SEARCH CLINIC

Chancellor George Osborne has confirmed in the budget yesterday that the 50p a month landline tax for next generation broadband will be scrapped.
Instead the government will leave the majority of super fast broadband roll out to private investment.

The Conservatives opposed the introduction of the broadband tax and it was dropped from the Finance Bill at the end of the last parliament.

Speaking about the decision to scrap the tax, he said: “I am happy to be able to abolish this new duty before it is even introduced. Instead, we will support private broadband investment, including to rural areas, in part with funding from the Digital Switchover under-spend within the TV Licence Fee.”

Labour had planned to create a rural broadband fund via the new tax which were supported by the Liberal Democrats but were heavily criticised by the Tories.

Despite the lack of new funding, the coalition government has said it is committed to providing broadband improvements.

In a speech at the beginning of June, culture secretary Jeremy Hunt said that it was his goal to provide Britain with the “best superfast broadband network in Europe”.

To achieve this, he is considering forcing water, gas and electricity companies to open up their ducts to allow fibre to be laid inside them. Experts estimate that a large chunk of the cost of offering fibre networks is associated with the expense of digging up roads to create the new ducts.

Last month, Ed Vaizey was appointed as the new broadband minister.

He will oversee the roll-out of next-generation broadband. He is also responsible for ensuring that all homes have a minimum speed of 2Mbps (megabits per second) by 2012, honouring a pledge made by the previous government.

Dr Search the principal consultant at the Search Clinic abhores the way labour wasted taxpayers money building up useless databases so yesterday’s leading article in the Independent-”Database of distrust” deserves a wider airing:
Wednesday, 16 June 2010
The vetting and barring scheme represented the worst instincts of Labour in office: the assumption of guilt, the love of bureaucracy, the obsession with databases, the reflexive statism. The labour government did scale back the scheme last year.

But the new Home Secretary, Theresa May, is right to go a step further and call a halt altogether.

No sensible person disputes that some form of vetting procedure is needed for those who are employed to work closely with children. Recent revelations of sickening abuse by paedophile priests remind us why there need to be special safeguards.

But Ms May is right when she argues that the previous administration’s vetting and barring scheme, even in scaled-back form, was wholly disproportionate.

It would have required virtually every adult who wanted to work with children, from full-time teachers to occasional volunteers at the local scout group, to register. It would have affected around nine million people.

There was every reason to believe that volunteers would have been put off by the bureaucracy involved. One does not have to be a fully paid-up subscriber to the Conservatives’ vision of “The Big Society” to grasp why this would have been undesirable.

Children would have been the ones to suffer under such circumstances.

The previous Government’s stubbornness in pushing through this unwieldy project was especially maddening because the existing screening methods for those working with children are adequate. Employees must already go through criminal record checks to work in schools. And there are official lists of individuals barred from working with children and vulnerable adults. There is a case for combining these procedures, which the review announced by Ms May yesterday should look into.

But it is important that there is room for some discretion in the system too. If the Independent Safeguarding Authority, which was established to oversee the vetting and barring scheme, is to survive it needs to avoid making snap judgements based on potentially malicious allegations or unsubstantiated pieces of gossip.

The core problem with the vetting and barring scheme was that it threatened to inject a hysterical level of distrust into all relations between adults and children. Now that the scheme itself has been halted, the Government’s task is to make sure that this counter-productive mentality goes too.

From:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-database-of-distrust-2001516.html

Say goodbye to your transistor radio – labour’s digital switchover is killing it off.

The controversial Digital Economy Act, passed as one of the current labour government’s very last pieces of legislation in the “wash-up” process before Parliament is dissolved next week, enacts a legal framework to end FM, AM and Long Wave radio transmissions – despite huge practical objections and warnings that pressing ahead may result in a “public backlash”.

For almost 90 years through wars, royal weddings and moon landings, British radio has relied on the traditional analogue signal to bring news, music and entertainment to millions of listeners.

But now the hiss and crackle of the analogue radio set are finally set to become a thing of the past, with a new law passed yesterday paving the way for digital radio switchover in 2015.

Recent statistics show that the vast majority – 94 per cent – of radio listeners are satisfied with the service they currently receive and that less than a third of radios sold in the UK are digital.

The influential House of Lords Communication Committee, chaired by Lord Fowler, has also warned of the consequences of a digital switchover for the millions of perfectly functional analogue radio sets in Britain. Up to 100million existing sets will effectively become useless, while radios in 30million cars will also need to be converted – at a cost of upwards of £55 a time.

Switchover has also been the subject of fierce opposition from some radio campaigners, including 14 operators of local commercial radio stations who have today written to The Daily Telegraph saying that their “ability to operate in the future is directly challenged by the digital radio switchover proposals” in the Act.

These small stations – from West Berkshire to the Shetland Islands – said that they face being excluded from the new digital service and therefore starved of listeners and advertising.

The House of Commons Culture Media and Sport Committee this week warned of a “digital divide” in radio, with coverage patchy at best in rural and remote areas.

The organisation leading the proposed switchover, Digital Radio UK, says that the benefits of digital radio include a greater choice of services, improved sound quality and new functionality such as being able to pause, record and rewind radio broadcasts. Switchover will also lower costs for radio broadcasters, who currently have to pay to transmit their services twice – once on FM, and once on digital.

Digital Radio UK says that the new law provides a framework for digital radio coverage across the country to be improved, and for car manufacturers to start fitting digital radios as standard. “Radio deserves a digital future and this legislation is the first key to unlocking that,” said Ford Ennals, its chief executive.

The target date of 2015 for switchover to digital radio was described by culture secretary Ben Bradshaw in the House of Commons this week as “an incentive not an ultimatum”, with the precise date remaining to be set by the incoming government after the general election. The switchover date will not be set until more than 50 per cent of radio listening is via digital means, and national digital radio coverage reaches a comparable level to the current FM signal.

Controversial elements of the Digital Economy Bill will face further scrutiny as the bill is passed, Commons Leader Harriet Harperson has said.

Part of the bill, which refers to how copyright holders can block access to websites hosting pirated content, will be subject to further consultation.

Several MPs called for the whole bill to be delayed until after the election.

Despite objections, the bill was given a second reading and will be rushed through its final stages today.

The Tories have said “big questions” have been left unanswered while the Lib Dems are seeking greater scrutiny of some aspects.

Closing the debate, Digital Britain Minister Stephen Timms said: “The choice we have is to act on unlawful downloading or not to act. That is the choice the House needs to make.

Ms Harman revealed to Parliament that one element, known as Clause 18, will be subject to “a super-affirmative procedure” – meaning the details of it will require further Parliamentary scrutiny.

Clause 18 was hastily rewritten by the government. It was intended to future-proof the law against new methods of accessing pirated materials.

It grants rights-holders the power to force service providers to block access to websites hosting pirated content.

The Liberal Democrats have called for a similar procedure to be applied to the issue of how public wi-fi will be affected by the bill.

Currently, if the bill passes into law, the owners of publicly-accessed wi-fi will be held responsible for content that is illegally downloaded by individuals using the hotspot.

Which would effectively shut down all public wifi access in the UK. Reducing the UK back to the dinosaurs.

The second reading of the bill was somewhat overshadowed by the earlier announcement of the general election and few MPs gathered in the Commons to hear Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw introduce it.

However, a heated debate followed with several MPs, including Labour MP Tom Watson, calling for the more controversial elements of the bill to be removed.

Shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt branded the bill a “digital disappointment of colossal proportions”.

For the Liberal Democrats, culture spokesman Don Foster condemned the government for allowing a “totally inappropriate” amount of time for debate on such a major piece of legislation.

The SNP’s Pete Wishart, a former member of Celtic rock group Runrig, told the Commons that internet file-sharing was not unlike a person walking into a record shop and taking whatever albums they liked – for free.

He said: “The cream of the UK’s creative industries want to ensure that we have this bill and these measures. Then we can continue to have the best creative industry and digital economy.”

But Mr Watson, a long-standing Labour opponent of the bill, urged the government to rethink rushing through the legislation.

“In the last seven days, 20,000 people have taken the time to e-mail their MPs. They are extremely upset that it won’t have proper scrutiny,” he said.

There has been mounting public opposition to the bill, particularly the plans to give Ofcom the power to cut off the internet connections of persistent pirates.