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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

I shall speak also to Amendment 14B. I should declare an interest as a member of the Climate Change Adaptation Sub-Committee. I apologise for raising this issue only on Report. Discussions with Ofcom and the department have been ongoing. I am grateful to the Minister’s department for its engagement, but, having reached a point of impasse, I felt that I needed to bring forward the amendment. Climate change will have an increasing impact on essential services in this country. Communication networks and services such as telecoms, the internet and broadcast media will be no exception. Perhaps I may give some examples: heat, floods and storms can knock out services, as can interruptions to power supplies. Transmission equipment can be jeopardised by stormy weather. In emergencies, communication services are vital not only for emergency response but for the public to gain information about what is happening during an emergency, as well as for the public to communicate with one another to gain reassurance about the safety and welfare of family and friends. During the Carlisle floods in 2005, when storms had brought down telecommunications and floods were increasing, Environment Agency staff nobly waded in and out of the local police station, itself underwater, simply in order to keep communications open and the emergency response services in action. Just at the time when emergencies do arise, the public want to get more information about these emergencies in order to be able to respond to them. They also want to be able to communicate with their nearest and dearest, with their places of work and with emergency services. I believe that the public have a right to expect that the communications infrastructure and services will be planned to take proper account of the medium-term and longer-term implications of climate change and that communications companies should report from time to time on their preparedness for and resilience to climate change. My Amendments 14A and 14B seek to ensure that the communications companies do so. This is not an off-the-wall, unusual request to the communications companies. Those of your Lordships who helped to steer through the Climate Change Act will recall that, under that Act, a variety of public and business bodies—for example, the water companies and the energy companies—are required to report on their preparedness and their adaptation to the impact of climate change. The communications companies were not included in that group, I think by mistake rather than by design. The water companies, the energy companies and others classed as statutory undertakers are required to report. Of course the communications companies do not fall into the category of statutory undertakers, but they are, as I am sure your Lordships would agree, just as important to this country’s resilience to the impact of climate change. Amendment 14A tries to correct what I believe is the erroneous omission of the communications companies from the Climate Change Act reporting requirement by asking Ofcom to seek reports from such companies, whose resilience to floods, heatwaves and storms is important. The Secretary of State will prescribe what information he needs to know, so Ofcom is not required to become an expert in climate change impacts and their adaptation. The proposal would not cover all the companies regulated by Ofcom but would leave Ofcom to judge which companies are the most important in terms of resilience to climate change impact. Amendment 14B would enable Ofcom to use its existing information-gathering powers to require communications providers to supply the information required and would ensure that Ofcom could not just ask willy-nilly for excessive information. It makes it clear that the power would be subject to the restrictions in Section 132 of the Communications Act 2003, which says that demands for information must be proportionate. I am absolutely certain that the Minister will resist this amendment, although I do not believe that that is because the Government do not want communications companies to have to report on whether they are resilient in the face of climate change. I believe that the Government want that; indeed, in response to the consultation about Ofcom’s powers, they confirmed that they believed that the industry should plan for the resilience challenges posed by climate change. The disagreement is really about how that can be achieved. In the discussions that have been taking place, the Government have proposed that these issues be addressed later, in the wider context of the new security and resilience requirements that arise as a result of the recent review of the EU telecoms framework legislation. The revision to this framework directive has only just been published. The timescale for transposition is unclear and, although I would hesitate to accuse the Government of fiddling while the UK floods, it feels a bit like that. The Minister has meanwhile proposed a voluntary arrangement of the key players in the sector, which might be in place by the autumn. I believe that this is too important an issue to be left to a voluntary agreement with the industry to provide some unspecified information from unknown companies at some possible future date. Wisely, the Government have not accepted a voluntary approach with other key industries, so I do not believe that they should accept it with the electronic communications industry, which is vital to emergency resilience and the work of other parts of the critical national infrastructure. This may be the wrong amendment. If it is, there are perhaps other ways in which the Government can give assurance on these points. Clause 2 of this Bill, which amends the Communications Act 2003, requires Ofcom to prepare reports on electronic communications networks and services matters, including preparations made by providers for responding to an emergency, the steps taken to assess the risks of different types of emergency and the steps taken to reduce those risks. Perhaps the Government might give guidance to Ofcom to ensure that the definition of an emergency includes not just immediate emergencies and resilience envisaged by the clause, but also the very likely medium-term causes of future emergencies such as the impacts of climate change. It should also include the risk assessment and resilience measures to be put in place by the communications networks and services to meet not just these immediate risks but the medium-term and longer-term climate change impacts. That piece of guidance to Ofcom might strengthen the position. The ideal situation would be if the Government were to ponder on this amendment and bring forward one of their own, either at a later stage in this House or in another place. At the very minimum I ask the Minister to give assurances to noble Lords, and indeed to the public, that these vital communications companies will ensure that they are resilient to the impacts of climate change and that they will be required to report on that resilience, as the majority of other organisations and companies important to national climate change adaptation and resilience already have to do by law. I beg to move.