Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Bill

Committee (2nd Day)

Clause 60: Upgrading and sharing of apparatus installed before 29 December 2003

Amendments 17A and 17B not moved.

Amendment 18

18: Clause 60, page 45, line 22, at end insert— “(5) In paragraph 74 (power to fly lines), after sub-paragraph (4) insert—“(5) References in this paragraph to installing lines include carrying out works to install, maintain and keep such lines and other reasonably associated apparatus.””

My Lords, if my noble friend Lady Harding is not in the Chamber—I was not expecting to do this—I will move the amendment on her behalf. I look to other noble Lords whose names are on this amendment to introduce it more comprehensively than I can. I just want to get this debate going, because I know that there is broad support across the Chamber for Amendment 18. Noble Lords may remember that I expressed my support on this matter when it was referred to at Second Reading, because it is of benefit to all telecoms operators. With that, I beg to move.

My Lords, I apologise. I rise to speak to Amendment 18 in my name, and I thank my noble friend Lord Vaizey, the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, and the noble Lord, Lord Fox, for putting their names to it. I apologise—I am slightly breathless, as the noble Lord, Lord Fox, gave us a little bit of disinformation about today’s Order Paper.

I beg your Lordships’ pardon—the moving of the Statement on the Metropolitan Police was not communicated to several of us.

Many apologies. I also thank my noble friend Lady Stowell, who I was not expecting to see, but who has been extremely helpful already this afternoon. I promise I will be brief. The aim of this amendment is to address an issue that other noble Lords and I raised on Second Reading: ensuring that the Bill enables the sharing of pre-2017 poles on private land without requiring an additional wayleave, just as it does for ducts on private land. This may sound very detailed—it is—but will substantially speed up the rollout of full-fibre broadband, on which we are all agreed.

There are an estimated 1 million-plus telegraph poles on private land. Access to them is particularly important in accelerating fibre rollout in rural England and urban Scotland. As with ducts, these poles are regulated under Ofcom’s PIA mechanism. That means that any operator is able to access those poles, so extending the provision to pre-2017 poles on private land would allow all operators to speed up their rollout equally. Without this, operators will have to dig up streets or put up new poles, which will slow down the rollout in the very parts of the country that suffer some of the slowest broadband speeds, based on copper.

There is clear consensus across the industry that the Bill needs to make this possible. I understand that the Digital Infrastructure Minister recently received a letter from all the major operators and trade bodies, asking that this issue be resolved and clearly stating the public benefit that doing so would bring. There is cross-party support for the amendment, and at Second Reading my noble friend the Minister was clear that he was keen to look into the matter very closely. However, as drafted, the Bill does not actually solve the problem. There is no explicit right in the Bill to access the pole or install equipment on it. My amendment is relatively simple and seeks to set that straight. It is limited in scope.

My Lords, a cup of tea lies gently cooling in the tea room, unpaid for as I sprinted to move my amendment—and failed to arrive in time. It would never do for me to blame the Liberal Democrats for the mess that I find myself in; I take entire responsibility for not following with due care the moving of the Statement on the Metropolitan Police. Although the finely crafted Amendments 17A and 17B will not be debated, I have the chance to address at least some of the issues they raise in my response to my noble friend Lady Harding’s excellent exposition of Amendment 18.

We are talking about the ability to upgrade telecoms infrastructure. It is worth taking a step back to think about what the Bill is about in its focus on telecoms infrastructure and reform of the Electronic Communications Code. As I pointed out at Second Reading, when I was a Minister I had the opportunity to change the Electronic Communications Code, and I freely admit that I did so after extensive representations from infrastructure providers of all kinds who made the point that the rents that they were being charged by landowners, both in the countryside and on buildings, were extremely high and were affecting their ability to invest in infrastructure. The time had come to redress the balance so that the rents charged were proportionate to the investment being made in infrastructure. However, in the Bill we are trying to revise it further so that the infrastructure can be upgraded much more easily. We find ourselves in a slightly invidious position where, every time a telecoms provider wants to upgrade the existing infrastructure, in theory it has to start all over again on how it negotiates the rents.

Amendment 18, and, had they been moved, Amendments 17A and 17B, address essentially the same issue, which is existing infrastructure and the ability to upgrade it with as little fuss as possible. All of us in this House know that telecoms infrastructure is constantly being modernised and changed. Indeed, sometimes political issues come into play: for example, the decision to remove Huawei from our telecoms infrastructure will require a great deal of changes to existing infrastructure.

I find the position of altnets—the alternative networks and competitors to Openreach—difficult to understand. I know many of them pretty well. I have worked with some of them, such as Hyperoptic, and I know CityFibre and Community Fibre. Anyone who lives in London knows that these altnets are already investing in areas where Openreach is present because they know it is a potentially lucrative area for them. They are likely to continue to invest in multi-dwelling units where Openreach is already present, and they are likely, in years to come, to benefit from any amendments that allow them to upgrade their apparatus with the minimum interference and fuss, yet they are standing in the way because they perceive that, if they can put an obstacle in front of Openreach, they can somehow benefit commercially. In doing that, I respectfully submit, they are damaging the overall project, which is to bring full fibre to as many residences as possible in the United Kingdom. Frankly, they will not be the ones going to small multi-dwelling units in small, rural towns up and down the country to upgrade or install apparatus; Openreach will be doing that.

Anyone who says that there is a wealth of difference between giving the same powers to an operator to go in to upgrade infrastructure to a multi-dwelling unit and powers to upgrade a pole is wrong. We should be looking at this in the round to make it as simple as possible.

I want to again apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, for causing him not to be here—and I will of course pick up the cost of his cup of tea.

He brought up the changed landscape of altnets, and we need to remind ourselves as we talk through the amendments that the old picture, as we looked at the telecoms market as it was—the copper world of a huge company and nothing much else—has passed. The fibre sector is a different sort of market. The fixed and full-fibre network infrastructure supplied by the independents, the altnets, reaches about 11.5 million premises with, at the end of 2022, an estimated 1.5 million live connections. That is separate to Openreach and Virgin, so there really is a big change in that market supply, to which I think the noble Lord was alluding. Had the noble Lord finished, by the way, or did he give way to me?

I was giving way to an excellent intervention to save me from the poor quality of my speech.

I am sorry; I suddenly saw the look on your face and thought you were finished.

The whole Committee stage debate has already become surreal, and we are only about 20 minutes into it.

If I can take noble Lords back to the tea room, where I was this morning, we were discussing the lack of intervention in debates in the House of Lords, which is apparently seen as a Commons trait and discouraged in your Lordship’s House. In fact, I was told by a very senior chair of a committee—who is in the Chamber—that on no account was one to take an intervention at Committee stage. But I felt that as the noble Lord, Lord Fox, had already transgressed so badly in detaining two eminent Conservative Peers in the tea room, I would simply allow him to continue to flout convention and break the rules. I also felt that my speech was going so badly that, just as I used to do in the other place, giving way at an opportune moment to gather one’s thoughts was sensible.