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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, very briefly, I would like to support what the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, has just said. The ideas behind this clause are good, but the exact wording is wrong. It is not ideal. The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, has given me the opportunity of pointing out that he thinks that Ofcom has done extremely well in some ways, and he mentioned the local loop unbundling. The trouble with the local loop unbundling is that although it has done fine in the cities, where there is a lot of competition, but—and this is where the later amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, are going to be so important, and I support them very heavily—it has allowed the entire local loop to degrade in rural and distant areas to an almost disastrous extent. Investment in those areas is not commercially interesting, and this is where the word "efficiency" and the points made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, come in. Another example where Ofcom may have made a mistake is over the sharing of mobile telephone masts. That sounds very efficient, but it has allowed companies to reduce the number of masts in some areas. We now have such contention on some masts that you will find that your signal is not as good as it used to be in some areas, because they have taken out some masts in order to save money. It has not done what it was expected to do, which was to increase the amount of masts available and give us better coverage. We are getting worse coverage instead. I am not sure that Ofcom realises some of the unintended consequences of some of their policy decisions.