Digital Switchover (Disclosure of Information) Bill

I am grateful to noble Lords, particularly the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, for identifying these issues, which are usefully aired by the amendment. He has taken full advantage ofthe publication of the scheme, but I am not surethat this amendment is adroit enough to meet his requirements. I listened fairly carefully to what has been said; I have also looked at the amendment. It would require the Secretary of State to publish a report on the likely costs attributable to the DWP and other public providers of information under the Bill. That seems to be a recipe for additional and unnecessary bureaucracy. The DWP is not required to provide a report for data-sharing gateways other than in relation to the disclosure of information. Therefore, I am not sure why it should be required to do so with regard to this information, unless the noble Viscount is indicating that he would like the amendment drafted slightly differently so that it identifies the BBC as the point at issue. Clause 41 of the BBC agreement requires the BBC Trust to report to the Secretary of State annually on what the BBC has done in complying with its various obligations under the help scheme. The help scheme agreement makes it clear that that report must contain information about the operation of the scheme, including in particular information aboutthe performance indicators mentioned and the performance of the administrators. I recognise that the BBC Trust’s report covers only the BBC’s activities and not the DWP’s, but we can certainly refute any suggestion that the BBC isnot answerable to this position. Therefore, the amendment throws the whole weight on the DWP as needing to be more in the open. I persist in my point that we do not ask the DWP to produce similar reports for other data-sharing gateways, and I am not sure that the case has been made for this one. We certainly intend that the costs will be treated as scheme costs and borne by the administrator, rather than the DWP. They will fall within the budget set for the scheme and the reports produced by the trust. As noble Lords have said, details of the arrangements have still to be agreed. We have not completed that. In Committee, I was pressed to delay Report until we had published the help scheme, which we have, so the broad contours within which we are working are quite clear. Not every ‘i’ has been dotted nor ‘t’ been crossed about administration, but our current work suggests that costs associated with information sharing for the help scheme will be modest. We do not expect them to be more than £10 million for the lifetime of the scheme. That is because the data will be drawn from existing DWP infrastructure, which does not require much adaptation to facilitate the physical sharing of data for the help scheme. I freely acknowledge that I do not have full documentation on operational details, but I can respond to the amendment by indicating that the DWP is not involved in significant costs for the scheme. Secondly, the DWP is not asked for that information in any other context; I am not sure why it should be here. I emphasise that the BBC will, in its annual report to Parliament, have to give full details of how the scheme is being operated. The noble Viscount, Lord Astor, laid the rather formidable charge that we do not know what on Earth we are doing about the European Commission’s attitude to the Bill. Let me allay the noble Viscount’s anxieties by saying that we have done some work in that area. We think that the scheme will probably be defined as a state aid and will therefore need to be notified to the Commission, but we regard it as certain to be judged as compatible with the common market under provisions of the treaty of Rome dealing with assistance of a social character. That is what the scheme is about. Platform neutrality is of particular importance in successfully bringing an aid within that exemption. We do not anticipate that causing a delay to implementation. There is a later amendment from the noble Viscount about platform neutrality, to which I hope I shall be able to respond positively, but I trailat this stage the fact that, because of those two considerations, we think that we will be totally compatible with Brussels rules on these matters.