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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

I shall speak also to Amendment 26. These amendments amplify the scope of the report that is the subject of this clause. My reasons for adding these three items are that some key aspects of the network do not seem to be included in the rest of the, admittedly quite extensive, wording in this clause. First, Ofcom should have regard to the resilience of the network. In the past year or two, we have been through a period when the resilience of the economy and our banking protection system was tested. It is a good idea to look at these matters before we hit a crisis. I do not think we need to specify what kind of crisis might hit a network. It could be anything from power difficulties to difficulties relating to other kinds of incidents: anything that could impact on the performance of the network. We are going through a period when the resilience of the network is being systematically decreased. During the big boom in building mobile services, we were putting in base stations with one or two weeks’ reserve power capacity so that the mobile network could stand quite a long period of difficulty, such as being unable to get to base stations because of the snow. It gave you a week to get there. Now, we are putting in base stations that have only 24 hours’, sometimes even less, reserve power capacity. If we continue on that pattern, which Ofcom appears to be allowing solely on an economic basis, we will end up with a network that is quite fragile. That sort of thing ought to be part of Ofcom’s remit when it comes to this report. Secondly, going back to my original complaints about Ofcom’s lack of attention to citizens, when we had the bombings on 7 July, the first thing that happened was that people’s mobile communications services were cut, which was fine, under those circumstances. When nothing too devastating or terrible in a geographic sense has happened, people can be relied upon to act sensibly, and we walked home. You could not tell anyone where you were, but eventually you turned up and things were all right. But if something happened which was more frightening, to leave the population in a position where their preferred means of communication was disabled is an invitation to panic and irrationality. I know there were reasons why communications were disabled in those particular circumstances, but when we are doing a report on the communications system, we really ought to understand how much a key part of people’s lives we have allowed mobile communications to become. It is important that we should seek to preserve that, in circumstances when the Government want to have an effect on how people behave. If, for some reason, they want to restrict people’s movements, for example to prevent the spread of a disease, they could not do that without communicating properly with people. If you have a communications system—particularly a mobile system—which falls over in an emergency, you are going to be unable to do what you need to do. Amendment 26 picks up an additional circumstance to which Ofcom should have regard. It is not only physical criteria and physical disruption of the service which matter. There can be circumstances, going back to 7 July, where something that does not of itself damage the communications infrastructure places such a load on it that it is disabled. In the context of this report, that is something that Ofcom ought to have regard to. I beg to move.