My Lords, I cannot believe that the noble Lord believes that it is reasonable to reduce the rent by 90%. There may be community benefits. However, I will come on to whether the consumer has had the benefit of these reductions, which is a very important point, and to the point about aggregators versus mast operators, which seems to be the battle of the behemoths. That is not a very happy situation but, in a sense, one caused by the changes that have been made to the ECC.
Protect and Connect estimates that providers have lost more than £200 million a year in income, including £60.5 million of lost local authority income, £44 million of lost agricultural rural site-owner income and, as the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, says, the Government’s legislation expands the no-scheme valuation regime into approximately 15,000 agreements governed by the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 and the Business Tenancies (Northern Ireland) Order 1996. This would allow operators to ignore contractual agreements entered into in good faith, leading to more incomes being dramatically reduced.
I come on to the question of consumers. The noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, talked about the aggregators but my noble friend Lord Fox and I have brought up throughout the passage of the Bill the question of what is in the interests of the consumer. The benefit appears not to be coming down to the consumer. In fact, a great deal of money is being made in other parts of the forest. The Times yesterday reported that
Digital 9 Infrastructure has bought 48% of Arqiva Group Ltd from the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, using £300 million in cash and a loan note. Clearly there is money to be made, but is any benefit flowing through to the consumer? If the site providers are being heavily reduced in income, that is clearly not going through to the consumer.
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As the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, said, Amendments 20, 22 and 23 would reverse the imposition of a “no scheme” valuation regime while retaining the Law Commission’s recommendation to stop ransom rents. Infinitely reasonably, the noble Earl has put forward an alternative in the form of Amendments 24 to 27, which are predicated on the “no scheme” valuation regime effectively remaining in place. We agree that this is not the best solution, but as he said, the changes serve to illustrate that a Government who really wanted to strike a balance between different interests could find a way of doing so. As he said, we need stability and certainty, and they are not there at present. It is certainly not facilitating speedy rollout, whatever the operators might say. I hope the Government will very carefully consider these very reasonable amendments.