Landowners Lobby UK Government for Higher Rents on 5G Mobile Masts

A group of land and property owners, including the British Property Federation (BPF) and National Farmers Union (NFU) among them, have written a new letter that calls on the UK government to suspend earlier reforms that made it easier and cheaper for mobile and broadband operators to deploy their infrastructure on private land.

Before 2017 it was frequently landowners that would extract highly lucrative rental agreements in return for allowing telecoms operators to deploy infrastructure on their land (e.g. mobile masts, trenches for optical fibre etc.). But this often made it too expensive for network operators to expand their coverage, and thus inhibited the roll-out of new services.

The previous government tried to correct this in 2017 by revising the Electronic Communications Code (ECC) to make it easier and cheaper for network operators to access public or private land (here). But that initially swung the problem in the other direction (here and here) and resulted in some providers, particularly mobile operators, trying to force the adoption of dramatically lower rents (sometimes slashing rents worth thousands to just a few tens of pounds).

Since then various tribunal rulings and wider political efforts have been made to find a fairer balance, which has had some modest success (e.g. here and here), although experiences do vary. Meanwhile, the new Government has previously signalled that they intend to make a “renewed push to fulfil the ambition of full gigabit and national 5G coverage by 2030,” which would at the very least require them to retain the current approach.

However, The Times (paywall) has today reported on how a group of major landowners has written to Lord Livermore, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, and demanded that he suspend the 2017 amendments. The letter highlights how the rules have “fractured the relationship” between landowners and mobile operators.

“Landowners are now increasingly unwilling to host infrastructure, and where there is no land available, rollout simply does not happen,” said the letter. “While well-intentioned, [the changes] are now actively discouraging land and property owners from hosting mobile infrastructure, slowing the pace of deployment and undermining Britain’s growth prospects“.

A Spokesman for the Government (DSIT) said:

“Our priority is to continue delivering high quality 5G networks across the UK, which is critical to boosting growth and improving public services for the British people.

We want to ensure the measures to deliver the infrastructure the country needs to grow work for both landowners, operators and communities, which is why they are currently subject to a technical consultation, which we invite the public to respond to.”

We suspect it’s no coincidence that this letter has been drafted at around the same time as the Mobile Infrastructure Forum (MIF), which represents the main providers of mobile infrastructure for EE, O2, Vodafone and Three UK (i.e. Cellnex UK, Cornerstone, MBNL and WIG), recently began calling on the government (here) to resolve the issue of 6,200 UK sites (masts etc.) that are “stuck in legislative limbo” and preventing 5G upgrades.

The 6,200 sites in question – representing 16% of the UK’s total – remain under a legacy legal framework governed by the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 (LTA 1954) and equivalent legislation in Northern Ireland. But mobile firms complain that this makes it difficult to deploy the latest 4G and 5G (mobile broadband) upgrades.

The LTA 1954 can potentially create challenges because it provides security of tenure to tenants, including those holding access agreements for telecoms equipment. In short, landlords may be reluctant to grant access or agree to upgrades without legal intervention (even if the landlord wants to do it, the process can be tricky), potentially delaying or obstructing the rollout of new mobile technologies. Not to mention the added costs involved.

Once again the government and Ofcom, which is responsible for implementing the ECC, face a difficult balancing act as they attempt to implement long-awaited changes to help make broadband and mobile infrastructure sharing, as well as network upgrades and related dispute resolution, easier to deliver (see our summary). But achieving that without further undermining or reducing the rights of existing or potential site providers (land/property owners etc.) could be difficult.