Restricted vision
Broadband technology is vital for everyone, not least journalists, but the UK government’s Digital Britain proposals look only to big business to keep our networks up to speed and leave many questions unanswered, says GRANVILLE WILLIAMS
IT COULD never live up to the advance billing. The Digital Britain report, we were told, would be a vision of the future. Compiled by Lord Carter, the UK government’s top media thinker, it would draw up a blueprint for 21st century communications.
On publication day in June Gordon Brown himself had an article under his name in The Times, headed “The internet is as vital as water and gas”. The Prime Minister proclaimed: “I am determined that Britain’s digital infrastructure will be first class.” On the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) website Gordon Brown said: “This report shows how we will ensure we have a world-class digital and communications infrastructure.”
If anyone thought this might mean that Digital Britain would set out a comprehensive government-directed plan to ensure that the full benefits of broadband technology would be accessible to the whole population, they would have been disappointed.
The overall thrust of Digital Britain is about the digital economy and business. The report’s cover has the logos of both the BIS and the DCMS, the culture and media department, but it is clear that in the tensions between commercial interests and the social and cultural priorities which the report had to consider — such things as local and regional news, public service broadcast programmes and broadband access for those currently excluded — Lord Carter’s solutions place no burdens on business. The highly profitable commercial players in the burgeoning digital markets — the ISPs and cable, satellite and telecommunications companies — will all benefit from the expansion of broadband, but it is the public who, directly or indirectly, will pick up the tab.
The direct way they will pay is through the £6‑a‑year tax proposed for all fixed phone lines. Telecom company shares rose sharply after the plans to subsidise the deployment of broadband networks were revealed. One investment analyst commented: “The creation of a next generation fund to subsidise a UK fibre build-out ... is a long term positive for BT.” It now turns out that the levy might not even happen, with Labour taking fright at the likely consequence at the next election and ministers briefing in August that the plan will be kicked into the longest grass they can see.
All this was really little surprise coming from Stephen Carter, who was a high-flying advertising and City PR man parachuted in to become head of the media regulator Ofcom, which operates to a business-oriented agenda. From Ofcom he went to head PR firm Brunswick, for a reported £500,000 a year, before being taken on by Gordon Brown, first as a special PR advisor and then as communications minister — the “Digital Czar”, of course — to produce his report. Having got that little matter out of the way, he quit the government to go back to business.
The first job of Digital Britain was to ensure universal access to high-speed broadband, and even there it has disappointed. The report set a target of a minimum data rate of 2 megabytes per second to be “rolled out” by 2012 — not a very ambitious target, considering that it is available to 90 per cent of the population now. What we will have in large areas of the country is the present operators delivering slower broadband speeds through existing cable and aluminium cables, with mobile broadband filling the gaps.
There is a complete lack of vision in the report, with very little discussion about the benefits of what is really needed, a fully fibre optic network. The core philosophy is that broadband access will be delivered through a laissez faire market-led regime, whereas what we need are interventionist policies to develop a modern digital fibre optic infrastructure. The report states that the UK “will achieve wide-scale next generation coverage first through market-led investment, and to a smaller degree, through targeted intervention”.
The cost of connecting every home in the country directly to a fibre optic network has been estimated at £25 billion — considerably less than the government has injected into the banking system to very little tangible benefit.
Other countries are going much further: Australia has announced a £21 billion plan to provide fibre networks directly to 90 per cent of homes and businesses in the country over the next eight years, at an average cost of around £2,700 per home. South Korea is setting up communications networks offering speeds of up to 1 gigabyte a second — 500 times faster than will be available for much of Britain.
For journalists the most serious effects of the corporate values and market ideology at the centre of the report are in the proposals to use the BBC’s £130 million digital switchover funding and “top-slicing” money from the licence fee in the future to fund the public service output of commercial broadcasters.
There is another way. Earlier this year the NUJ and sister broadcasting union BECTU commissioned the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) to look at different ways to raise the funds, apart from top-slicing the BBC licence fee, to ensure public service programming is available on other channels.
The IPPR’s proposal is to levy the hefty profits of mobile phone firms and of broadcasters such as Sky and Virgin that have no obligation to provide public service content. This money would pay for children’s, arts and science programming as well as news and documentaries, on C4 or any other broadcaster who wanted to bid for it.
The report, entitled “Mind the Funding Gap: the potential of industry levies for continued funding of public service broadcasting”, found that a 1 per cent levy on Virgin Media and BSkyB revenues could raise an estimated £70 million per year for quality broadcasting. Another £210 million a year could be raised through a 1 per cent levy on mobile phone companies.
It is significant that it was the unions that sponsored this research and neither the government nor Ofcom, with its huge budgets and research programmes. Such levies on communications industry profits have been proposed before, only to be met with the official response that such things are out of the question. But then came Lord Carter’s own call for the levy on fixed phone lines. Perhaps the fact that it was to be imposed on consumers, rather than business, made it more palatable.
Now we hear that the government is trying to drop even that idea. It makes the fate of the policy proposals in Digital Britain even more uncertain, but it is deeply depressing that the government did endorse Lord Carter’s attempt to undermine the distinct role of the BBC licence fee. It will be an appalling consequence if the report’s expressed desire to protect public service content leads to the weakening of the one organisation that has unfailingly delivered it.
Granville Williams is an NUJ member and author of Media For All? The Challenge of Convergence, a policy paper that will be discussed at the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom’s Media for All Conference in London on October 31