Clause 3 - General duties of OFCOM
Communications Bill
12:30 pm
Mr Andrew Lansley (South Cambridgeshire, Conservative)
As I said a moment ago, part of my purpose will be to suggest to the Committee some issues that were not properly resolved by the Government's response to the joint scrutiny committee. Among those, perhaps the most important is the question of the structure of general duties. The Minister knows how important that is. During the proceedings of the Committee that considered the then Utilities Bill, he said that general duties lie at the heart of the regulatory process. They set the framework in which regulators exercise their functions under the Acts. That is clearly true in
relation to the Bill as much as it was to that legislation. My hon. Friend the Member for Maldon and East Chelmsford rightly referred to the questions that have arisen over the years about how regulators have interpreted their general duties, or felt obliged to do so in order to secure their objectives most effectively.
A principal difficulty that Ofcom faces is the breadth and complexity of the duties placed on the regulator. Not only is a range of duties set out in clause 3(1) and (2), but a range of factors to which regard has to be shown is set out in clause 3(3), some of which take the character of additions to the duties rather than factors as such. We will go on to debate the extent to which they should be characterised as duties rather than matters to which Ofcom must have regard. In practice, they add to the complexity of the range of objectives that Ofcom needs to meet.
The duties do not stop there. I will not go on about it at length, but clause 4 gives a range of duties related to Community legislation, some of which stand in a prior position, so Ofcom has a requirement to meet those above and beyond any other duties. When we get into subsequent parts of the Bill, there will be duties in relation to the wireless telegraphy spectrum, which amplify on the optimal use issue, and so on. The complexity of Ofcom's duties is a characteristic of the regulatory issue, and, if anything, goes substantially beyond most other regulatory Acts or the establishment of regulators seen in recent years.
It has been clear that one of the ways in which one can deal with the issue is to ensure not only that those duties are as clear as one can make them, but that, wherever possible, Parliament states its intentions as to the manner in which those duties are to be considered, one against another.