Deregulation Bill

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Thursday 5th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, support the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe. I declare an interest as a presenter of some of the BBC’s iconic children’s programmes and an independent television producer. I agree with what many noble Lords have said in support of the amendment.

However, I want to talk about the potential impact on the BBC’s children’s programming if the noble Baroness’s amendment is not accepted. We have already heard that if licence fee evasion were to increase to —let us say—10%, it could result in a reduction in the BBC’s revenue of about £200 million per annum. That could mean that children’s original content provision will suffer. The UK has a highly competitive children’s media market, with probably the highest number of dedicated television channels anywhere in the world. However, with the exception of CBBC and CBeebies, most of those channels show little or no UK original content. Their schedules largely consist of material bought in from abroad.

I understand that the BBC’s executive has taken the decision to protect the children’s department budget, but that has meant that the reduction in its budget is proportionately much less than the reductions agreed for other BBC services. The children’s department commissioning budget will reduce from £150 million in 2011-12 to £101 million in 2016-17. So already a planned impact on the budget of children's programmes has been put in place. I believe in the BBC’s sincere and long-term commitment to children’s programming. However, I worry that the BBC has agreed a licence fee settlement until 2017 on which it has based its long-term budget planning. Unforeseen reductions in income will impact services and content, and that will include the high-quality provision freely available for our children.

Therefore, I support the amendment, which is intended to ensure that any impacts on the BBC’s funding resulting from the Perry review are not introduced until 1 April 2017, the first day of the next licence fee settlement. Surely we can wait until then.

[Lord Inglewood (Con)]

I rise to join the chorus in support of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe. This is part of a much wider question, which, as several speakers have said, will be determined over the next few weeks, months and years. It should remain an integral part of that process and not be sliced off like a piece of salami. The only substantive objection against the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, in the debate this afternoon has come from the noble Baroness, Lady Corston. I have every sympathy for the predicament that she describes, although I have no knowledge of the facts to which she referred. It seems to me that what she was describing is not a consequence of criminalisation but a consequence of what happened in the courts and the actions of the relevant social services. It is important to decouple the two. I think it would be very foolish not to support the noble Baroness, Lady Howe.