 Well, good morning everyone. Can I welcome you to the 13th meeting in 2014 of the Infrastructure and Capital Investment Committee? Can I remind everyone to switch off their mobile devices as they do affect the broadcasting system? Can I welcome today Gil Paterson, who is substituting for Jim Eade. Agenda item one is EU digital agenda, and today I'm pleased to welcome Mr Robert Maddlin, director general of DG Connect at the EU commission. Mr Maddlin has a very busy schedule during his visit to Scotland, so where do you light it is made time to come to speak to the committee this morning on European and Scottish digital matters. We anticipate this being an interesting session in light of the wide range of developments currently taking place in Scotland in relation to digital connectivity. In advance of this session the committee sought submissions from stakeholders on the types of questions that they would like addressed today, so we're grateful to the stakeholders who put forward questions for consideration and we have drawn on some of these questions into our approach on evidence taking today. Can I also welcome Jamie McGregor to the meeting from the European and External Affairs Committee? Mr Maddlin, can I invite you to make some opening remarks? Thank you very much Chairman, and may I say that for me it's perfect that not only that I can meet the committee but that it's been prepared in the way you describe because the purpose of somebody like me wandering around Europe is to get away from the ivory tower in Brussels but to find out what's going on and what we're missing at the European level, so I'm very pleased to have the committee's time. To be brief, the digital agenda for Europe was launched in the first year of the Barozo II College and that college is now at the end of its five-year mandate, hopefully on the 1st of November, the new team will be in place. This is therefore a moment when we look at what has happened, what has surprised us and what are we missing. So what is happening in the area of most concern to this committee around infrastructure is that connectivity is improving across Europe. What we are missing I think is a sense that the speed of infrastructure rollout in almost all the member states be fast enough to meet growing business and societal needs. So on the one hand we're getting there rather slowly and on the other the question emerges is there now a measurable gap between where any society, any community in Europe needs to be to attract new investment to build jobs and the strong society and where we are and I think that in this area of electronic infrastructure as everywhere else Europe not uniquely in the world is underweight in infrastructure spending. If you compare this to the golden age of rail when people were investing in the late 19th century a lot of the riches of Britain in railways some of which only survived 20 or 30 years some of which were vanity projects you could argue with a very treasury look that then money was being wasted but actually the infrastructure was there and if you're growing a garden you want to allow things to grow a bit and then you prune them back and that's what we were doing in those days. If you come forward to today I would argue that we are billions short of the rate of investment we need that doesn't necessarily mean the taxpayers money should be used to bridge the gap although that's the model being followed in some other places like South Korea and Australia but we need to be very conscious that there is a gap. Then the question arises should we wait until the need is demonstrated or should we build it so that they may come and I think that there is a sort of economic strategy challenge there. One choice is let's build it and see what grows around 100 megabit connectivity rather like a motorway and another is more cautious to leave it to the market. The difficulty with the market in this field as we all know is that we have a market which is not competitive electronic communications is a rootedly uncompetitive market that's why we have organisations like Ofcom across Europe why we have ex ante and not ex post competition rules and so it's very hard to generate market led investment at sufficient levels in a market which is not fully contestable. So I think that on the infrastructure side we can say that we have more to do. If I look more broadly which would be my second big message I think that when I took this job in 2010 and we launched the strategy a lot of people around Europe said yes we know digital is nice to have but isn't it interesting that it's coming first among the strategic initiatives of this college. People were a bit surprised and I think in the subsequent years whether it's the OECD, McKinsey, the Boston Consulting Group the idea that digital is crucial to the survival of any society has gone completely mainstream. I really think that there's been a shift in the recognition that digital is everywhere and we need to have it in our mindset whatever our core business is. But even there I think we can highlight some lacuna which we need to work on. One is skills, digital literacy whether it's for retired or older people or for the under tens is still inadequate, coding clubs, putting, programming as a core part of the curriculum, having a very clear map of where business needs are not met by our education system that's one problem. A second is getting SMEs IT ready which doesn't mean buying them a new computer because most SMEs need to change their business model and then they can sell to more new markets better and that can work right down to the micro enterprise. We've had some very interesting experiments for example in rural Connemara where a few hundred euros here and there for people to understand how they're literally cottage enterprise can get online, transforms their prospects and the third area I think which is more on the individual consumer and citizen angle is that neither e-government nor e-commerce are growing as a proportion of the way we live our lives as fast as we think they could or as fast as we see they are growing in countries where the infrastructure is stronger, the skills are there and the self confidence is higher like for example Norway. So I think that going forward my sense is that the next college of commissioners we will need not just to have a strong digital commissioner in Brussels but to have a digital college, a digital I hope president of the college of commissioners so that in every area the digital aspects of the transformation we need whether it's education or infrastructure or business strategy will come first so that in 2015 we will level up rather fast some of the areas of policy that have been lagging in the last four five years and hope to do better and I think everything I've said is directly relevant to Scotland which as a country in some areas such as e-health is a European leader I mean literally not just being ahead but helping to coordinate work in places like the ICT team in the University of Edinburgh is again I think a global as well as a European beacon and I think that therefore most of what I've said is directly relevant to Scotland and my sense is that many of the policies being rolled out in the country are pretty much in line with what I'm saying so I don't have a sense of coming to teach anybody anything but seen from where we are at the European level I think those are the strengths and weaknesses we've discovered in the last three four years journey very much Alex would you like to start off the question yes you made it clear in your opening remarks that you're here to listen you're here to gain the experience of people in Scotland but would it be possible for you to give us very briefly the key priorities on your side for the development of the digital agenda so so the first priority and I'm not saying it because I'm before this committee is the infrastructure conundrum we have in the last three four years got to 96 97% coverage for basic broadband which means you know achingly slow connectivity and we have put out a model where satellite can fill the gaps the next step which is 30 megabits per second is extremely complex both from an investment and from a technological point of view and there are well understood controversies including in Scotland whether the copper infrastructure will allow you to get to 30 megabits per second if the distance from the cabinet to the home is more than three quarters of a mile so that area is really difficult and the political will has been tested in the budgetary debate last year where we proposed a seven billion euro novel financing instrument to help member states and regions plug the gaps and we got zero we haven't given up we've put 150 million of our if you like of our own independent research money on that from a different heading to try with some pilot projects to show that it is an area worth funding not necessarily out of the EU budget so that is a remaining major theme at the other extreme I think the whole digital citizen and skills agenda is the other major theme if the people get it then the politics at local level will also change in favour of the sorts of infrastructure and IT transformation we need so if I had to just give two pillars those would be the pillars getting it right for people and getting the infrastructure right these are two issues we've discussed before on this committee but how do you feel Scotland is measuring up against these priorities so on the infrastructure side my sense is that the the BD UK the Highlands and Islands schemes are pushing in the right direction I think that the the answer in every town depends on the length of the copper wire how old it is and how many people want to use it and therefore there's a degree of deep knowledge which is needed which is probably not available to public authorities anywhere in Europe in a perfect way and I don't even know that the incumbents have done their homework in that degree of detail but I think that the the big challenge especially in a country with some very sparsely populated as well as some very densely populated areas is to get a detailed enough map to make public policy choices about exactly where the money should go but if I look across the the structural funds programming agreements for the UK which are now under discussion and I look at what's being funded under Scottish and UK schemes it's all pushing in the right direction but the people I've met in previous visits and also in Brussels from from the west of Scotland say yeah but every time we're due to come last and then people go back to the beginning and start a new piece of technology so we're still lagging on the other hand there are examples of bottom-up community schemes on some of the islands where the existence of some high-speed public access fibre has enabled individual villages to connect themselves at 100 megabits per second at very low cost for households so there are different models out there I think in that sense you could say Scotland is a laboratory it sort of leads me to the final question I was going to ask in that is do you think we in Scotland through the mechanisms available to us including the actions of government are doing the right things to support the right progress or are there areas where we could do more in my in my previous job I was dealing with health and it struck me there that Scotland was in a way just the right size to have very strong community routes for a very vibrant policy people understood what was going on in the e-health field I think you can see that strength coming through in in IT on on e-communications infrastructure I don't know but I don't see a signal that says the incumbent providers and the IT teams in the Scottish government are working on the the rural end as hard as you are working on some of the lighthouse projects around for example Glasgow and Edinburgh so I would say that as often in public policy the picture is one of light and shade but if there was a piece that I felt probably a country like Scotland needed to look at carefully it would be the rural connectivity because as even the Financial Times was saying this morning proximity to big cities is still very important so Scotland has big cities the second highest growing wealth rates on this chart I saw this morning in the UK after London was Edinburgh but there's there's a need to use the new infrastructure to ensure that distance becomes a zero handicap in the future which it can and not a heavy handicap as it used to be digital infrastructure should be seen as a utility like water and energy provision yes it's clear to me that that that communications infrastructure is a public good then you whether you run it as a utility owned by the state financed by the taxpayer and open to all or you find some other mixed economy solution for provision that's a different question and the treaty of Rome and every treaty since has always said we leave that to people outside Brussels to choose but it's definitely a utility and it is a crucial public good for the survival of our societies in the future thinking in terms of new housing developments are new well it's almost always does go into new industrial developments but doesn't always go in and in terms of new housing development no precisely so on that we have legislated in the life of this college at European level so it's it's being rolled out in the year ahead we just finished before Christmas in the the reducing the costs of civil expenditure civil's infrastructure within the overall broadband cost structure because typically 80% of the cost of putting a kilometer of fibre in the ground is digging holes getting access to ducts and so on so what we've agreed among all the member states is to require mapping of where the ducts are and to require that new builds are by default open to high tech infrastructure including some fibre cable it's still not self-evident if I go back to Norway because I was visiting there recently as well even in a country as well managed as Norway every province has a different rule about how deep you have to bury the cable so you can't calibrate your digging machine the same way and run it from the south to the north and I guess that similar narrow differences but in areas like how wide is the road where do you put the ducts are handicaps also in Scotland so I think there are there are problems but I think that increasingly you get it acknowledged that houses will sell better will be more attractive if they have good connectivity and may may be up to 20% lower in value if they don't have good connectivity for for e-infrastructure. Thanks and Gil Unix. Yeah thanks a lot. Good morning. I wonder if you could tell us how you think Scotland's comparing against of performing against other European countries. So I think if you look at the you can look right down at the at the sort of county or regional level within Scotland and on still on the broadband infrastructure the the the coverage goes from 90 to 0% so so you you can see if you I mean everybody has a telephone but if you go above if you look towards 10 20 30 megabits there are still parts mainly of the Highlands and Islands where nobody gets that speed and that may not be true for some lease lines for business and it may not be true for some hospitals or schools but in in general and then if you look at the if you look at Dundee Perth Glasgow Aberdeen Edinburgh it's fine so I think that that you have to look at that granular level the average of a series of experiences between 0 and 90 doesn't tell you very much and I think overall you can say you know Scotland as an average even the UK as an average it's it's it's more or less in the middle it's not Romania and it's not Norway but there are bits of Scotland which are like Romania and bits that are like Norway and that's the important point I think the the range of experience is the biggest it can be and the kind of general picture are we catching up or are we slowing up is there something you could talk to tell us about that so you know civil servants are forever failing to give the clear answer that the political decision makers need to questions like that there are things which you are doing in Scotland which are absolutely the best in class trying out affordable high-speed infrastructure in every flat in a high-rise block in a poor part of Glasgow or Edinburgh that's that's huge in what you can learn about how to get disadvantaged people connected to real opportunity at the other extreme if you can't get even a sort of dial-up functional access to the BBC website when you're staying at a hotel somewhere in the northwest that's a drag on the market people will say that makes it a very quaint place to go but you know certain categories of people will find that a problem so I think that the good the good stuff is the best in class and the rural connectivity it's a challenge for every part of Europe with rural problems if you look at the countries with even a higher proportion of sparsely populated territory than Scotland so the Nordic neighbours the only way they fix that is by putting more public money into it at a municipal as well as at national level thanks for that can you can have a kind connecting Europe be used to support the digital agenda in Scotland so the connecting Europe facility was the was in two parts this was a budgetary proposal that we made in the in the last multi-annual financial round in Brussels and we proposed firstly six seven billion for the infrastructure rollout and as I said the answer to that was near to zero we proposed a second thread which is about collective e-government public service infrastructure what we call DSI digital service infrastructure and there we got pretty much what we wanted which is three billion not to provide e-government across the whole of Europe but to provide a common hub common hosting and a common toolbox so that people can at lowest possible cost offer e-procurement e-identity e-health services across borders but then because you're doing it together across borders you end up doing it with the best practice from around Europe being shared more quickly so on that side the digital agenda for Europe is being served by a part of the the expenditure that's that's new in the this EU budget compared to any previous planning okay thanks very much for that okay Gordon okay thank you much convener um i want to continue discussing this situation regarding funding in the broadband infrastructure and the Carnegie Trust produced a report last year going the last mile how can broadband reach the final 10 percent and the author stated in that that it must be recognised that supplying the final 10 percent with nga services on an equivalent level to those available in urban areas will cost several billion pounds and this cost is unlikely to be met through normal market forces assuming that a straightforward grant funded mechanism is unaffordable for most states what solutions are emerging to finance the provisions of digital infrastructure connections to the most remote areas of europe so if i start with technology 4g mobile is going to get you there faster than tweaking the copper 4g rollout is starting rather slowly in the UK as a whole largely because of spectrum allocation we're assured it's going to catch up so that would be one way whereby you can begin to build solutions the the second is to concentrate the public money not on the last mile but on the backbone so that you get access backbone into the local community and then you allow the local community to do it themselves in terms of digging out from the backbone and either through radio or through other solutions building their own local network the difficulty on that is that the the commercial backbone is not generally made available so this is a commercial choice to these sorts of um collectivist approaches but when they're properly done these collectivist approaches are extraordinarily cost effective and they work and it's good community building and there are these great examples around the isle of mull for example i was mentioning the tegla system so i think that the if you can't simply throw taxpayers money at the whole solution part of it is pushing faster deployment of the newest technologies and part of it may be going into the backbone level and making sure that there's there's a point of contact relevant relatively close to each community so that the community themselves can begin to decide whether this is the priority or replacing the school bus or whatever but are there any lessons that Scotland could learn from the likes of Iceland, Norway or Sweden who all have higher uptake of internet users than Scotland but have lower population densities so they're very rich countries they have quite a strong municipal budget layer and they they haven't done what South Korea or Australia have done they haven't put up satellites or paid for all the fibre themselves at a taxpayer level but they are they have deeper pockets than anybody around here i fear as public authorities the the other aspect which i think is very striking in a place like Sweden is that the the offer has been very attractive to consumers music streaming has been a huge success in Sweden most royalties that music copyright owners make in Sweden from us listening to their music are now made from streaming services rather than from us downloading from iTunes or buying CDs or anything like that and i think that bundling together of content services with phone subscriptions is something which hasn't quite taken off yet in other markets now why does something sell better in one market than another first it's very hard to judge but what the Swedish regulator always says to me is part of this Robert is he gets dark in Sweden earlier than it does in Brussels and so some of the features that drive the Swedish model might work in Scotland as well just one point relating to you were saying that Richard the Royal Society of Edinburgh produced a report spreading the benefits of digital participation just published in april there and it actually suggests that GDP per capita for Iceland, Sweden and Scotland are exactly the same at $41,000 per GDP per head so i don't think that should be a factor however that my final question is is there any methods of european funding available to assist in the provision of broadband infrastructure and hard to reach rural and island areas such as laws in Scotland so in passing just to note on your GDP per capita figure it may be that household incomes if you look at relative household incomes maybe it's not the same figure so so you you have to net out the the mineral resources wealth if you look at what can europe do personally you know i'm sad we didn't get the the new line specifically for broadband but despite not having that one of the operational objectives under the structural funds is around ict and i think that the the the programming discussions now going on covering scotland would include some ict in the bid from uh from from scotland and from london in terms of what you want to spend the money on as you know this is a kind of awkward negotiation where the the country makes the bid but my colleagues in the commission get to complain about it and i think it's it's a matter of public record that commissioner han who's the guy in charge doesn't much want to spend the structural funds on infrastructure he wants to spend them on skills or other stuff we've not supported that line but you don't win all the inter ministerial fights even in brusles and so it's not clear as of today where that negotiation will come out which means there's everything to play for and i'm sure that your colleagues in the scottish team on ronpoir shuman are fighting that battle quite hard thank you very much janey you want to come in on this well there are a couple of things thanks very much yes i represent highlands and islands i'm in msp for highlands and islands region which of course goes from the south end of kintire to the most northerly shetland island and um so it's over half the landmass of scotland with only about half a million people uh and very scattered population now and we are facing in some areas very significant population decreases which are very worrying and i'm in fact going to a summit on friday about population decrease in argyll which is one particular area now i happen to live myself in what you described as the the romanian areas one of the romanian areas of of argyll and i know how desperate it is um you know if you're trying to get broadband out or to to run any business too i mean especially a tourism business where you have to get back to people straight away so i suppose my question too is um the first one is i mean you may have covered this is how can the EU help get gulab or broadband to the most remote rural communities who still face a weight of years uh you know even if to to get it i mean what can they you know is there anything that can be done for these people uh in order to sort of stop this depopulation which is i'm sure is related to this and the other question is um what's your view on rural constituents having to pay significantly more for satellite for satellite broadband services uh than the rest of the population if i start with the second question because that's news to me i mean i guess that's a commercial uh decision uh it will charge you more to send the man to screw the satellite dish onto your house that i could understand a bit but i think the refusal to supply is is a real problem even for sort of parcel post type deliveries in in your constituency because i have friends who live there and and it's not clear to me that it should be okay to refuse to supply within a territory after all if it's a community you should supply if if there is also a difference being imposed on consumers because they have no choice so somebody providing satellite is charging a higher subscription just because they know they're not competing against a a a a bt package i would say that's probably something for the competition authorities i mean that's a that's again a political matter because the the consumer is vulnerable and the the vulnerability is being exploited but i don't know the facts in order to judge whether it's one or the other or both but it seems to me clear that for satellite services like everything else there should be a fair price and i think one of the issues the list i gave of things we haven't fixed was was short one of the issues i think we haven't yet focused on sufficiently is the the specific characteristics of the digital consumer problem in all its areas because being a consumer in the digital age is is difficult in different ways than being a consumer in the bricks and mortar age and the consumer policy consumer protection models that we tend to apply are still very bricks and mortar so i think your satellite case is is an interesting case study so i mean i'd be interested to look a bit more at that on on your first point i i think i have not so much to add i i i i would really hesitate because i've never been responsible for territorial connectivity to say yes the answer is this but i think that what would probably be a a fruitful road of inquiry and and we would be happy to try to put people together would be to see it at the local level between the northern bits of Norway or Sweden for example and and your constituency how did they manage it didn't all come down miraculously from Stockholm at Oslo a lot of it comes from the the political but also practical actions in the middle levels and it may well be that making the case much more strongly for some very specific rollout put a piece of fibre from here to here and then in return we will be doing this would unlock financing decisions which when you're looking at the overall large numbers you tend to put immediately in the too difficult category so it may be that there are there are lessons to learn between the successes and problems of different rural communities in scotland and in neighbouring countries can i just one more just i i sit on the european in external affairs committee and a while ago we did um um look into the you know we had a thing on horizon 2020 and in that um i noticed that the you mentioned commissioner harm not being very keen on spending money on communications um actually you know having looked at it it did appear that the the budget for communications had been cut has it actually been cut in terms of and how if so by how much so horizon 2020 if other members of the committee are not are not detail are not looking in detail at this is the new framework program for research and innovation um and i in my department i'm responsible for spending the the ict chunk of research money and the the trend is still relentlessly upwards it's one of the success stories i think of the european budget decisions last year that at a time of austerity and cuts research grew so overall research grew and within that growth ict does continue to grow 2014 is a lean year there's a little dip which is traditional in the budgetary cycle that uh we tend over seven years to start low and build up so 2013 was the highest year of the last framework program and we start a little bit lower but the long term trend is is still up and crudely that means we're spending um a good way north of a billion euros a year in part funding of projects therefore that are worth more or less two billion a year across europe uh and i think that the uh within that our spending on the next generation so 5g connectivity the internet of things remains a big theme for us uh we think that the uh the way in which uh e connectivity will affect not just communities but the factors of the future the design uh value chains of the future this requires a lot of work but we can win in these areas europe still has some really world class uh strengths i've already mentioned the university of edinburgh but there's dundee in gaming and others around uh the neighboring countries in areas around semiconductor chips and so on so so there are real strengths there so i would say that we didn't get everything we asked for uh we were hoping for uh well our dream including the sef would have been more like 16 billion and we got about 12 so we got less than we asked for but more than we've been spending in the past did you want to come in on this the subject competition uh was raised there briefly and i wonder if there was anything uh that needed to be said on that subject now the recently only recently discovered that bt in their provision of broadband have a dual price in policy in which they have one price for areas in which they are the monopoly infrastructure provider and a different price in structure in areas where there is a competitive infrastructure in place is that kind of practice a positive or a negative when it comes to the development of the infrastructure and services so so i think that uh the the first thought that goes through my head is that in some in some areas you have uh local scrutiny from the competition experts and i'm not sure that offcom has a a strong presence north of the border and maybe there's a problem there because this sort of granularity is probably invisible from where they are sitting on the river Thames and i think that overall they would take the view and my competition colleagues would take the view that it's a market so if you think you can sell for more in in town than in the country or vice versa you can do it up to a point and the question is whether you whether the point is passed in competition terms that means are you abusing a dominant position and if you are then that that would be a problem so i would say not as a competition expert but instinctively that if if the situation is indeed as clear as you were to describe it then a competition authority should be taking an interest in that but i think at the other extreme we've learned in the past that price fixing by bureaucrats is probably also not a efficient way of getting services to customers so this is a a colossally difficult area we are asking ourselves the question i think not just in in my bit of the commission but more generally whether the new technologies so beyond just connection services but also the sort of the google story are creating new forms of distortion of consumer and b2b competition that need new sorts of attention and this is a very hot political debate among competition authorities at the moment my competition opposite number made a speech recently saying basically the way we tackled the microsoft browser monopoly and now the google search monopoly show that the the fundamental structure of competition law is fit for purpose i am still thinking about wether that's entirely true or not i don't think you need to change the fundamental concepts of dominance abuse of dominance but for example at the moment we take current market share which means last year's market share as the indicator for dominance if the market share is growing like this they may become dominant before you notice and so you need slightly more agile techniques to say the least and as your example shows you need also to dig deeper to have a definition of the market which is small enough to capture the practices of companies i was going to ask about you'd mentioned the 2020 horizon project and your support for the connectivity element of that um could you perhaps expand a little on what's being done to support innovation and emergent technologies which could complement broadband coverage you hinted at 4g as being a particular benefit in terms of enhancing mobile internet access although i have to say i have a constituency not in the highlands and islands which has quite a number of not spots in it in terms of mobile phone coverage so um is there anything by way of support from europe to deal with these particular issues so um one of the areas which all member states and the united kingdom is no exception want to keep very subsidiary very much in national hands is spectrum management and it is one of the tragedies of the commons i think in in europe that as a result we have extremely diverse and slow management and deployment of spectrum spectrum is a limited resource and the needs for it are changing at the moment we have vast over monopolisation of spectrum compared to need by the the public services including the armed services in all member states so there's a sort of lagging inefficiency there and we also probably have extra costs across europe because the the the three and four g spectrum allocation is in different places in different countries which led for example the the the iphone five i think to be to be sold everywhere else but not in europe for six or twelve months because they couldn't be bothered to put enough antenna in the machine to make it work in europe so if i start from the spectrum management place i believe we could do a lot to enable more rapid deployment of the best available technologies for mobile if we had us the courage to manage this extremely delicate resource together there's a proposal on the table in the parliament and council as we speak to to push in that direction the resistance is predictably huge and we'll see where we get to after the european elections but i think that's one of the very rare cases where we haven't yet got to an efficient balance in terms of managing a a borderless resource in a coordinated way secondly i think the the next technologies so five g we have to win a game where we won one we won one round the current technologies the specifications in the phones we use today were built in europe and every time we buy a phone royalties trickle back to european coffers four g not the same that was more or less invented elsewhere by an essentially asian coalition five g we want to win nobody knows what five g is five g means the next more efficient mobile transmission technology and we're putting a lot of money into that we have a strategic partnership between public and private research institutions and companies and i i think well let's see everybody's trying to find that next best thing the the other way to go is to say maybe the answer is radically different we won't have mobile telephone connection or fixed lines we'll have small cell wi-fi type solutions which would enable a different configuration and different cost structures which might mean that it costs less to put high speed in a village in a sparsely populated area it might this requires experimentation across the water in ireland in the republic they are saying come to us we have sparsely populated areas we can be a living lab for the deployment of new approaches if as i hear there may be some sparsely populated areas in scotland scotland could be also a living lamp for some of these approaches so those are just of three ideas and is there any european support for for the living lab proposals yes we have i mean we we we will have as part of our spectrum use research so here i'm talking about horizon 2020 not about regulation of current spectrum we will have within the partnership opportunities for people to to well we do it by call so you you respond to a call by saying here we have a coalition of people researching in 5g people who are able to build an experimental something across a vast empty tract of hill country and islands and we think this is an efficient way to advance the research i personally believe that if we look at you look at the the the different ways people talk about research in ict it's not about it's not so much about just pieces of metal anymore we do have at the top end a lot of research on the next generations of chips where not the not the sort of big production chips but the more specialized stuff we think european win there we have around the 5g technologies and research but then downstream a lot more attention i think will be paid in research and innovation to how can the internet of things be configured and made to work it's not all about your fridge talking to the supermarket it may be more complicated what is a really smart community whether it's a village or a city what what does what does e-health really mean in a situation and so i think the the the need to have embedded research to do research with real people in real places is a very strong thread in in the new approach we're now trying to roll out which means the authorities that in a way own the territory become the missing partner in the research landscape and concretely in the europe in the european innovation partnership on active and healthy aging where health scotland and research institutes in scotland are a leading actor that was the the the breakthrough in the last three years to bring the regional health authorities and hospital managers into the picture so that we weren't inventing things in laboratories without any attention to whether it would work in real life and the same will be true i think for mobile connectivity fascinating stuff but can i perhaps change tack a little and ask given the significant financial contribution by the scottish and uk governments do the state aid rules have any consequences for the work on expansion of digital infrastructure in scotland? the answer is the state aid rules always get in the way i've never worked in that field and in the last three years i think that in the case of birmingham which you may have followed from afar the application of the state aid rules was one of the obstacles to success for a for a rollout plan in that city in practice the system it was so slow to give a clear answer that i think birmingham and london policy just just went another route and we now have the ict vouchers for sms we now have the bduk schemes which are in place including in scotland i think that the the revision in the last two years of the state aids guidelines is exactly in the right direction we were very pleased with that from a user perspective and so i think that the the risks are lower in the future than in the past but there are also ways to avoid problems which not all member states use some member states but this would not be one of them have an upfront strategy about support for infrastructure that they get approved by the competition state aids people in brussels and then everything that is just an application of the strategy is very easily ticked through if you come with ad hoc proposals not only is the resource available to study them inadequate so they pile up in somebody's intray but they are each scrutinised with a rather more attention than is the case if you're sitting within a pre-ordained strategic framework so i think that that that goes back to what i was saying about having leadership at close enough to the territory because if if there were a scotish vision on our broadband priorities and with the stakeholders support it said these are the priorities and that was approved by probably now mr ammonia's successor individual applications of such a vision would be much more readily managed from a state aids perspective than if you come individually saying and now this is something for the highlands and islands and now we have something for smart cities and now we have something for the gaming industry i mean how did we how did the uk government get into the situation that it was breaching rules on the superconnected cities thing because you know we've got edinburgh trying trying out the voucher scheme and for our dean you know it's not looked upon as being the best way of of helping businesses in that city so and it's set back you know the timing has slipped as a result how did the uk government get into that situation well of course i may hold a british passport but it's more than my life's worth to give a direct answer to such a question and part of the answer would be what i sometimes caricature as being administrative sociology i think that the the existence of the bduk the dcms mandate the location of the state aids expertise in biz there are quite a lot of actors around whitehall in this area but i think the as i say the the piece of advice which i think we can distill from the experience is the the one i've just given which is you need a strategic view upfront you need a political vision which you enunciate you take to clear through the state aids obstacles or jump over the hurdles and then it may it becomes much easier and i think part of the problem here was just the the speed of action where i think that the the initial the initial political statements of of vision there was a missing link maybe in the engagement with with the state aids authorities but that said if you look at if you look at the uk as a whole as well as scotland as i was saying earlier compared to others across europe i don't think it would be accurate to say and so because this particular episode resulted in lost time everything is going badly things are going well as well okay we'll move on to digital participation we've got a number of questions on that and we'll need to speed up a bit because we've only got less than half an hour left so mary you were going to start off on this same thank you can do that and good morning and i'd like to explore a bit more of the balance between building the infrastructure and building the skill set and last year the scotland government published its report scotland's digital future and the government is committed to ensuring that business and individuals have the skills that they need and that we also have a thriving digital economy but it has too much attention being given to building the infrastructure at the detriment to building the skill set or have we got the balance rate so you need lots of both so i don't think i can make a very fine-tuned judgment whether the balance in scotland is right or wrong what what i could say is that i think the um the good and the bad news on the skill set side is that even the sorts of countries that we think are tremendously efficient find it very very hard and if i take the example of singapore which is small very government driven quite successful in this area on the one hand they have a very strong top down vision that digital literacy is the fourth r as they put it and has to be a priority and on the other when you talk to the officials who've been responsible for this they say the things which everybody else says which is you know the teachers may not get it and don't want to be forced to do it and so you need a very clever attentive sustained effort in terms of teaching the teachers training the trainers incentivising but also making it safe for people who are coming from age groups that don't necessarily get it you know like mine and beyond and helping them to look good in class because it must be rather it's probably always scary being a teacher but if the kids all get it and you don't and you're expected to teach them coding or programming that's really scary and so i think that if there's one area where we haven't really bitten the bullet it would be that i think finland is the only country or it's definitely the first that's gone in depth in terms of integrating it into the curriculum beyond sort of how do you use powerpoint boys and girls we haven't really engaged at the teacher training level how do we make sure that every it's not it's not rocket science you could you could say every teacher in the next year will do one of its training of their training weeks on this it stuff and then we take it from there i think one of the great things about the the strengths of the ict faculty at edinburgh university is the way they go out into the community and their postdocs are running the coding clubs so that sort of thing the multiplier effect is also important the people who know how need to be giving back now into the community and i think that the the other thing that i perceive very strongly and i'm neither a programmer nor a musician is it's similar the things that make it work in people's minds it's similar to understanding music so the sorts of strengths that Scottish communities have around making music seem aspirational easy accessible to everybody you could apply those same community based approaches to making it more than just video games and powerpoint you know if there are measures available that people can use to assess their digital literacy so individuals particularly can measure where they have gaps in their skill set i mean are there online diagnostic tools i don't know to be honest i mean i'm sure there are because you can find everything online um but i think that it raises a more important question which is what is the skill set it's not a block i mean you it is like reading writing and arithmetic at the basis but i think what we have to overcome is the notion that being digitally skilled either means powerpoint or being steve jobs at every level of educational attainment and in every job there is a digital literacy skill set that you need and what employers are saying to us and it can be startups or smes or big companies is we find that there's a gap at every level and so that's why you have to start right at the bottom of the educational foundations i with the teachers because it's not just teaching the people who are good at maths to become programmers it's teaching even those of us who are not good at maths to be digitally literate and i think that tells you something then about the answer to the question what are my gaps everybody will have a gap it's not like we're trying to pre-select the the next generation of Alan Turing's yeah but it really means that it's for everybody and that's why i think it the the the first thing is that the leaders of a society need to say that that is the case so that's the first thing that singapore has done and we have not to actually say this is not just nice to have or aspirational it's not like a driving license it's like reading now if we're honest in every country in the developed world we have much more illiteracy than we like to admit so we're not saying we can snap our fingers and fix digital illiteracy either but but everything will flow from a from a political leadership vision that this is for everybody it's not just for the bright people it's not just for those who are good at maths it's not just for those who are going to university and that leads very nicely on to my last question and it is around what responsibility should government then have to drive the the development of digital skills should it be an assist role should it be more a controlling role and if i think about the the use of digital infrastructure with SMEs about 60 percent of scottish SMEs use the internet if we look at voluntary organisations and voluntary organisations more often than not provide support to people that are excluded and disadvantaged so should more support be given to organisations like SMEs and voluntary organisations yeah so i think i personally believe that this this whole area not just the hardware but the skills is an area of of public good and therefore government has to make it its business to ensure that these public goods are at the hands of all citizens not necessarily always through state provision but that vision is not yet clear you know it's a digital agenda for europe it's not at the heart of everything we do yet secondly i think that it therefore means that everybody has needs that have to be met and i think the the voluntary organisations that's a great example they that both they need in order to be efficient they need to be able to have digital platforms that are easy to use and maybe helping them to federate their needs so that there are big solutions available will help i think cloud technology and a little bit of corporate social responsibility after hours help could deliver transformative support for the voluntary sector but equally the voluntary sector is part of the solution to the skills gap it's very striking apprenticeship colleges in malta old people's homes in norway the boy scouts in poland the vehicles for bridging the digital skills gaps often come out of the voluntary or social services sectors in glas going particularly in scotland broadband uptake is well below the national average just to ask if there are any other examples across europe where there are particular cities where broadband uptake set aside technology issues are there any other examples on a similar basis to glasgo so i'm assuming in glasgo that the low uptake is both among let's say medium-sized companies and households and the other particular households particularly households so like partly it's price so i think the the the experiments i was talking about just now where you you bring in uh not only high quality broadband but lower cost and you see what happens to use in a single uh housing development i think that's a very important interesting experiment in similar if i think about some parts of malta which malta is a rich country some parts of it are very poor there it was a telco led experiment they gave away for no extra cost the higher speed service for a year and it was a colossally it was good for society but it was good for them because a lot of people understood that the value was worth paying for for them as households and i think the experiments that are going on now in glasgo and edinburgh as i understand it to see whether if you give it for five instead of 25 pounds a month subscription do people then say okay so in the end that 20 pounds that's a couple of rounds of drinks that's worth doing i think that's the sort of that's that's one end of it you have to you have to let people come into touch with this so that it's not just something aspirational and middle class it's relevant to me but there are places in the whole of europe where that's true i mean i think that what you see is um it's a bit like it's a bit like any social phenomenon a healthy society the gap between the rich and poor will be narrowed but it will always be there and there will always be hard to reach pockets at the bottom and and so what can you do about that i think you have to you have to give tailored offers so lower cost services but also experiment with this let us hold your hand and help you to see how it can serve your community the i've talked a lot about norway and the nordics i actually believe that at this end of the problem quite soon and it's already the case in some parts africa will teach us what to do they're eventual capitalists in america making a lot of money because they picked up some very cheap bangladesh developed e-health applications and they use them in colorado and it works or they use them in Harlem and it works so i think uh if you if you're trying to deal with this problem of especially inner city uh deprivation or exclusion it may well be that the solutions that we need to look at and think about are going to be in emerging economies as much as in the rather rich neighbours we have at that point on on price i think also there's perhaps aspect of skills and confidence was using those services and it was just to ask if there is funding available to help particularly those inner city areas where there is areas of high deprivation inequality right across the city to see particularly those areas of high deprivation whether there's funding there for training at that community level to build those skills and confidence so so again it's it's it can be part of the structural funds model uh it's the sort of thing that europe europe does rather tentatively because we're so far away we can't see how to target the need uh but there is there is scope there to do some work and there's definitely i think a lot of willingness to to share inclusion learnings across europe so i have teams who do modus teams who do research around e inclusion issues and over in the social employment part of the commission likewise but we wouldn't claim to be the big experts well again i mean i'm not a tourist guide but i think you're the scottish office of brussels if you say to them find me through the committee of regions and the economic and social committee people who are facing this problem in other countries i want to come and meet them that you can you can actually find in the european space uh conversations like that where the lessons may be worth more than the checks you'll get from the commission but there's a bit of both on a on a different issue just to ask whether you feel there are any cyber security issues and that's gotten willing to address as we keep developing and that and expanding um our digital infrastructure right so i cyber threats are everywhere i don't i i'm not aware i i don't think there's any scottish specific threat the really interesting question whether it's about cyber security hacking or privacy is you know sure we worry so much about that that we don't take advantage of the good things that this new set of technologies can offer and i think they're the answer has to be no you know if you wait until it's safe you'll never go out uh we do need to develop good security in parallel with developing our our it enabled society um this second only to spectrum is an area where the responsible authorities at national level they want to talk among those they trust so typically that would mean uh the uk the french the germans the dutch but not the bulgaris the romain and i think that's a problem and that's why the european union has proposed that we actually have cooperation at 28 around bioterror threats and pandemic health threats it took 10 years but we have got agreement that even sensitive intelligence related stuff we should share peculiarly on the cyber side we haven't had i sometimes wonder since snowden whether snowden reveals why it's harder on cyber than on health but we need to do it but i don't think there's anything there that should make us think that the water's too cold i'm not jumping in simply we have to be aware of the risks um you know obviously there's a push for more and more things to be done online and you know i'm thinking in this context claiming welfare benefits so there's a there's a a danger that more people will feel excluded you know if we don't catch up on on digital participation and on there those people who still would rather deal with a person face to face rather than um fill in a form electronically or just simply can't so you know there's that balance to be struck isn't there between the move towards everything being done online we could also talk about it in terms of procurement and um small to medium businesses have we stalked about earlier not being up to speed on on accessing contracts so you know what's your view about how you achieve a balance so i think that you in a in a healthy society you have to allow people the choice so it's okay to be digital by default but you have to have options and the second thing i would say is if we if we put the right effort in the technology can can itself reduce the risks of exclusion the things that a smartphone can do for a blind person now guiding them around a city if the lamp posts have got the right chips on them talking to them turning text into voice it is amazing but it's not yet available for everybody at low cost but that which we develop for blind people who thankfully are a minority in our population helps the illiterate as well the the work on the user interface is increasingly developing really easy to use approaches but again they tend to be rolled out first by the sort of glitzy corporate solutions and then public sector develops something else which is more or less unusable or not fit for purpose and i know because we do it to ourselves in the commission as well so i think that we we we do need to gain the efficiencies but we have to always allow people the choices and make sure the safety net is functioning and i think the idea you know online welfare online banking and these sorts of things are a big change in our societies and everybody has to rethink our attention for example to allowing people to say well i can't manage that how do we make it easy and non-stigmatising for somebody who actually can't work their way through the form to get help at the other extreme how do we make it how do we adjust our acceptance of risks so if you've got to click in to claim your welfare who says it's you and it's not your mother-in-law and you're in Barbados so the authorities have to worry as well and i think we just have to work through these changes the way we work through the changes from horses to motor cars and it will take 10 to 100 years but we shouldn't let it stop us i think that's the point we have to we have to understand the the worries and deal with them and make clear as a society that we intend to deal with we're not just saying you have to run faster but the key as for the cybersecurity question is not to say well it's also terrible we're not going to do it because at the top level as i've said already i think a vision that says we're going to do this and we're going to win and it's going to actually make us a stronger society whether in scotland or in europe that's one of the missing ingredients in success when we were building railways we believed we would make a success of it and it would be good and it was they weren't all built in the right place it is a bit the same we're going to make mistakes and we have to advance in any case but in the meantime between that 10 and 100 years do you think it's incumbent on public authorities to task let's see voluntary organisations working in communities to provide the alternatives or provide the support for people who are not up to speed if you like yes absolutely this this i fully believe and as i say i think which authorities which institutions a society picks will depend on each society but the examples i gave were were really i think extremely successful examples so so the granny in rural poland doesn't understand how to use a computer the boy scouts get a badge if they teach her and then the local library because they still have one gives her access to the computer because she's not going to be able to afford a pc at home that works for rural poland something different will work in the towns and countryside in in scotland ask mr mudlin to sum up is there do anybody else have any further questions if i could just go back to the digital rollout i mean the highlands and islands project has a name of covering around 84 percent of homes and businesses in highlands and islands the rest of scotland project is about 96 percent or so in comparison with for if i take correctly what you said in norway they would just go ahead and do that other small percentage with fibre but is there you know should we be saying that the highlands and islands the rest of scotland must make sure that the rest is covered by satellite or or other or just wait until they can get everybody connected with fibre so i mean i think we we don't have in norway or in rural germany what people call fibre to the farm so i don't think even in even in norway they're actually giving everybody exactly that good a solution but there is a commitment to giving everybody access now maybe it won't be 100 maybe it'll be 30 i don't i don't know i haven't gone to those municipalities and discussed but i think the notion that 95 percent is enough is is is not good enough we faced that problem ourselves in the last 18 months the the the the the basic connectivity for 100% goal in the digital agenda we'd got to 96% and so we had a discussion some of my colleagues said we declare victory and some of the others said that 4% is a lot and in the end what we have done there is to say for the 4% here is a one-stop shop solution to find out how you can bridge that gap with satellite so the offer is there but we're not at the European level taking on the responsibility of delivering it to all those homes which may be scattered in little pockets i think the same is true i i i i i don't i don't believe people living in even remote areas except that they will never get this good thing kind and i think that's the question because they don't when you're living a long way away and there isn't a telephone you know that there's a there's a distance you have to travel you can travel it more or less fast when you have the telephone you at least have voice until a tree falls on the line with this stuff there's no reason you should be disconnected so if there's no reason do we want a society where 5% are still disconnected or do we actually want to say we will map that 5% and find out whether we can fix it and i think that's the the the thing we don't do in modern societies to say we'll look at it hard and try and fix it and come back and tell you it's all the time shall we commit to 100% or is 95% enough leading a debate will get the community to fix some of the problems itself i think so have you got any final messages for this committee what do you think we should be pursuing and and pushing government governments to do at the moment well so so as i've tried to say throughout i i i wouldn't be confident that i had messages you should be listening to but i think that the the the point i started with is really my strong belief that it is a mixture of societies assets in the intangibles in the human skills and the infrastructure over which society can exploit its assets and if we have both of those points very strongly in our political vision and a vision of solidarity where nobody is left behind most other things follow i think that the the second message i would say is that europe sometimes is a source of funding although as i've had to say in response to all those questions it's never quite enough or in the right way or fast enough what europe is also a source of is examples from elsewhere the european space is a place where decision makers from different territories can meet is colossally effective and i think the strengths of people like the the the edinburgh university team is that they've understood how to use the european space to strengthen the networks they already had and i think through the scottish representatives on the wrong point shuman in brussel there are opportunities to to pick very specific problems and find out who in other countries has been tackling or is tackling the same problems because if they remain problems it's often because they're too small if you just say it's a problem in one constituency in one country when you discover it's a problem in one constituency in 28 countries suddenly it needs a solution so i think that that's the other part that time spent making new links people to people with decision makers elsewhere in europe can be transformative okay thank you very much and i think that's been very useful and interesting evidence and stuff that we can incorporate into our future discussions on digital participation and connectivity so thank you very much mr madeline and i briefly suspend the meeting to allow the witnesses to read the room we can resume and move on to agenda item two which is petition pe1236 the item on the agenda today is to discuss a letter and report from transport scotland on the evaluation of safety measures at lawnskirk in relation to petition pe1236 members will see from the background note that there has been some correspondence which is included in the annex to this paper and can i welcome Nigel Dawn the local member to the meeting can i invite comments and or views from members on the petition i'm grateful for the further correspondence by the minister i'm concerned that perhaps the level of understanding of the needs of the area and the the use that's made of the junction is still not as good as i would like to do like to have however i think it's a tremendous opportunity for us having local member here at the committee today to hear his views on the subject and the latest consultation he's had anyone else before i bring in Nigel nope okay Nigel over to you very much convener and and thank you for the invitation to be here that really is appreciated can i start by saying i'll welcome the analysis that best scotland has done simply because any data is is useful um and i also as i'm sure we all do welcome the reduction over the period and the total number of accidents in the area i mean regardless of how that's happened it has to be welcomed um i note particularly that does seem to have been affected at the north junction um and i'm not surprised at that i i note since they put in a merge lane there have been apparently no accidents uh that is perhaps no surprise certainly again it's welcome i hope it stays that way but as members will i'm sure recall this petition is actually about the south junction it's about the 937 as it comes up from mary kerkin and montrose and the information that i would particularly draw members attention to is to be found in paragraph 410 of the analysis where there are indications that there have been three slight uh slight injury accidents beforehand and only two afterwards but immediately underneath you can see that there have been seven damage only accidents beforehand and eight afterwards now don't want to overdo small numbers but if you simply add those together as minor accidents then you've got 10 beforehand and 10 afterwards and i think that is actually a reasonable indication of what it's actually like there um so whilst i welcome the general reduction accidents in the area i don't think the data in front of us indicate that anything has particularly improved at the south junction it might just be that actually people driving there are now more aware of the issues and they'll be in that regard less likely to improve i'm also aware as as members are of the access to lauren skirt study which is being undertaken by nest trans i'm very much welcome that i think that does give us an opportunity to come up with the right answer and then to encourage the government to find the money to implement that right answer so in that regard i think we are still going in the right direction i'm very much hoping convenient that members will feel able to keep this petition open and might just be beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel could i also just just make the point to forgive me members who've been here for a while we'll recall this but i am concerned and i do occasionally hear people not have to say on this committee saying well i drove past that junction and half past eight this morning and it was fine um as if somehow that deals with the matter and i would just like to keep putting on the record if you want to see what's happening there you need to be there between 6 30 and 7 30 in the morning that's when the rusher is coming up from merykirk and that's when it adds most dangerous and you will see that on some of the videos which are on the internet um and the other point is on friday afternoon and i'm sure committee you will be aware of this the the the the rusher from abedin more or less starts at lunchtime on a friday and quite honestly it's more or less continuous all afternoon and on the fridays when i do a surgery in lorrenskirk in the later afternoon i do not attempt to come across that junction i actually come back to brichin through fetican um it's it's twice as far but it's plainly the safest thing to do and i think that comment will resonate with most of my constituents you'll understand that this is a junction they would just rather avoid because quite frankly it is dangerous and it really does need to be sorted and of course the accidents continue i've taken the opportunity to report experiences on the road at the previous committee meetings and as i drove home last thursday in the early part of the evening there were a number of police cars and attendants at an accident on the southbound carriage way where at the point where the traffic slows down for the 50 mile an hour limit there had been a concertina accident and these things it's an example of how regardless of the other issues we have experienced or seen or discussed regarding this junction the fact that there is a 50 mile an hour limit necessary on one of the busiest parts of our trunk road network is in itself a disadvantage i mean i think there is absolutely no doubt that there is a need for a grade separated junction at lorrenskirk um and i think the report is very welcome i was actually a meeting a nest trans meeting on friday um and what i mean the government has always said it's got to be got to be funded by developer contributions and i don't think we're going to get away from that but one of the things that came up at this meeting which i found immensely encouraging is that instead of you know one developer or at lorrenskirk having to fund this that they're actually going to have a develop a development bank so that a number of developers will pay into the bank and the bank can can fund it so it'll be a fund rather than just as i say one one developer i think that's a very positive move forward what needs to happen though is that angus council need to come on board with this as well because although it is in an Aberdeenshire is very much traffic from Angus that is contributing to the the traffic on the Mary Kirk road so i think it's incumbent on Angus to get on board but i still think that the work that nest trans are doing and to be fair transport Scotland is as others have said a reason for keeping this this petition open but i think since the last time we discussed this there's certainly and the last time it was before the committee and there has certainly been a lot of progress albeit in the eyes of some people far too slow but things are moving in the right direction so i would agree that we keep the petition open that any letter the minister makes it clear that he will continue to update us on progress i mean there's still you know should it be at the south should it be at the north should be a Lincoln road to the north and then what is the effect on traffic through Lawrence Kirk so all of these things have got are still being monitored and still have to be taken into consideration yes Nigel can i just echo what you said convener i think that is actually important point people need to understand and i suspect many people are now beginning to understand we don't necessarily need a flyover at the south junction if there's going to be only one flyover it needs to be in the right place that might well not be at what is currently the south junction and that is what the current study really needs to work out because the last thing we want is everybody then having to go up Lawrence Kirk high street which if anybody can visualize it is a slalom okay so agreed to keep the petition open okay at our next meeting we're going to be starting the consideration of amendments to the stage two of the housing bill and members are reminded that the deadline for lodging amendments for parts one to three of the bill is 12 noon this friday and with that i close the meeting