Communications Bill
10:30 am
Mr John Whittingdale (Maldon and East Chelmsford, Conservative)
I join the Minister in welcoming you to the Chair, Mr. Gale. The imminent prospect of Christmas pales into insignificance compared with the anticipation that Conservative Members feel at the prospect spending the next seven to eight weeks considering the Bill under your chairmanship and that of Mr. Atkinson.
It is a particular pleasure that you and Mr. Atkinson should be in the Chair, not because both of you are political colleagues of mine—I realise that that is entirely put to one side while you are occupying that Chair, Mr. Gale—but because the two of you are veterans of the last time that we debated some of the issues raised in the Bill, when we considered the Broadcasting Act 1996. Many might regret that you and Mr. Atkinson are in the Chair for this Committee, because you will not be able to express any views on the contents of the Bill. However, there are perhaps one or two organisations that are relieved that you, Mr. Gale, are not able to express observations on the contents of the Bill. However, in the case of the organisation that I am especially thinking of, it may be
that you and Mr. Atkinson effectively cancel each other out.
I am sure that every Committee member will agree that this is an enormous Bill in many respects. Its sheer physical size—running to two volumes, 395 clauses, and any number of schedules—is an indication that it has vast scope and covers an enormous part of our economy. Its consequences are likely to be profound and long term. It is six years since we last examined these issues and, even then, many of us felt that we would need to return to them. The pace of technological change is such that developments in these sectors happen quickly and there is a real danger that legislation becomes rapidly out of date.
For that reason, it is extremely important that we get the Bill right. We should try to ensure that it is sufficiently flexible to take account of change. I suspect that, back in 1996, none of us imagined what the broadcasting environment or the telecommunications sector would look like today. Most of the 1996 Bill was concerned with establishing digital terrestrial television, which has come and not quite gone. It has not gone, but it is certainly very different from the type of project for which we created the conditions in 1996. That demonstrates how hard it is to predict how the sector will develop, which is why we must try to ensure that the Bill will, at least, create a framework that is capable of taking account of unforeseen developments.
Clearly, the Bill has already been subject to a lot of scrutiny. It has been through several different stages. We had a communications White Paper that the Government published and to which organisations and individuals responded, and, in the last session we had the paving Bill to establish Ofcom—the Office of Communications. Some aspects of that Bill will be covered again in our consideration of this one. The House has already had a chance to debate the bringing together of the regulators into a single umbrella regulator and some of the issues that arise from that.
In the last Session, the Government published a draft Bill that was scrutinised by the Joint Committee on the Draft Communications Bill, which I am sure that we all welcome as a useful exercise that has saved us time. Undoubtedly, it cleared up one or two points and improved the Bill by making it more technically coherent. Although the Government did not accept the Joint Committee's recommendations in some key areas, in large part, the recommendations were accepted. Therefore, I am sure that all of us welcome the exercise and hope that the Government undertake similar ones for other Bills that could be improved with draft scrutiny. The other Bill for which the Minister is responsible is the Licensing Bill, which we look forward to receiving later this year. I suspect that that might also have been improved had it undergone the same pre-legislative scrutiny process.
Dr. Howells indicated assent.