§ Sir Geoffrey Johnson Smithasked the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether he has yet reached a conclusion on the recommendation of the inquiry into cable expansion and broadcasting policy concerning the length of cable operators' franchises; and if he will make a statement.
§ Mr. WhitelawRecommendation 40 of the inquiry into cable expansion and broadcasting policy (Cmnd. 8679) proposed that cable operators' franchises should be for 10 years in the first instance and eight years thereafter. The inquiry did not consider the question of the licences for cable providers, however, since its terms of reference did not extend to telecommunications and technology issues. In the debate on cable systems on 2 December—[Vol. 33, c. 490]—my hon. Friend the Minister for Industry and Information Technology72W announced that the licence period for cable providers would depend on the technology that the licensee proposed to install: for tree-and-branch systems laid down in the star configuration the licence would run for 12 years, extendable to 20 years if switches were installed at a later date; a provider installing a fully switched star system from the outset would receive a licence for 20 years. Because of the desirability of keeping the termination dates of the cable operators' franchises and the cable providers' licences in line, I have decided that the franchise for a cable operator should run for 12 years in the first instance and eight years thereafter.