Digital Britain

My Lords, I very much thank both noble Lords for their contributions. I was perfectly content for my senior colleague in the other place to be the first person to read his Statement. I suspect, despite my gentle rewording of "tantamount to theft" to "wrong", that I was considerably happier to re-read his Statement than he was to read his. One of the things that we see in the public domain is the public’s engagement with political debate and a desire for deliberative and informed discussion about real issues as opposed to knee-jerk rejections of policy positions, whoever presents them. I would be the first to say that issues remain in this report—there clearly are—but I will try to deal with the substantive questions, most of which were asked by the noble Lord, Lord Clements. First, I shall clarify my own position, as it is my first opportunity to do so in this House. I have not resigned; I am in the process of completing my task on entering government, which, as I think we made clear in a Statement last week, was to commission and complete this report, and we will do so. The noble Lord, Lord Clements, is correct; there are follow-on consultations. Indeed, there are 11. I make no apology for the fact that there are follow-on consultations, because that is what we are required to do by both good Cabinet Office practice and better regulation practice. However, let us be equally clear that most of those 11 consultations are about implementation, not debate. A very clear consultation document was issued today on intellectual property and digital piracy and how we will transpose the necessary powers into the hands of the sectoral regulator to do what we say we wish to do. On the bigger question of what we are trying to say with this report today, we are trying to say three things. The first was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Clements. For the first time, we as a country should unashamedly endorse our creative industries as an industrial capability of real scale and international clout. We should recognise that the digital economy is central to our future industrial competitiveness, and that that requires us to make some hard decisions about the infrastructure capabilities that we have in this country. I have many times heard members of the opposition party wax lyrical about the benefits of the liberalisation of the telecommunications market. Indeed, I was a beneficiary of that. I was also a regulator of it, and tried to solve one of its unfortunate by-products: the failure to create an access regime to create a competitive market. It is very clear that if we wish to create a future market structure, we need to make some decisions about investment in next-generation capability: hence the proposals for the levy. Some questions do remain for us to discuss, but considerably fewer than the noble Lords have outlined. I am deeply saddened by the process point that the report and the Statement were late, and I apologise to the House. We have tried studiously to observe parliamentary primacy, and rightly so—I make no virtue of it—so there were no briefings, certainly not from me or my office, beyond the article to which the noble Lord refers. I took due care and consideration—indeed, I penned the article myself—to make it clear that we were in no way, shape or form divulging content; we were arguing a case. That is a perfectly legitimate exercise of a ministerial position. We were absolutely determined that this report would be delivered to Parliament first, and I am deeply disappointed that colleagues have not had the opportunity to review it in a way that I hope people feel it benefits from. I have two final points to make. First, the contestability of the licence fee is not a small question. I for one in government have been insistent that there are two principles that need to be tested: one is that there is a requirement for funding for local news, regional news and news in the nations; the second is that we are for the first time asking whether the licence fee should be used for other things. The Government are clear that the time has come, but we believe that it is a substantial policy change that benefits from a clearly time-defined policy and public consultation. Again, I make no apology for that. We are both clear and open, and I, for my part, believe that that is the definition both of good government and of good policy development. The noble Lord asked about the delivery of services to rural and remote Britain—or not so rural, because we are talking about a third of the country. I sincerely share the noble Lord's hope that our recommendations today will act as an accelerator to commercial investment in market deployment, notwithstanding that we believe that a clear case has been made for targeted, market-facing and forensic intervention. I commend the report to the House.