The Earl of Erroll (CB)

My Lords, I will say a few words, particularly in response to the comments of my noble friend Lord Cromwell about loading costs on to the landlords. The problem is that, if you are in the countryside, they want to charge a huge amount to get it to you. We have one or two cottages and, to get a fibre cable out to us, we were being quoted £15,000 at one point. We would be connecting about five properties at the end of it—rented properties and another house. The other complication is that, if one of them is a business, for example, there are different rules on what they are allowed to charge. A lot of this is in the original regulations telling BT and the other networks what they had to do, particularly when BT was trying to block other people having access to the houses. There are a lot of unfairnesses in the legislation, which Ofcom never dealt with properly. I am not sure where it has got to now, but there are lots of little wars going on. It can be very expensive: it is not just a matter of connecting something to a roadside, as it is in the city. If you are going to be running it half a mile or so, you will find that you can be loaded with enormous costs, and that they want five-year leases and so on. Sometimes, you can tell that the price will be slashed soon, because they suddenly make a big sales pitch, trying to get you to take on a five-year commitment to five grand a year; that is the best sign that they are about to roll it out in a couple of years’ time. So things are not quite as simple as they seem.