My Lords, I am fortunate to follow the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, whose comprehensive support of his amendment means that I need say very little, but I will make a couple of points.
We have talked in various debates on the digital economy about how wireless and broadband are converging, but there is one area where we do not want them to converge. The paroxysms that we are putting ourselves through around the broadband issue are because of how broken that market is, and there is a firm danger that we may be sending the wireless market down the same route. As the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, pointed out, we had an equitable spectrum distribution, but there is a clear and present danger that we will move even further from that equity, with two dominant players and two very small players. The purpose of this amendment is to work in advance of that, so that we will not subsequently be debating the brokenness of the wireless market as we have been, from time immemorial, in respect of the broadband market.
When this amendment was debated in Committee, the Minister’s response was very much about leaving Ofcom to choose. He hazarded that, from the Government’s point of view,
“it also strikes us as unlikely that Ofcom, having determined appropriate rules …, would immediately nullify the results”.—[Official Report, 31/1/16; col. 1196]
In other words, it is up to Ofcom to decide, and it is not going to decide on this issue. That actually makes this amendment more important, not less. Ofcom has clearly recognised that there is a potential issue here, and it has gone tentatively down the route of limiting access to the 2.3 gigahertz spectrum while completely ignoring the 3.4 gigahertz spectrum. I think that the case has been made by the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, for us to take account of that in the Bill and, for that reason, I support the amendment.