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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, I rise to support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, plus the amendments to it, because they are slightly different things. Taken as a package, the whole thing, though not essential, would be extremely useful for the UK and possibly the world. Nowadays, in a global society where more things are happening and there is more international assistance, it seems silly that teams who go abroad should not be able to interoperate to a certain extent. If we operate on completely different frequencies, the kit has no hope of interoperating. It might be possible—I do not know—to get stuff to interoperate if we, for instance, dispatched a team to Haiti. If other international teams were there, we might find that we could, whereas the kit will not interoperate if we are working on completely different frequencies. Therefore the idea of organising this at a European level, for a start, is extremely sensible. There has been quite a lot of debate on this around the scenes for the last year or so. When it has been raised at meetings with various people from the Civil Service, the general attitude has been, ““Well, the emergency services have to bid for their spectrum like everyone else, and if that is wanted they will be given the budget to do so””. What worries me is my suspicion that, with the current parlous state of the economy, they will not be given that budget. Because of a temporary crisis in our economy, we may well find ourselves regretting that in 10 or 15 years’ time—or even at, say, the Olympics. If there were a disaster then, it would be far better if we were operating on the European frequency. If teams were there with similar equipment, we might find it easier to operate together. The point about the critical national infrastructure is that that is different. It would not be regarded as being for the emergency services. Again, however, it is important that they have spectrum allocated to them. More and more control systems—for power stations, for the grid and for other things—are running over radio frequencies. Those systems are not running down just wires or cables. We must make sure that those services have frequencies reserved for them that cannot be interfered with and that will not interfere with other transmissions. It should be dedicated to them. I therefore support all of these amendments.