Digital Switchover (Disclosure of Information) Bill

I understand the hon. Gentleman’s point, but given that 75 per cent. of households have already switched to digital it would be remiss of the BBC or any other provider not to advertise its digital services. In terms of encouraging the 25 per cent. who have not switched to do so, it would be remiss of anyone involved in broadcasting not to advertise what will, in just a few years’ time, be the only source of television broadcasting. Ofcom has estimated an average cost of £100 per household, although that figure could rise to £300 if aerials have to be altered. Some 10 per cent. of aerials are likely to require modification. For the 7 million households that might be affected by the Bill, that gives a total cost of £700 million. Another hon. Member suggested £6 million and I have heard higher figures suggested. When will the Government produce some figures? The Secretary of State, in parliamentary answers, has said that the Government cannot reveal the estimated cost because that would bias the tendering process that will get under way shortly. In many tendering processes, the estimated costs are disclosed to enable the bidders to put together a package that meets or betters the expectations and estimates. In many instances, it is part of the bidding process in both the private and public sectors. As long as all bidders are given the same estimated costs, it would not breach competition rules and would not give one person an advantage over another. Given the estimated costs to Parliament so we can take an informed decision during the passage of the Bill, it will surely not prejudice any issues on the bidding process. The Bill effectively gives the Secretary of State carte blanche to alter at will major and significant parts of the Bill once it has passed through this place. For example, clause 5(1) provides for the agreement between the BBC and the Secretary of State to be changed, without the consent of Parliament, at the whim of the Secretary of State and without any further recourse to Parliament once the Bill is passed. It is intended to allow the scheme to be updated as it progresses, but effectively gives the Secretary of State total freedom to make further demands on the BBC without any parliamentary scrutiny. Clause 2 provides power for the Secretary of State to prescribe, by order, the precise kinds of information that can be supplied under clause 1. Once again, we do not know what information the Secretary of State might, at any given stage, decide to prescribe, and the clause gives the Secretary of State total freedom to prescribe far more information than Parliament, if it were allowed to discuss the matter, might be willing to give at this stage. When the Bill has been through Committee and Third Reading it will be too late—we will no longer be able to contribute to the process. The Bill is far too permissive in the powers that the Secretary of State wishes to accord herself. Discussions between the Secretary of State and the BBC have been happening late in the process, but they have not been made public. It looks as though Parliament is to debate the Bill, vote it through and take it through Committee without being privy to all the detail of what is happening, what the requirements are and what the costs will be. Parliament should have much more clarity on those issues rather than be asked to give the Government a free hand to do as they like. With regard to illegal disclosure of information issues, the Bill asks the House to abandon the tried and tested standard of UK law—that people are innocent until proven guilty. That will be subject to detailed discussion in Committee in January, but if satisfactory answers are not forthcoming at that stage, the Government can be assured that that part of the Bill will face a very rough ride in the other place, where the Government have already suffered setbacks in recent years in their attempt to introduce the concept of ““guilty until proven innocent”” in other contexts. Other issues arise. One of the defences under the Bill is that the person concerned can say, ““I believed that I was acting lawfully””, but how can we establish what a person believed in retrospect? Do we just take the person’s word for it? How will proof of innocence be tested, or is it meaningless? If it is not an offence to release summary data that do not contain personal information for regions, how will the reverse burden of proof be applied if a summary allows people to be identified because of the very small number affected in certain areas? How contextual will the offence be and how can it be applied fairly when data sets are so variable in size across the country? The Bill does not make specific provision to prosecute a sub-contractor—I understand that it was intended to and may be amended later—but only the people directly employed by the BBC or the Secretary of State. What, then, will prevent sub-contractors from using or selling the sensitive information that we will pass to them if they are not specifically named in the Bill in that way? Many sub-contractors throughout the country will receive lists of names and addresses of vulnerable people in their areas—sensitive information that we in Parliament must be sure cannot be abused by anyone further down the supply chain. It is not an offence under the Bill deliberately or maliciously to inform a contractor or sub-contractor that the data may be used or disclosed freely, so there needs to be a way to prosecute employees of the BBC or the Secretary of State who misinform contractors about their responsibilities. If the detail is not clear before Committee stage, we need a draft of the statutory instrument that will clarify the prescribed data and all the offences so that we are clear, before we agree to the Bill’s passage, about how those offences would operate. Many technical issues arise from the process. Late as it is, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has not given the industry a clear brief about the specifications for the equipment required for the big switchover that will affect up to 7 million households, yet the Department of Trade and Industry stated earlier that the industry would need quite a lead time in order to develop that equipment. That was a year ago, but up to now the industry has not been given the specifications to start working on it. There is a danger of all that becoming a classic Government information technology procurement fiasco—as with the individual learning accounts or the Department for Work and Pensions and NHS projects—as costs spiral out of control because the brief for the equipment is too vague or undefined at the start or keeps changing throughout the process. We must avoid the problem of the Government constantly amending the contracts. Given the present vague data available to work on and the increasingly short time scale within which to operate the scheme, there is a danger that the industry will not want to bid for the delivery. We need clear terms for the scheme and we need to know what the contractors will be expected to deliver for a fair tendering process. If DCMS wants to shift its risks on to the contractor, it must also hand over full control of the project—otherwise DCMS must retain responsibility, as well as control. Which of the two is it to be? It cannot be both. Will there be a choice of equipment at switchover and will the equipment be usable by the full range of elderly and disabled people who are eligible under the scheme? For example, although it is not strictly part of digital switchover, there is a very large Government procurement programme for the equipment, so what a wasted opportunity if the Government do not specify as part of their requirements that the equipment should have a return path capability built into it. If that happened, the people who secured access to digital in that way could also start to access all the e-government that local government, for example, has been obliged to provide. Those people could then access it from home via that method. What training provision will be put in place to help people use the new equipment? I am thinking of my 80-year-old mother, who lives in Sheffield. I tried to explain it all to her last weekend. One quick explanation of how the equipment works once it is installed will simply not be enough. I understand that the two small pilot projects that have taken place found exactly that—that one explanation to people in that category is insufficient. Finally, environmental issues also have to be considered. Let us start with just the single issue of set-top boxes, which cost a typical household £30 extra in electricity while they are on standby around the clock. If we multiply that by however many millions of houses use it, the figures start to reach hundreds of millions of units of energy consumption unnecessarily wasted unless the right specifications switch off after a set period or, if that is not possible because of the delayed recording capabilities, switch to the minimum power stand-down in a short period of time. The industry tells me that it is perfectly feasible, but will the Government enforce the specifications when they are eventually sorted out? A third of recently tested digital TVs did not meet strict energy efficiency criteria. The Government should have taken the lead in encouraging the industry to produce cleaner and greener equipment. Carbon emissions will go up as a result of digital switchover. The production of waste electronics, as defined in the WEEE directive that was mentioned earlier, will inevitably increase as a result of the switchover from analogue to digital. The Government knew for a long time that there was going to be a problem with recycling fridges, but they waited for years until the last minute, so we saw the nonsense of fridge mountains around the country. There was one in my Chesterfield constituency, awaiting the provision of the equipment necessary for recycling. More recently and on a slightly smaller scale, we had the same problem with the recycling of car parts, oil, brake linings and so forth. The DCMS and the DTI must learn from the farce of the fridge mountain and ensure that we do not have a WEEE mountain, to coin a phrase. Finally, we support the Bill’s principle of switchover, but so much more detail is needed—and very quickly if the Committee is only two or three weeks away in January—if we are to consider the Bill in a worthwhile way. If the major project that is to be delivered by the Bill is to happen, we need to know the specifications and costs, but as yet, they are a complete mystery to us all.