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Barbara Follett: I have spoken to businesses in my area about that. It is partly to do with the costs--although those businesses have invested in PCs--and partly to do with lack of training, but mainly to do with lack of confidence. People believe that if they put out on the net their signature, or something confidential, it can be read. In some cases, that fear is still well founded. People cannot be sure that their e-mails will be confidential.
The Bill goes a long way to restore that trust and confidence, so I welcome it. I know that, when it becomes law, people in the eastern region will feel better about giving credit card details. Worldwide transactions on the net are most often aborted when people are asked to key in their credit card number. Therefore, the net is being used much more as a marketing tool than as a purchasing tool. If we want to gain the maximum benefit from it, we must ensure that it is also used for buying and selling goods. That is such a challenge in the east of England that the development agency considers that its main task in the next few years is to encourage the spread of e-commerce.
As the Government will be doing 90 per cent. of their routine procurement on-line by 2000, businesses must take up the net. They must meet the challenge of that new technology. Furthermore, if we are going to face the future--the future in which we have set-top boxes and can access the net in ways other than by using PCs--we must ensure that people have confidence in that technology.
Mr. Tony Baldry (Banbury):
I start with two declarations of interest and two apologies. My first declaration of interest is the one in the Register of Members' Interests. I am chairman of a United Kingdom subsidiary of a Saudi Arabian company which owns one of the seven internet licences in Saudi Arabia. Other companies with which I am involved also have internet interests.
My second declaration is that I shall speak on behalf of the Select Committee on Trade and Industry. The Committee has 11 members, 10 of whom are in Sweden
at present. I am sure that they are doing very valuable parliamentary business there. I am the only member who appears not to be in Sweden, so it has fallen to me to speak in the debate on behalf of the Committee. For reasons that I shall explain, the Committee has done a fair amount of work on the Bill. I hope to share some of our--unanimous--thoughts with the House; during this Parliament, all our reports have been unanimous.
My first apology is that, in the Bill and the debate, there are many words that one just has to assume that everyone understands. Perhaps Hansard should include a glossary of terms such as escrow, encryption and T schemes. One must assume that everyone who takes part in the debate understands those terms, because it would otherwise be difficult to communicate.
My second apology is as follows. I discovered a little while ago, when things such as A to Zs and telephone directories became a blur, that I needed glasses. I have not yet cracked how to read and look at the Chamber simultaneously, and I have a choice: either hon. Members will be a blur or what I want to read will be a blur. I hope that hon. Members will not mind if I decide that it is preferable that they should be a blur and that I can read what I want to say.
The Select Committee has been considering e-commerce for more than a year. As I believe that we have all heard, proposals for the Bill have now been in two Queen's speeches. So for the first few months of 1999, the Select Committee was in a curious position: we began to take oral and written evidence, but the Government were unable or unwilling to produce a Green Paper or a White Paper, let alone a Bill. We had to respond to proposals of uncertain weight.
In March, a consultation document proposed, among other things, a statutory voluntary licensing scheme for cryptography service providers, a legal regime for electronic signatures centred on the introduction of a rebuttable presumption, the promotion of key escrow and key recovery technologies without making key escrow a criterion for licensing, and power for the law enforcement authorities to require keys or decoded texts under the equivalent of a warrant. The Select Committee on Trade and Industry considered the consultation document's proposals swiftly and reported in May. We recommended that there was a need to justify the rebuttable presumption regime, that powers to introduce a statutory scheme should come about only if a self-regulatory scheme was seen to fail, and that key escrow should be dropped altogether in favour of the proposed new power.
In June, the Select Committee reported on a range of e-commerce issues not in the legislative programme. In July, the Cabinet Office performance and innovation unit reported on a similar range of topics and, at the end of July, the Government published a Command Paper containing the reply to our report and the draft Bill. I am glad to say that the draft Bill adopted the Committee's recommendation that a statutory scheme should be introduced only when a voluntary scheme was seen to have failed, followed the Committee's lead and abandoned rebuttable presumption in favour of prevailing legal doctrines, and dropped key escrow promotion.
Earlier, it was said that the Government had listened to industry and business. I hope that, in taking evidence, the Select Committee also provided a way by which those concerned could make their views known to the House.
By producing a report, I hope that we were able to consolidate and harmonise those views. It is to the Government's credit that they took on board the unanimous report of the Select Committee.
The Select Committee does not hang about--indeed, we worked over the summer and produced a report based on the previous evidence. The Minister was once a member of the Committee, but he found the pace so fast that he asked the Whips whether he could be transferred to a job in government; he found it too difficult to keep up with us. The Committee considered the Department of Trade and Industry's response to written questions and the responses received by the Department about the draft Bill. It agreed a report on this draft Bill in late October. The report was published on 3 November and made several detailed recommendations.
It would be fair to say that the Select Committee welcomed the Bill. We welcome clause 13, which is in part III. It is a crucial new provision that responds to the Select Committee's recommendation that the Bill should explicitly exclude the use of key escrow as a criterion for accreditation under a statutory regime. Of course, more information is required on some subjects. In particular, information is required on the timetable for the commencement of parts I and II, on a draft of theT scheme and on its start date, which will be independent of the Act, and on the level of fees. Doubtless, such issues will be dealt with in Committee.
Some measures have been added to the draft Bill that require explicit justification. They include the clause 8(3) change to relax the criteria for record keeping of electronic storage or communication, and the clause 9(6) rider, which expands the scope of orders made under clause 8. Part III, which was formerly part IV, on telecommunications licence modifications, is not only an ever more evident add-on, but raises fresh unease because it will give added powers to the director to decide what constitutes a significant minority for objections. There has been no sign of movement on the process for changes deemed regulatory, but it is balanced by an attempt to clarify grounds for appeal.
I suspect that the members of the Select Committee and of the Standing Committee will want to ask specific questions. It would unfair to detain the House on those points now, because they are matters for Committee. However, it will be good if the Government can keep the House and industry abreast of the implementation dates for various provisions in the Bill. They are not always self-evident from the Bill and people will want to know when the different provisions will apply.
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