My Lords, in his opening remarks, the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Kamall, said that some of us might not welcome him here. I am sure that that is not correct; I am sure that we all welcome him and his colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Harlech. I certainly do.
First, I apologise to the House for not participating in the earlier stages of the Bill due to circumstances elsewhere—but I have read and watched them. Secondly, I should declare that I am an unpaid director of a small farming company that has a single telecoms mast on its premises. Normally, I would not speak on a subject when I have an interest even as modest as this, and I know that a number of other noble Lords have not participated and remained silent for the same reason. However, having seen how one-sided and damaging this part of the Bill is in so many ways, including to the Government’s own objectives for rollout, and having seen how resistant the Government have apparently been to efforts to address its faults, I feel that I must speak out critically but constructively. I support all the amendments in this group but, to my mind, Amendments 20 and 21, which would leave out Clauses 61 and 62, are the starting point, with the other amendments seeking to achieve damage limitation.
There are two parties to any agreement on a site: the site owners and those who seek to occupy and operate them. Not only is this Bill crudely unjust in its valuation basis but it is already creating a breakdown of trust and co-operation between the parties. It will create and intensify conflict between them, leading to a delay in rollout—the direct opposite of what the Government intend. We, therefore, need to find a better middle ground between these two parties.
As has already been mentioned, Clauses 61and 62 would have land valued as if it were not to be used for a mast site. This is as bizarre as anything in a Gogol short story. Who would, for example, value a building plot, knowing that it is imminently going to be built on, on the basis that it would never be built on? I am sure that HMRC would never countenance that approach for tax purposes.
Amendments 20 and 21 reflect the need to remove these counterproductive and illogical clauses—but how did we get here? We need to be fair about this: previously, some owners, due to the rules of supply and demand, had a bargaining position that may have enabled rents that are higher than they would otherwise have accepted.
In seeking to accelerate rollout, the Government have decided to rebalance things—so far so good. However, this Bill would swing the pendulum to completely the opposite extreme. It would strip the site owners of their legally long-established property rights—something I find astonishing from a Conservative Government—and deny small enterprises, sports clubs, hospitals and others of a vital source of income. This was raised by Labour at an earlier Bill stage, and I was astonished when the then Minister—so rightly admired in other respects, as many have said—pretty glibly told them in his reply that they should simply seek other sources of income.
These clauses will take a situation where sites were coming forward voluntarily and replace it with one of zero trust—in either the operating companies or the Government—whereby both potential and actual site owners will seek to avoid, and indeed resist, providing sites for this use. It will enable the operating and mast companies to pay peppercorn rents and thereby enrich themselves and their shareholders—with no evidence of trickle down, or even dribble down, to consumers.
When I see all this, combined with powers elsewhere in the Bill for operators to reclaim rents retrospectively from site owners—tearing up existing contracts freely agreed and entered into by professional commercial companies and site owners—I can only gasp in disbelief. So I have been asking myself how on earth we got into this situation and what could explain it. I have been urged by some of my colleagues to be temperate in my remarks, so I will not indulge in conspiracy theories, but we need to focus on encouraging sites to come forward to achieve faster rollout—something which I think we are all agreed on.
Let me therefore offer a valuation solution that is indeed in the middle ground between the past and the extortionate future foreseen in this Bill. There is a tried and tested middle ground that uses a practical and already widely accepted approach used to set rents and values for other commercial sites. I ask the House’s indulgence in describing this very briefly and simply with an illustration from another commercial activity: mineral quarrying. Where a quarry operator wants to lease land to set up a processing plant, there is a well-established valuation method whereby the database of local industrial rents is assessed and a percentage of that rent—say 70%—is paid to the site owner. There are clear advantages here. First, land agents and valuers on both sides are well accustomed to such discussions, which can therefore be swift. In the very unlikely event that they do not reach agreement, binding expert determination is available as standard. Secondly, it is based on a well-established dataset that reflects regional differences and will adjust over time to reflect the regional economic context. Thirdly, there are suitably qualified practitioners on hand across the country to carry it out.
Crucially, this would produce a balanced result and would get there using a transparent, objective and logical method. To be clear, the resulting rents would be set below what some site owners currently receive, but not as counterproductively or extortionately low as the unjust free hand that the Bill, as currently drafted, would give commercial operators. I therefore urge the Minister and the Government to think again.
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I appreciate that lobbyists working for the operator companies have been telling the Minister that all is lovely in the garden and urging him to press ahead with the Bill as drafted. One could not expect anything else from them when we reflect on what the operators would gain, but they are offering a wholly unbalanced view. It is not too late for the Government to stand back, reflect and seek a middle ground. It can easily be achieved and would, by enabling swift and more equitable outcomes, address far more effectively the Bill’s important objective of encouraging sites to come forward and be negotiated by willing parties within a sensible framework. Failure to grasp this and bulldozing ahead, egged on vociferously by operators seeking enhanced profits for themselves, will achieve precisely the opposite.
Clauses 61 and 62 amount to legalising a land grab by large commercial companies, stripping site owners of both their rights and incomes. This is already devastating trust and co-operation, and these clauses will clog up rather than free up the much-desired rollout. I therefore support these amendments.