The U.K.’s Digital Economy Act from 2017 introduced regulated rents for telecom infrastructure on leased lands, in a bid to bring the costs of operators down so they could pour that money back into developing more sites and speed up rollout.
Britain’s National Farmers’ Union (NFU) estimates that rents offered to British farmers under the new bill plummeted.
“It went from being what was negotiated between a telecoms company, to a statutory valuation, which was the value of that little piece of land, just a small little square in the corner of a field,” said Eleanor Griggs, the land management adviser at the farmers’ union. “We saw operators coming in” after the law was passed and “what they were offering [was] significantly reduced.”
Some U.K. farmers also found the new rules to bring less instead of more certainty about this revenue, and triggered a fair share of legal disputes in court. “One of the problems for landowners like ours is that they’re just seeking for £5,000 a year in rent. The cost of going to court is disproportionate: Even if they won, it would still leave them with a zero as a balance,” Griggs said.
The EU’s proposal is “less pervasive” than the U.K. bill, said Ana Rocha, the director of agri and forestry-related policies at the European Landowners’ Organization (ELO). But “it can still have similar negative consequences,” including even slowing down the rollout of networks, she said.
Towers vs. farmland
The draft provisions could disincentivize farmers to open their lands to mobile towers — hurting rural broadband in the process — and give the upper hand to “multinational, multibillion tower company or mobile network operators,” said Scott E. Langeland, co-chief executive officer of land aggregator APWireless. “There is no evidence that access to land has ever been an issue,” he added.
