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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

The noble Lord nearly gave me a nasty turn. I will start with Amendment 177. I listened with interest to the concerns of the Committee last week that this part of the Bill is unclear about the order in which actions should happen and the timescales involved. I recognise that there are genuine concerns in this area. I have always made it clear that the Government intend to introduce technical obligations only if the initial obligations do not work. I agree, however, that it would be helpful to provide more clarity on the face of the Bill about the intention that technical obligations should not be introduced unless or until the initial obligations have been tried and found not to be sufficiently effective. For this reason it is our intention to propose, on Report, an amendment to Clause 11 to require a minimum period of 12 months following the coming into force of an initial obligations code before an order imposing technical obligations may be made. I hope that this will meet the concerns of the noble Lord and others with similar concerns that this will not be a rush to judgment. There will be a decent period of time; as I have said, our proposal is to have a period of 12 months following the coming into force of an initial obligations code on which there will be a consultative process. On Amendments 179 and 207, we have set out in the draft SI our views on how the costs of the initial obligations should be handled. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, appeared to be satisfied in that respect so I will not dwell on that. Turning finally to Amendment 180, we discussed last week an amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Mandelson to ensure that an order under this section is to be made by the affirmative procedure. I hope that that achieves what noble Lords want. Given my explanation, I hope that the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw the amendment.