Electronic Communications (Universal Service) (Broadband) Order 2018 — House of Lords, 2018-06-05
Topic: Technology
Robert Stevenson (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I thank all those who have contributed and have got a lot of things off their chest, which is always a good thing to do. There are times when we want to get things moving but that does not happen. The noble Viscount, Lord Waverley, gets the prize for making the shortest and least geographically located point. Asking simply where global Britain was going to come out of all this was rather clever, and I wish that I had thought of that myself. At least we did not get to go down the byways and highways of yet another county, even though that is at the heart of what we have been trying to say I was left with five points from the many good speeches. First, I think that the Government are making a rod for their own back if they do not nail down very quickly what they mean by the various percentages and coverages and so on. The Minister’s speech was better in that sense, as it was restricted to a couple of examples. However, if people do not know what they are being offered, cannot measure it against their real experience and then do not see what they can do to redress the point—the question was asked: where do you go when you have a complaint?—we are going to end up in worse trouble than we are in at the moment, and I ask the Government to think again about that Secondly, what came through was the need to think about reach as much as about what broadband is doing in terms of broadly shaping of the economy—by that, I am referring to the two aspects of rural and small businesses. If we do not get that right, we will again build in trouble for ourselves, because there is a suppressed demand that we are not measuring and not seeing. Even though some people will say that they do not want particular advanced technologies, there seem to be an awful lot of other people out there who, if the technology is available, will be able to do a lot more than they can at present. We are missing a trick if we do not try to respond better to that Thirdly, it is good to hear about the commitment to fibre, which I have taken as a very positive output from this debate. The aim is for 15 million premises to have a pretty good fibre connection in a reasonable amount of time, but it seems a very long time to wait for the 100% figure to be reached. I assume that 100% is 100% of everybody everywhere. If it is not, obviously we will need to know about that, but 2033 seems an awfully long time to wait for that I have two final points to make. The thing that I had not thought about enough when preparing for this debate was the social exclusion argument, which was made by a number of people—particularly the noble Lord, Lord Foster. It is important not to lose that in the rush to find toys for people or, more seriously, to give people the tools they need to develop their careers and the work they want to do. The social exclusion element is really important Finally, a review of availability is promised in the order. There is a bit of a blockage at 75% of people getting 30 Mbps or more, but if it is possible to think about that more broadly in terms of serious issues regarding new technologies, I think we will all be happier. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.