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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

I am very sorry, Lord Chairman. I was carefully parsing what the Minister said. I am of course comforted by what he said about the priority given to the needs of the emergency services. He said that we are involved with Europe. Yes, I know that we are involved in Europe. I was taken to task quite severely by Ofcom for saying that we were not. We are just not co-operating. We are not doing our best to reach a resolution on this. It is going back to the days I remember from my early engagement in politics under different management. There is a great difference between being involved in discussion and working to bring the discussion to a fruitful conclusion. I would very much like to know that the Government are committed to the idea of identifying common spectrum that the emergency services might use in the future. It seems to be a very important concept with a lot of benefits for us. I would very much like to hear the Government say that, rather than just getting involved in discussions which—looking at past discussions on this subject and the contributions made to it from the direction of Ofcom—have been singularly unconstructive. It seems to be a piece of co-operation which we should be encouraging. If the noble Lord cannot reply to me now, I would very much like to have it in writing that we are actively seeking to get towards the agreed goal of a common spectrum allocation for future use by the emergency services. I do not disapprove at all of the basis that the Government have laid out regarding how the emergency services and others should acquire spectrum in essentially a competitive situation where they have to justify their use of the spectrum. We have been terribly profligate with it in the past. The Ministry of Defence still sits on about a quarter of the entire spectrum, which is a little excessive to say the least. What matters here is timing. The police will certainly develop a strategy. However, there is no way that this Government, or any other Government, will allow them a budget for the next three, four or five years to put in a new system or to begin work on a new system. We will come through a period where public authorities will to have to be extremely careful about their budget. In that period, under the rubric set out by this Government, the key bits of spectrum will have been flogged off to mobile telephone companies. That is the problem which I seek to address in this amendment. It is not about the principles of the way that the Government are going at it; it is about timing. Because the Government are waiting for things to happen that necessarily cannot happen for five or 10 years before they will allocate spectrum to the emergency services, the other provisions of the Bill will result in the key bits of spectrum—the bits which would have worked on a European or an international basis—having already been allocated to other services. That is what I seek to avoid. I do not seek some unjustified allocation of spectrum. I am advocating that we should be properly careful to make sure that a longer term objective—a five or 10-year objective—is not sacrificed in the cause of a more immediate gain. I have not had the answer that I am looking for on that. I suspect that I shall need to return to this at a later stage of the Bill. For now, however, I will withdraw the amendment. Things were going rather fast but I see that we have comfortably gone back to the old pace of 20-minute groupings on this Bill. I shall absent myself from the next section, not least because my noble friend’s amendment comes rather too close to my own school days for me to want to sit around and listen to it. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 243 withdrawn. Clause 40 : Classification of video games etc Amendment 246 Clause 40 : Classification of video games etc Amendment 246 Moved by