Digital Switchover (Disclosure of Information) Bill

I shall make some progress, but I will give way in due course. For the record, can the Secretary of State tell us when the licence fee settlement will be made, and so when we will know the cost of digital switchover? Will Parliament have an opportunity properly to scrutinise those costs? If not, will she at least allow the National Audit Office to do so? Everyone other than the Government and the BBC is being kept in the dark. Various unofficial estimates of the costs of targeted help for switchover are doing the rounds, and they range from £400 million to £800 million. This afternoon, the Secretary of State went for the middle figure of £600 million, but does that include VAT? It could end up costing"““on the far side of a billion””" pounds, according to the BBC director-general, Mark Thompson. As a comparison, the cost of retuning videos for the introduction of Channel 5 more than 10 years ago was some £165 million. That involved visits to 10 million homes in nine months and was well over budget. The Department has suggested a cost of between £80 and £570 per household for switchover, and has estimated that 7 million homes will need assistance. However, that figure has gone from 5 million households when the former Minister with responsibility for switchover gave evidence to the Select Committee, to 6.5 million in the Government’s response to the Select Committee’s report, and now stands at 7 million. Like the Olympics budget, the figures seem to be going only one way. What assurance can the right hon. Lady give that we now have a definitive figure? We know that estimates exist within the Department for targeted switchover, but those have been kept confidential. Why have they not been published? What does the Secretary of State have to hide? How can Parliament debate the Bill without having any idea from the Government what it is likely to cost? On myriad factors, we do not know the Department’s thinking. How many new set-top boxes will be needed? What is the cost per household likely to be? How many aerials will need upgrading? How much will the processing and providing of social security data cost? How many households are likely to take up assistance? How many people will need to be trained to provide that assistance? What are the likely associated costs, such as Criminal Records Bureau checks on engineers? Given that those checks will be taking place at the same time as checks on those working on the Olympic building programme, what estimate has the Secretary of State made of the impact on the agency responsible for those security checks? Not only do we not know what the cost is likely to be, but we know nothing of the Government’s thinking on the eventual budget when the money has been spent. By making the cost of targeted help part of the licence fee settlement, the Government are storing up trouble for the future. Can the Secretary of State tell us, for example, what will happen to any money that is not spent on targeted help? Will the BBC keep that money, or is it to be returned to the Treasury, or even—perish the thought—to the licence fee payer? More importantly, what if the Government have significantly underestimated the cost of targeted switchover? Where would additional funds come from? Would they come from the Treasury, from a further increase in the licence fee or from elsewhere in the BBC’s budget? The Government have made up their mind that the BBC should fund and oversee switchover. The Select Committee, of course, came to a different conclusion. Nevertheless, there are many parties involved in the process. It is the responsibility of two Government Departments—the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department of Trade and Industry, not to mention the Office of Government Commerce; two regulators—Ofcom and the new BBC Trust; and two sets of broadcasters—the BBC and the rest through Digital UK.