Britain’s mobile policy is disconnected from reality - and it’s costing us billions

Your phone says you have signal, but the map will not load, the call drops or you cannot check when your train is coming. Britain has a mobile connectivity problem - and new research suggests poor indoor mobile connectivity alone is costing the UK economy £100 billion every year.

Nearly a decade after reforms intended to improve our networks, it is increasingly clear that policy is part of the problem.

Our mobile network depends on thousands of pieces of equipment installed on other people’s land and buildings. Operators need somewhere to put their masts and antennas, while farmers, businesses, charities, churches and councils agree to host them.

Rules governing that relationship are known as the Electronic Communications Code.

In 2017, the Code was overhauled to reduce the cost of hosting mobile infrastructure and make it easier to roll out better networks. But the changes also dramatically reduced the rents many property owners receive and gave operators greater powers.

The result has been an increasingly adversarial relationship. More than 1,000 telecoms disputes have reached the courts since the reforms, compared with just 33 in the previous three decades.

And property owners are losing patience. A recent survey of more than 500 mobile site providers found that around a third are considering walking away from hosting mobile infrastructure altogether.

Why does that matter for your mobile signal?

If a property owner no longer wants equipment on their land or building, in some circumstances they can serve a Notice to Quit (NTQ). If that ultimately results in a mobile site being removed, the coverage it provided has to come from somewhere else. Finding a replacement can take years and, until then, local coverage can suffer.

New evidence from London shows just how costly that can become.

VodafoneThree estimates NTQs are costing London at least £2.7 billion in economic output every year. There are currently 86 sites off air, with another 31 due to be switched off by November. Across all networks, as many as 450,000 Londoners could be living in a “functional not-spot” - somewhere that appears connected on a coverage map but where the reality is very different.

That brings us back to the Code.

Rules designed to make mobile rollout easier have coincided with an extraordinary rise in disputes. Driving down the cost of individual sites may look like a success on paper, but cheaper sites are of little use if the result is damaged relationships and less willingness to host infrastructure.

Government needs to tackle both sides of the problem: make it quicker to replace infrastructure when a site genuinely has to go, while reforming the Code so that keeping existing sites becomes easier.

That means revisiting how property owners are paid and whether the balance of rights between the two sides is working. Ministers should also commence Section 70 of the Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Act. This would give site providers an independent route to raise complaints about operator conduct, while giving Ofcom a much clearer picture of the problems occurring across the market. Without that visibility, it is difficult to know whether the current system is working as intended.

This is not about choosing between operators and property owners. Britain needs both.

London should be a warning for the rest of the country. Better planning will help replace infrastructure when it needs to be replaced. But better connectivity also requires better cooperation. Nearly a decade after the Electronic Communications Code was overhauled, it is time to reform the rules accordingly.

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Lord Cromwell (Godfrey Bewicke-Copley) is a Crossbench member of the House of Lords with more than 30 years’ experience in business, agriculture and international development, alongside extensive experience in financial services and regulation.

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