back a few years now, yet in a reasonably affluent and well-heeled part of West Sussex, you cannot do it.

Can we have a complete outlawing of “up to” speeds? That term is a smokescreen of the first order. All it does is allow providers to conceal poor performance. Will the Minister turn his mind to these things and say what will happen about giving this measure proper teeth so that we can start seeing some real results, not at some time two or three years hence, but in the next two, three, four months? The Government issue permits and licences and are responsible for governance here, but even if they were not, there is reason to intervene where there is market failure and there has been market failure here. There seems to have been a concentration on people streaming videos—or whatever it is they want to do—from Netflix and other providers, yet businesses cannot get the sort of download speeds they need for their day-to-day, normal-working-hours operations. I hope the Minister will be able to give us some positive news on that.

[Viscount Waverley (CB)]

My Lords, I have heard the despairing contributions this afternoon. How on earth is the UK going to become “global Britain”, which is the aspiration post Brexit?

[Lord Mendelsohn (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Stevenson for moving this Regret Motion and giving us an opportunity to debate the order. I also thank him for an outstanding speech setting the right context for this, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster, for an excellent speech that placed in context the consequences for small businesses. I share the frustrations of previous speakers—the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, and the noble Earls, Lord Cathcart and Lord Lytton—about these speeds. I share it although I do not suffer from any of the difficult consequences, as they do.

I live in north London. We have three suppliers into the house. We have all sorts of cabling across the house, with boosters and all sorts of signals, but I have never achieved the stated packages from any of the services. We have problems of latency, contention and all those matters. In fact, my business has a dedicated phone line, which has boosters and other cabling to try to make sure that the signal is not lost, and we are fairly close to BT Tower itself—but our service is barely better than the much cheaper super broadband. It is frequently a problem that the claimed capacities are never fully achieved. That is something that we have to be very wary of, even when we establish a universal service obligation.

I turn my attention to the universal service obligation in this particular order. I want to make the simple point that the order does not achieve its objectives, and I would like the Minister to address that problem. When the Act was passed and the level at which the USO would be introduced was set, it was based on a series of assumptions none of which I believe to be true. I do not believe any more that it achieves the purposes of equity by trying to sort out the digital divide and deal with the problems of rural communities, and nor do I believe that it achieves any of the stated benefits of economic growth.

Some rather good documents on economic growth were produced by DCMS, and I thank it for the work that it did on that. In parenthesis, I acknowledge that the digital team at DCMS has steadily improved, and I suspect that if the same team had been around during the passage of the Bill last time we would not have been stuck with this level of USO. The economic growth benefits are said to be £257 million a year, which relates to:

“Local enterprise growth … Enterprise productivity growth … Increased teleworker productivity … Increased participation of carers and the disabled”.