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Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. My previous pleadings seem to have failed. May I please direct the right hon. Gentleman to the fact that we are debating the Wireless Telegraphy Bill. His comments do not fall within the wide title of that Bill.
Mr. Redwood: Mr. Deputy Speaker, you are right to remind me of that fact. I was attempting to demonstrate the fact that this Bill was an unfortunate choice for a Department that is so burdened with problems and wrong policies. As the President of the Board of Trade will not be in the Chamber for the reply, I will not have an opportunity to ask her in person about those matters, and that will be a great pity for the House. Hon. Members would like occasionally to see their President of the Board of Trade so that they can hold her to account.
The Minister of State, Department of Trade and Industry asked me what else, if not this Bill, could be done to provide the spectrum that our growing industry needs. He might look in the history books through which he has been trawling to discover what the previous Government did in recent years. When I was a Minister, we reviewed the spectrum and negotiated with the public bodies that were holding too much of it. They shed that spectrum, which we made available for other users.
Why does the Minister not start there? In his own remarks, he said that the current system has worked pretty well up to this point. We made it work by removing spectrum from public bodies that had been hoarding too much of it. Today, he himself has said that spectrum hoarding is occurring. Much of that hoarding must still be in the public sector, because that sector tends to be the dominant holder of spectrum which has been passed down over the years.
The House needs to know how the President will sort out the mess over powers in this legislation, how she will find sufficient spectrum for the exciting new services that will be available and how she will claim that she will be fair to the different parts of the industry in a Bill that is currently lopsided and unfair.
The Bill states that between £500 million and £1,500 million will be raised, and that there will be another £75 million on top of that. Why cannot Ministers decide now how much money they wish to raise with the Bill--how much they wish to plunder from the industry--and tell the House? The Minister of State, Department of Trade and Industry says that the amount will depend on the auction prices. Of course it will depend on the prices, but Ministers have it within their power to decide how long to run the auctions and how much spectrum to sell in them. Therefore, why does not the Minister tell the House the limits of his ambition for raising money from a very successful industry?
Why has the Minister not done any homework on how many jobs will be lost and how many businesses could be closed by taxation on this scale and by shifting systems to provide spectrum to a crucial industry? Why have not Ministers worked out how much the measure will cost the public sector? Why have they not included in the Bill safeguards for the emergency services that require special frequencies? When will they strengthen all the assurances given in another place, and given again in today's debate, and include them in the Bill for which they are responsible? The Bill is a sloppy measure, poorly drafted and not properly thought through. The Minister would be well advised to take it away and try to improve it.
Has the Minister consulted the health service about the extra costs that will be imposed on it? Will the Government increase the budgets of Departments that will be affected, such as the Department of Health and the Ministry of Defence--or will there be more ward and bed closures to pay the bills? Perhaps the President's budget should again be raided, as it was the other day, to pay for mistakes elsewhere.
After weeks of surrender of territory by the DTI, there is a rumour that the President is to become overlord of regional grants--not to give out more to the telecommunications industry, which may be in need of a handout after her Department is finished with it, but to scale back the passion, particularly of the Secretary of State for Wales, for spending more. I believe that the President has to come to the defence of the northern region to protect the Prime Minister and his northern interests.
The President's new role, however, is not the end of her territorial ambitions. After five months of burying her head in the sands of the DTI, her ultimate reward has been to become one of the five people entrusted with preparing the United Kingdom for economic and monetary union and the abolition of the pound. It must have been her enthusiasm, in 1980, for complete withdrawal from the European Economic Community that led to her appointment. She said then that none of the arguments for staying in the EEC could be sustained. Perhaps her appointment was a result of her remarks, in 1990, that Britain should be "global rather than European". How can anyone say that new Labour is without a sense of humour when the President has been appointed to deal with EMU rather than to get on with the more crucial job in her Department of straightening out the Bill and answering a few questions in the House about her real responsibilities?
The UK requires a strong telecommunications industry and more spectrum to open up new services. As a Minister, one of the tasks that I was most pleased to perform was finding more spectrum to allow more new services, putting us ahead of the world in many spheres.
I did not require a tax to accomplish that objective; I simply found more spectrum in the public sector's horde.
Mr. Battle:
I do not wish to take away anything from the right hon. Gentleman. When he was a Minister, he did find space in the public sector. I seem to recall, however, that the public sector accounts for about 40 per cent. of the total. Although some efficiencies were made in the public sector, we must deal with the private sector, which accounts for the other 60 per cent. That is the purpose of the Bill. We have introduced the Bill because we cannot squeeze more spectrum out of the public sector. If he thinks that he could have found more spectrum in the public sector, why on earth did he not do so?
Mr. Redwood:
I set up a continuing review programme which would have progressively squeezed more out. I wonder whether the Minister has even tried to do that. I think that he has blundered into the Bill and has been given this excuse for it by his officials. I doubt whether he has had any meetings to try to free spectrum from any parts of the economy. He thinks that it can all be done by imposing tax increases.
Mr. Stephen Timms (East Ham):
I am pleased to follow the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood)--I followed his speech with interest. It is extraordinary that he launched such a savage attack on a measure that was in the Conservative party's manifesto. It will be interesting to see whether other Conservative Members follow his line and oppose their manifesto, or whether some of them agreed with the manifesto on which they fought the election.
I want to confine my remarks to three specific points. I want to talk about some of the newly emerging demands for radio spectrum that underline the Bill's importance in ensuring that spectrum is available in a properly managed way; I want to ask my hon. Friend the Minister for clarification about the Bill's impact on existing operators, because some confusion about that was raised in interventions from Conservative Members; and I want to make a suggestion for an addition to the Bill.
Many new demands for spectrum are emerging. Many of the points I want to make arise from discussions with the Telecommunications Users Association of which I have been the honorary president for a couple of years. It is an entirely unpaid role, which I have already declared, but I do so again now. It keeps me in touch with developments in the telecommunications industry and with the needs of small and large telecommunications users. One of the central contentions of the association is that for many users, particularly small business users, there is very little competition between suppliers of telecommunications services.
The previous Government talked a great deal about introducing competition to the telecommunications marketplace. In the City of London, there is a great deal of competition between rival suppliers and that is welcome. For big business pretty well anywhere in the country, there are plenty of suppliers from which to choose. However, in many parts of the country, and in many towns outside the major metropolitan areas, there is all too often no real choice of supplier in practice for small businesses.
New uses of the radio spectrum, commercialised as the Bill envisages, may provide the means to offer the variety and choice of services that has been lacking. One of the important benefits of the Bill will be to ensure that radio spectrum is available in an efficient way to provide for the new services that have not been secured under the previous arrangements.
The Broadband Wireless Association promotes wireless as the
"low cost gateway to interactive television."
It has a conference about that in a couple of months. It says that the build cost per customer of a cable-type service provided by wireless will be about half that of a traditional digging-up-the-pavement cable solution. Assuming that about 30 per cent. penetration is achieved, that significant cost reduction can be secured. A wireless approach to cable transforms the economics of the cable industry. It will make cable economic in rural and other areas where it has been impossible to provide traditional cable services so far.
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