My Lords, following that very provocative statement from the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, I will not go into great detail about Amendments 17A and 17B because they have not been moved, although by a side wind the noble Lord mentioned MDUs and various other aspects. All I can say is that if they are moved on Report they will be very firmly opposed from these Benches. There are many reasons for that, which I will not go into, but we look forward to the debate on Report. In the meantime, we will keep our powder dry.
The noble Baroness, Lady Harding, made an extremely good case for her Amendment 18, as has my noble friend. I do not think that the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, is a great fan of poles, but we will just have to live with that. Amendments such as this would ensure that an explicit right exists to access the pole itself or place apparatus on it. That amendment is supported by all operators. It is good that we have one amendment that is almost unanimously supported by the operators.
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For example, CityFibre says:
“Extending the wayleave sharing rights to both ducts and poles for fixed networks will have a huge impact, particularly in urban Scotland and rural England where there is a much higher proportion of poles situated on private land”.
It estimates that 1 million such poles exist across the UK. That is an impressive number. On the other side of the equation, Openreach, which we do not always agree with, estimates that 1 billion metres of fibre are currently laid over poles in the UK.
We fully support this amendment and if the Minister cannot agree to it, as the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, says, we look forward to him tabling the necessary amendment on Report. After all, this amendment would achieve a consistent application of paragraph 17 of the ECC by extending permissions to reasonably associated apparatus without the risk of also including the apparatus within the premises, which is the bone of contention on the earlier amendments.