Land Owners in Scotland Criticise Bill to Boost Mobile and Broadband

The Scottish Land & Estates (SLE) group, which claims to be a “unified voice” for all those who own land and rural businesses in Scotland, has criticised the UK Government’s proposals for making it easier and cheaper to build new fixed line broadband and mobile infrastructure on their property.

The central UK Government is currently attempting to revise the existing Electronic Communications Code (ECC) through their new Digital Economy Bill 2016-17, but land owners in England and Wales have already expressed concern (here).

One of the key fears is that the effort to remove barriers for new infrastructure, which would help to roll-out new broadband and mobile communications into rural areas, could also result in land owners receiving significantly lower rental income than today and having less control over their own land. Now those living North of the border have joined in the fight.

Katy Dickson, SLE’s Senior Policy Officer, said:

“We firmly support improved digital connectivity. Our members are mainly based in rural areas and enhanced broadband and mobile signal would be a huge asset to rural communities allowing forms to be completed online, tourism businesses to be developed and create new opportunities for home working and business start-ups.

Sadly, we believe the Electronic Communications Code as currently drafted will have the opposite effect, discouraging farms, estates and other land-based businesses from engaging with telecoms companies and playing a vital role in improving telecoms infrastructure.

The draft code alters the valuation basis for telecoms sites meaning the telecoms companies will pay less money to station their equipment while giving them even more substantial rights of access, to sublet and share the equipment, and to assign the rights.

There is clearly a desire to reduce cost and time in securing mast sites but we believe that significantly altering the property rights of businesses – when the current system functions well – will lead to more and more contested cases ending up in court.”

Over the past few years we have seen some occasions when operators have struggled to gain access to the land they need because some land owners make it very difficult or far too expensive to access and install the necessary equipment, which ultimately benefits those residing in the local area. This is one of the reasons why mobile operators linked ECC reforms to a recent £5bn agreement for improving geographic mobile coverage (here).

Katy Dickson disagrees and claims to have seen “little evidence that landowners and farmers are holding telecoms companies to ransom,” although that’s perhaps partly because such issues aren’t usually recorded in public and tend to be handled privately between land owners and operators.

However the SLE notes that the new law could result in a rise in contested cases. “If a large number of cases are contested, existing digital networks may become fragmented and the roll-out process will become slow and expensive,” said Dickson (here). It should be noted that the new rules are only intended to apply to future and not existing agreements.

The Scottish Government also has a related consultation on relaxing planning regulations for digital infrastructure (here), which is due to close on 4th November 2016.