800MHz and 2.6GHz spectrum awards - consideration of representations on impact assessment

Dear Office of Communications,

On 22nd March 2011, Ofcom issued a consultation on "assessment of
future mobile competition and proposals for the award of 800MHz and
2.6GHz spectrum and related issues. This consultation states that
"The document, together with [those] annexes, as a whole comprises
an impact assessment...". Therefore, presumably, any response to a
question in this consultation constitutes a representation on the
impact assessment.

Section 7 of the Communications Act 2003 requires that "OFCOM are
not to implement their proposal unless the period for making
representations about it has expired and they have considered all
the representations that were made in that period."

On 2nd June 2011, Ofcom published two further consultations on
related subjects, which made firm proposals in relation to matters
that had been the subject of the earlier consultation.

I therefore request:

1) Any documentation describing the analysis that Ofcom made after
the first consultation and before the subsequent consultations
describing the consideration of representations on the impact
assessment in the first consultation.

2) If this consideration was not completed before the subsequent
consultations, please provide documentation on the process by which
the consideration of representations will be made, and how this
will be carried forward into the proposals in the first
consultation and the subsequent consultations. This documentation
might take the form of internal emails or briefing papers for the
Ofcom Board, ExCo, Policy Board or Spectrum Clearance and Awards
Programme Management Board.

Yours faithfully,

Alan Smithee

Dear Information Requests,

Thank you for supplying information in response to my request. This
makes interesting reading, but does not answer the request.

I requested information about any consideration that had been made
of representations in relation to impact assessment for the
consultation that ended on 31 May. I assume from the absence of any
document on this matter in your response that this consideration
had not yet been made.

If no consideration had been made, I requested on the process by
which it would be made. In response, you provided information in
relation to a meeting of the Management Board. However, this only
discussed an extension of the effective deadline for submissions in
response to the consultation, and not the process by which these
submissions would be considered.

I note that the Management Board decided to accept supplementary or
revised responses up to a month after the stated closing date for
the consultation. However, it appears only to have communicated
this privately to some stakeholders, and as a respondent to the
consultation I was not aware of this. Surely, if a decision of this
nature is made, it should be announced in an open and transparent
way on the page of the Ofcom web site for this consultation.

Yours sincerely,

Alan Smithee