My Lords, the Minister really did big up this section of the Bill. He said it would revolutionise this information service, that it would bring many benefits, has a green rating, would be the Formula 1 of data transfer in mapping and so on. We were led to expect quite a lot from this part of the legislation. It is an important part of the Bill, because it signifies some government progress towards the goal of creating a comprehensive national underground asset register, as he put it, or NUAR. We are happy to support this objective, but we have concerns about the progress being made and the time it is taking.
To digress a bit here, it took me back 50 years to when I was a labourer working by the side of a bypass. One of the guys I was working with was operating our post hole borer; it penetrated the Anglian Water system and sent a geyser some 20 metres up into the sky, completely destroying my midday retreat to the local pub between the arduous exercise of digging holes. Had he had one of the services on offer, I suspect that we would not have been so detained. It was quite an entertaining incident, but it clearly showed the dangers of not having good mapping.
As I understand it, and as was outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, since 2018 the Government have been moving towards this notion of somewhere recording what lies below the surface in our communities. We have had street works legislation going back several decades, from at least 1991. In general, progress towards better co-ordination of utilities excavations has not been helped by poor and low levels of mapping and knowledge of what and which utilities are located underground. This is despite the various legislative attempts to make that happen, most of which have attempted to bring better co-ordination of services.
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For the above reasons, we broadly welcome the Government’s latest moves towards putting NUAR on a statutory footing. As I said, our principal concern has been the time it has taken to get round to doing it and making efficient use of the data.
The Minister outlined the Government’s amendments very carefully and extensively. He has told us that they are mostly tidying up, are minor and technical, and all about consistency of language. I am happy to accept that.
I can well understand the concerns that lie behind the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. He and I obviously shared the same briefing. There is no doubt that the briefing from Linesearch- beforeUdig—LSBUD—raises a number of thorny issues and questions, which need answering before we finally agree these clauses.
The noble Lord’s Amendment 241A would require a review, Amendment 249A would delay implementation until the review has been completed and Amendment 299A seeks the publication of evidence for a new service before commencing the NUAR provisions. Together with the clause stand part notices, they provide the Committee with the opportunity to probe the Government’s thinking.
In essence, the LinesearchbeforeUdig briefing suggests that, without aligning with proven best practice, as the noble Lord said, NUAR poses a serious risk of creating uncertainty, reducing safety, adding unnecessary costs, stifling competition and compromising data. Those are fairly serious concerns.
As I understand it, the Government’s intention is to bring NUAR fully into service during 2031-32—some six or seven years away. NUAR covers only a third of asset owners currently, and the Government’s own assessment suggests that “significant issues exist”, with successful delivery of its services appearing to be only “feasible”, at this stage.
It is not my job to argue the case for a private operator of a mapping service for underground assets but, on the face of it, LSBUD has been operating a pretty comprehensive service for some 20 years. As the noble Lord said, it processes 4 million inquiries annually, covering all the major underground utilities—gas, water, electricity, telecom cables and more. It says that 80% of excavations in the UK involve a LSBUD search, so it has a lot of knowledge and experience. I was perhaps expecting the Minister to refer to that.
Given that LSBUD appears to have a significant share of this service market, how is the NUAR intended to work with it to protect our valuable underground assets, before it finally becomes this Formula 1 service? Can we be assured that NUAR will draw on LSBUD’s expertise and knowledge? What measures will the Government put in place to protect the security of data provided by asset owners, where commercial sensitivities are concerned? What steps will NUAR take to guarantee that security and public safety are hard-wired into its working practices? Do the Government and NUAR have a plan to ensure that the asset owners will be protected from unauthorised access to their data? How will the Government ensure that NUAR
aligns itself with current industry best practice? Given that LSBUD offers a free service, are the Government confident that the service that they have created, which is reliant on licensing and fee arrangements, will be both comprehensive and used?
I know that those sounded like fairly hard-nosed questions but, as I said at the outset, we are entirely supportive of the direction of travel of NUAR. Our principal concerns are, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, put it, to ensure that critical national infrastructure developments are not placed at risk during the creation, development and emergence of this service. It would be deeply ironic if, in developing a service that is designed to protect our most important underground utilities, we ended up putting them in jeopardy simply because of a system failure in data capture and mapping. I think that both the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and I require answers to those questions.